Really, I am not dead.

I just can't think of anything to say about photography. Drawing has kind of eaten my brain lately, but I am utterly unqualified to talk about Drawing, really. Maybe some day. I draw a lot. Every day. I am substantially less bad at drawing than I was a year ago, but I'm not good as such, and I certainly have no expertise or theory.

It's always tempting to just pivot to a this-is-my-life blog, but for whatever reason I am loathe to do that. Lots of people do, and that's fine, but I just don't feel it for this blog here and now.

To an extent this is a knock on effect of the workshop/retreat I did with Jonathan Blaustein a year or so ago. I came away from that with a serious plan to do serious work, a sort of "stop screwing around and get down to business" situation, and it turns out that I'm not quite ready to do that. Or I don't have the time. Or the energy. Or something. Maybe I simply haven't got the stuff for anything except screwing around.

Anyway, it was time to fish, or cut bait, and apparently I am doing whichever of those doesn't include doing a lot of photography or writing about photography.

Consider me on indefinite hiatus, I guess. Sometimes saying "I am on hiatus" stirs the pot, so it's 50:50 I'll be back in short order with 20,000 words, each more unhinged than the last, but I make no promises.

I do plan to actually get back to doing photography at some point, to doing that serious project, but it's just a hypothetical for now. Don't take me seriously until I actually deliver some fucking pictures.

A couple days ago, I guess, some protestors entered the National Gallery (the British one, not the American one) and had a go at a painting, because that's a thing we're doing now. To be clear, I don't think people ought to do this in general, and I don't think these protests make any sense. It's clearly just a "bit" the kids have settled on.

That said, it raises in my mind the question of who actually cares? There's been an outcry, of course, about our cultural heritage and so on. These valuable artifacts must be preserved, and their destruction is a crime against humanity! I've seen calls for much more vigorous security arrangements, which seems like a terrible idea to me. I don't really want angry, tense, guards on a hair trigger.

What, exactly, is the value that any of these paintings is bringing? I'll accept extremely abstract answers! I'm not here to reduce culture to dollars or to British pounds. Did the Rokeby Venus enlarge anyone's life? Does a Monet? I am, for reference, extremely pleased that these things existed! I am pleased that they exist, and I don't think people should destroy them! At the same time, I am not entirely sure why we should mourn their loss. There is no "mysterious air" here, it's just a picture.

If the painting had been, instead of vandalized, suddenly revealed to be a modern forgery, well, what then? The painting would quietly vanish from the walls, and the consensus would surely be that Culture writ large has been Improved rather than Impoverished. And yet, it would be the same painting. The fact that we believe it to be authentic seems to be an essential feature of whatever actual value it's bringing to us. Berger covers all this in "Ways of Seeing" of course, with his marvelous takedown of da Vinci's "The Virgin of the Rocks," it's not new with me.

Functionally, the Rokeby Venus has been the subject of a few million glazed-over glances, a few hundred art student sketches, and a very small handful of the weeping fans. What its current existence does for Culture is pretty vague.

Also, the mirror looks like a fucking head in a box, not a mirror. Dude, wtf were you thinking?

The history of the thing is pretty interesting! It occupies a notable position in art history! Something something nudes Spanish Inquisition, you can read all about it on wikipedia. The physical artifact on the wall doesn't seem to be particularly relevant to that, though, except as a sort of moral anchor to the story, a reification of the story. It performs the role of a photo illustrating a news item.

Let us compare, though, with an annual event here in Bellingham, the 6x6 show hosted by our local art store.

This is an open show. You can pick up a 6 inch by 6 inch square of one of several materials, for free, from the art store. Cover it with art. Anything. Paint it, carve it, attach sculpture to it, sew it. Return it to the shop, they'll give you a coupon for future purposes as a reward, and they'll hang your work. Zero curation, everything goes up. They have a show for about a month with a grid of 100s of 6x6 artworks on the wall of their gallery. You can buy any piece for $25. Proceeds to a local art non-profit.

The work is everything from 5 year old kids scribbling with crayons to professional working artists painting small landscapes. One piece was made by the artist's pet snails crawling around with pigment.

It is, easily, my favorite Art Thing in the world.

I'm now going to stealthily replace the Rokeby Venus with Monet, because the position of Monet in our culture while similar is more immediately salient. You won't have to think as much.

I put things in the 6x6 show, and so do my kids. I am, this year, the only photographer (I think) in something like 470 pieces. Which is wild! My kids draw/paint stuff. Usually, nobody buys anything we put in, about which more anon.

But what about this small, often poorly made, extremely local, art? It hits quite differently from a Monet. I could write at length about why a Monet is "better" but at the same time some child's crude drawing of a frog has its own intense value. At the bottom, the Monet and the Frog are the same: a piece of decor, with the potential to move us emotionally, to enlarge us as humans. They are the same in that both Claude and the child, let's call her Susie, essentially wanted to show us what something looked like: A Garden, A Frog.

There are endless details of scale, of technique, of scope of imagination, and so on that could be brought to bear to show how the two paintings are different, and one much superior. Mostly, though, the Monet painting is superior because the people we pay to tell us what's superior have said that it is superior.

Looking at a Monet can hit pretty hard! The effect is real! I love Monet, and have travelled to see Monet paintings! At the same time, though, a part of what I experience is the cultural baggage, the stamp of approval from the curatorial staff of various museums, the stamp of approval from critics and historians. The Frog hits differently, it has no baggage.

Nevertheless, it manifests with awful clarity the sincerity of the artist. The Monet and The Frog both reveal the will, shared by Susie and Claude, to show us what something looks like. Looking at Monet, the cloud of cultural baggage tends to obscure this will; looking at Susie's Frog nothing is obscured. There is a reason theorists and critics are obsessed with the ways children draw. There is an authenticity, a clarity of purpose, a purity of method (as it were) that a more thoroughly educated artist, or even art appreciator, loses.

Monet is in a sense sealed in amber and elevated to a pedestal. We cannot but react to the paintings, because we're told to do so. Monet is distant. You literally have to take a trip to see a Monet. For $25 I can have Susie's Frog in my home, over my desk, and look at it every day by raising my chin slightly. Susie's Frog was made here, in my town, by a child who probably lives no more than 2 miles away from me. There is an immediacy here, a nearness. Susie's Frog is a radically different cultural artifact than is a Monet painting, and in many ways it's much more salient.

Looking at a Monet can be a powerful experience, but in the end I leave the gallery and return to my life much as I was before. This kind of High Culture, as defined and managed by the priesthood, feels like a separate track, a kind of entertainment I can step into when I want to, but which doesn't live and breathe with me, with us. It has nothing to do with my daily life, with the daily clockwork of my little town.

Something is lost when an artist matures. The childish authenticity fades as the artist works to become more technically proficient, to make something look real; or perhaps the artist is trying to imbue their work with some sort of abstract meaning. Passing "beyond" the desire to show you what a frog looks like, the mature artist tries to make the frog look "real" or tries to make the frog stand in for something else.

This is, of course, the business of High Art, but damn is it hard. Many, perhaps most, artists spend a long time in the doldrums between childish directness and the actual ability to make the frog mean something. They're not painting a frog, they're painting a painting of a frog but no more than that.

Interestingly, the pieces that sell quickly at the 6x6 show are exactly these pictures. The realistic but ultimately kind of empty paintings of bicycles or boats, the well-made pictures with silly jokes, and so on. I like these things too, but I don't much want to own one. As well, there are certainly a few artists in play who are genuinely injecting meaning and depth into their well made pictures, and those sometimes sell as well. The childish frogs don't really sell, which is in a way a pity. I dare say people want to have something that's obviously well made, rather than something clumsy. Perhaps they're not very interested in the art children make; their loss.

In the end, I love 6x6 more than anything else Arty, because it hits inside my world, rather than outside it. It's Art that lands inside my life, my existence, not outside it in some temple to culture, not on a track that is parallel to my life, but actually on the rails my life runs on.

I've stumbled over a few items randomly, which just coalesced into something in my head, so, here we go.

Sam Bankman-Fried, currently on trial for operating an enormous kinda-Ponzi scheme in the crypto world (it doesn't seem to have been as coherent and organized as even a proper Ponzi, it seems to have simply been a sort of maelstrom of money that leaked a lot until the money was gone) is having his private conversations closely analyzed. As some point he seems to have written something or other about Shakespeare, arguing that so many humans have been born since Shakespeare that, statistically, there must have been many better writer after Shakespeare.

This illustrates a profound failure to understand how culture arises. Interestingly, while everyone had a good time making fun of Sam, I didn't see anyone offer a coherent explanation of why he was wrong. I plan to correct that here!

Second item: there's a guy, Devon Rodriguez, who's made something of a name for himself drawing and painting People On The Street. He's all over social media, and if you're looking for youtube videos on drawing portraits you're gonna have a hard time avoiding this guy's useless videos. He's a skilled technician, but mainly he's a social media presence.

He has millions of followers, and the backing of at least one NYC real-estate developer, and so he got a little popup show for his paintings. This show was reviewed on artnet by some hapless critic, who pointed out that the paintings were not very good, and went on about social media influence.

Devon's PR machine, noting an opportunity, decided to pull out the "I won't let the haters stop me!" page from the Social Media Influencers Handbook, and has been running that play for a while.

Here again we see the intersection of "Culture" in the form of Art and Criticism of Same with something more populist.

Finally let us recall that Larry Gagosian got himself a pretty girlfriend, painter Anna Weyant, a hair older than 1/3 of his age, and appears to be trying to make her into a Major Painter using his credentials as an art dealer. Weyant appears to be a significantly more interesting painter than Rodriguez, and is also a fine technician, so I don't really have a sense of whether she's "good" or not, in any way that makes much sense to me.

Let's keep these three little examples in mind.

Culture, contrary to common understanding, is not a distillation of the finest products of the finest creative talents, elected by some alchemy that inexorably whittles away the inferior and reliably, eventually, locates the best. It's just not. It's a hell of a lot more venal than that.

Bankman-Fried missed the point about Shakespeare: we have defined him to be great. Yes, the work is technically good, the meter or whatever you want to name is excellent. Shakespeare is great largely because, for him, the standard is how much like Shakespeare are you? Obviously, he is the best at being like Shakespeare. The attentive observer might wonder out loud how much of "Shakespeare was really good at specific important technical things" is actually "these specific technical things are important because Shakespeare was good at them." It's fair to suggest that there's a bit of push and pull going on here.

Larry Gagosian's efforts on behalf of Anna Weyant are specifically interesting, because Larry is absolutely a member of the club of people who get to decide things like "who are the really great painters anyway?" He's not the only member, though!

And finally we get around to Rodriguez. He has essentially no backing from anyone in that club, but he has a lot of social media followers, and he's got some rich people in his corner. Rich people who would probably like to be members of the taste-making club, rich people who probably go to some of the same parties that Larry Gagosian attends.

What interests me here, though, is whether we're seeing something larger.

Why should a small club of goobers like Gagosian be in charge of High Culture? There certainly seem to be days when they're picking shit at random (abstract expressionism? really?) and there's really no doubt that they do a lot of selection based on how hot and/or slutty the artists are. Why shouldn't TikTok select the Important Artists?

The crypto bros made a brave attempt to seize a beachhead in Culture with NFTs. Unfortunately for them they were thoroughly embedded in the crypto world, which turns out to be 100% scams, and also their art was really really terrible shit, not even rising to the level of kitsch. It wasn't even populist, it was just dumb. The try was bold, though, and it looked like it might work for a while! Beeple and his dumb $69 million dollar whateverthefuck looked like a real thing for a minute (before we learned that it too was a scam, oops.)

I don't much like Rodriguez, in part because his work isn't very interesting (it all looks like it's an excellent copy of some extremely bland reference photo, and some people think that's because they are in fact excellent copies of extremely bland reference photos.) I also dislike him, though, because his videos gum up the search for "how the hell do I draw a nose" with what are essentially ads for his work and his classes. I just want a few pointers on how to draw a nose!

My opinion, though, should not really carry any weight. Who gives a shit what I think?

The very idea is insane that these things should be decided a small group of people with degrees in art history, and an even smaller group of wealthy assholes who've eased their way into advising even wealthier assholes about which art to buy. Why should this specific group be in charge of determining what we see when we go into museums and galleries? Especially the museums and galleries funded by our tax dollars! Maybe we should be seeing a lot more kitsch!

On the other hand, there seems to genuinely be value in some small group making insane selections, however venal the reasons, for future generations. Maybe it doesn't matter what gets picked, as long as it's weird enough, as long as it's not populist kitsch. Maybe the job is simply to weed out things that are easy to like and pick some vaguely coherent selection of stuff that's hard to like. Future generations then have something to think about, something to struggle with. I think I'd rather live in a culture where we have abstract expressionism to gape at, than a culture were it's all likable kitsch.

In general I would rather see the collapse of Art As High Culture. I believe in local art. Rodriguez would do well as a Local Artist. He's entertaining, people like his pictures. I think people should totally be able to buy his pictures, sit for portraits, whatever. I don't think we would be well-served by making him into a Great Artist to Stand With Monet, but then, I'm not sure we're well served by the very idea that artists should be elevated to some stratosphere.

But my opinion doesn't matter. This isn't the first time populist art has made an assault on the cathedral, and it won't be the last. It'll be interesting to see how it shakes out, I guess.