beating a dead art

When I was twenty-two I met a man who told me that art died in the 19th century. He spun out an elaborate argument about profit and loss, patronage and the church; he described the artist as a pioneer, scientist, engineer, builder, and single handed cottage industry who lost ground in every area until ending up starving in a garret in Paris in 1880. Everything that had happened since then, he said, was part of a sad mass delusion about the value of individual vision from which you inevitably wake up, blink your eyes in the harsh light of the modern world, and see that the only people with enough money to purchase art are Midwestern dentists. (He really had a thing about dentists buying art -- not sure what the story was there.) This uplifting person was the chair of my MFA program in photography. He left his audience that day and every day thinking that maybe they should all go home and just shoot themselves.

I am an artist. I hope that this does not make me ridiculous or pathetic or permanently in the thrall of rich philistines (and I don't mean dentists - I do like my teeth after all). My life, as I suppose everyone's is, is a sort of social experiment. Can she navigate the pitfalls of daily life while maintaining her identity as a ----- until her death? What will it mean if she does?

After I left school, I realized how annoying it is that there are no guides on to how to do this. No, Profitable Gallery Shows for Dummies, no 7 Habits of Highly Artistic People, no Not for Tourists Guide to Where All the Other Artists Went. I began to wonder if my permanently depressed department chair had been correct. Maybe I couldn't figure out how to do this because it isn't possible to do. Art is dead. I'm not interested in starving.

Fortunately, I woke up and realized that I was not currently sitting in a garret. I still make stuff. So do a lot of other people. On this blog, I'm going to take a look at how and where and why this happens.

Art is dead! Long live Art!