On Saturday I was on an alumni panel at an open house for JFK's Arts and Consciousness Program. As a graduate it became very clear on how this program is so close to the essence of what art is. As I was leaving I picked up their newsletter and found a perfect and timely article for our months theme on art and the economy. It eloquently states and speaks to what Art is Moving is trying to create. An opening an awareness into the new paradigm of what art really is and what it can become. The art market as you know from my earlier posts of working it is a slimy place. Greed does not sit well with aesthetics. With our current state of affairs we really have the chance to change or heal one of the post modern diseases, which is the whoring and total objectification of art.
Below is an amazing article written by
Mike Grady The Chair of The Arts and Consciousness Program at JFK. You can also check out the post on their blog
"CLICK HERE"Post-Modernism, Economic Collapse and the Search for Value in ArtIn Arts & Consciousness we have always taught our students that art is intrinsically valuable. We haven’t emphasized the commercial aspects of art, but have instead focused on art’s connection to self-affirmation, health, cultural identity and spiritual truth. We have proceeded from the assertion that if these things are adequately achieved, then money will be received by the artist as a natural and inevitable result of having created new value in the world. We teach students that this is the essence of creative process as well as development of a career in the arts. The amazing financial success of several A&C alumni suggests that money follows value rather than the reverse. Without compromising themselves, artists are beginning to understand that once connection and meaning is a part of one’s artistic search, that material abundance – wealth – is a natural consequence. There are, of course, many alumni who still struggle to earn a living and whose artwork has not yet achieved that important level of ‘connection’ that renders it ‘valuable’ by the community at large. Like enlightenment, the search for meaning and value is long and sometimes elusive.
Throughout most of the modern era attaining wealth through art was associated by many artists with the cynical manipulation of value and meaning by a corrupt and materialistic power structure which used art as a means to broker power and prestige. The avant-garde considered financial success a sign of disgrace; a moral failure by artists who, if virtuous, would eschew material success in order to reach new levels of spiritual, social and cultural innovation. The idea of exploring the nature of value through conceptual art has its origins in that early modernist avant-garde. The Dada artist Marcel Duchamp began the exploration of ‘meaninglessness’ with his landmark ‘ready-mades’ in the early 20th century. His assertion that even mundane objects must be seen as art if offered, un-altered by the artist, as a ‘significant’ art work, was revolutionary concept. It remains an important canon of contemporary art.
Those who lived up to the avant-garde ideal of rejecting financial success were, of course, rarely heard from again and those who populate our art history books almost invariably (contrary to popular belief) achieved remarkable wealth and acclaim during their lifetimes. By mid-20th Century and the advent of Pop Art, the art of post-modern ideology, artists began to explore the concept of art and value as an important leitmotif of artistic expression. Artists, like Andy Warhol, actively sought financial wealth as a sign of ‘celebrity’ which they often equated with cultural value.
Everything was questioned and all foundations of meaning were challenged. Ironic self-deprecation replaced idealism and revolutionary zeal as the central theme of contemporary art. Breaking the rules became a central requirement for ‘good’ art. But as all the old rules of art were broken into smithereens, the avant-garde was forced to increasingly esoteric and obscure philosophical assertions in order to justify its own existence. These obscure sources of artistic content became increasingly inaccessible to the public but concomitantly attractive to wealthy collectors and art world insiders who desired membership in ‘the cultural elite’. By the late 20th Century, the art world had fully embraced art that asserted the premise that meaninglessness and absurdity were the only appropriate responses to a culture which had lost all connection to its own sources of meaning and authenticity . 'Soup 1', Andy Warhol 1968
At the beginning of the 16th Century there were still many distinct and isolated cultures on planet Earth. By the 20th Century, most tribal cultures and entire civilizations in the pre-European Americas had been eradicated. After the great wars of the twentieth century, cultural competition had become a relatively simple matter of East and West. The East was communist and repressive and the West was free and capitalistic – bizarre oversimplifications that sustained art and artists for nearly a century. In the era of post-Marxist, ‘late capitalism’ (post-modernism), the art world became obsessed with the futility of meaning itself. The remnants of the 20th century capitalist power structure went into a self-cannibalistic frenzy of sub-prime mortgages and leveraged hedge funds. As the world economy was super-heating at the end of the 20th Century, the art world was seized by conspicuous displays of power and wealth in response to artworks which were intentionally created to be devoid of meaning and content – now seen by the ‘well-informed’ as obsolete concepts. Where once artworks were purchased discreetly in the fashionable galleries of Paris and New York, art by the end of the 20th Century was being sold for hugely inflated prices in heavily publicized public venues such as auction houses or on-line purveyors of the world’s smartest art.
Damien Hirst, a British artist in his mid-40’s recently held an on-line auction of a wide variety of his own artworks that fetched a record smashing $200 million. The auction was intended as an artwork in itself. Even more significant than this extraordinarily high price, is Hirst’s assertion that the value of an artwork is an integral aspect of its artistic content, since this signifies the work’s relevance to the art world. Hence, collectors and art dealers become intentional collaborators in the artist’s work. The inflation rate for the art world’s ‘super-stars’ had become astronomical by the early part of the 21st Century, with even relatively obscure artists who were in favor selling artworks for over a million dollars. Collectors and dealers like the infamous Larry Gagosian began to view themselves as collaborators and participants in conceptual artwork which was explicitly about absurdly inlflated prices mediocre artworks and the manipulation and control of a cynical and bored art-collecting 'elite'. By the early 21st century, the art world had come to embody all that was worst about late capitalism - greed, arrogance, manipulation and excess in all things.
The underlying issue seems to be a larger questioning of the nature of ‘value’ itself. The express intent of artists like Hirst, Jeff Koons, Lisa Yukusavge and Chris Ofili is precisely this. Why would Ofili’s elephant dung paintings be deemed to be valued in the millions? The cynical answer is clearly that wealth and power has believed that it has the ability to arbitrarily assign value to valueless-ness. It is, perhaps, a debatable point but current economic events suggest that this presumption may have been disproven. The reasons for the trend towards absurd over-valuation of art seem to be closely linked to the reasons for the recent international financial calamity that has in recent months sent stock prices plunging and un-employment rates through the roof. The art world’s over-reliance on financial capital as a signifier of meaning, paralleled the attitudes and actions of world financial markets in their tendency to grossly over-value inherently worthless investments. The world of finance, like the art world, fell into the catastrophic belief that any investment is a good one if enough capital is thrown at it. In both cases, money was invested in demonstrably unsound products – think, Damien Hirst = sub-prime mortgages.
One of post-modernism’s main themes is the de-construction of ‘meaning’ (and therefore value) as an artifact of unreliable ‘structures’ such as language, symbols or ritual. The basic thread of Post-Modernist thinking is something like this: If meaning is based on culture, and culture is based on language, and language is intrinsically unreliable and always controlled and manipulated by a greedy and corrupt power structures, then culture, meaning and value all become illusions – infinitely manipulable artifacts of the power structure’s on-going demand for control. The art world’s ceaseless desire for a new and marketable concept requires new art-stars in increasingly spectacular settings made more conspicuous by astronomical prices paid for their work in order to assure the power structure that it still has control – that money is everything after all!
Some cotemporary artists are now examining a new kind of value – value that is related to interconnectedness, happiness, wisdom and health. This is the central; theme of numerous writings about the ‘end of art’ from relatively recent art world apostates such as Donald Kuspit, Suzi Gablik, Lynn Gamwell and Arthur Danto. As the world’s economic crisis undermines the foundations of the ‘old’ power structure, we can look to new directions in art as a pathway to expanded cultural consciousness and a return to value and abundance based on new and more positive cultural assumptions like inter-connectedness and sustainability.
The current situation in the art world, the economic world and the world political scene seems to be one of profound change – the long hoped-for ‘paradigm shift’. We may have seen it ushered in by the presidential inauguration on January 20th. When the recovery from the current crisis occurs, it seems possible that the world will re-discover the value of art as an essential part of culture – not as a coveted object but as living and breathing part of everyday life. The economic and political worlds seem to have little choice but to re-construct their structures based on a more sustainable and longer-term vision that includes human well-being and environmental awareness as key tenets for the future. In a sense not only America but the whole world voted for these changes in the symbolic form of the new American President. The emergent cultural vision seeks an integration of art, wellness and sustainability that is counter to former assumptions about value and power. In short, the power structure seems to be changing. The 20th Century ‘s emphasis on religion, nationalism, militarism and material wealth are yielding quickly to new cultural imperatives – the environment, social and economic inter-dependence, human rights and the individual search for meaning and happiness outside of culturally proscribed institutions. The emergent vision seems to understand that real value is based on connection and embodiment rather than military strength and coercion. We are all at a unique historical moment – the moment that the ebb of modernist materialism is replaced by a new flood of broadened cultural and spiritual awareness – a new era of expanded consciousness. To refer to this new consciousness as ‘spiritual’ is perhaps too limiting. In Holistic Studies we use the term frequently, but we as a culture are on the brink of a wholesale return to something more all encompassing than ‘spirituality’ per se. Perhaps the world is discovering that spirit cannot be separated from the physical or emotional dimensions of existence of identity.
The current re-emergence of ‘spirituality’ in art is based on direct experience rather than religious ideology. The new art exemplified by artists such as Andy Goldsworthy Kiki Smith, and Bill Viola (all of whose artwork also sells for astronomical amounts) is connected to a direct experience of nature and embodiment – an intrinsic value which other artists of the current generation may admire but still reject as unexciting and sentimental. We must all choose for ourselves which is the more desirable motif in art. There is a lot to discover in the contemporary art world.
In Arts & Consciousness we are developing a new pedagogy – a way of teaching artists to discover meaning and connection through the creative process. By examining the ideas of modernism and post-modernism our students find their own new ideas and new ways of offering relevance and value to a culture starved for authenticity and humanity. We hope they will discover abundance as a natural consequence of finding relevance and value in their own artwork. The on-going exploration the nature of value and meaning is an important part of contemporary art. Often misunderstood as opportunism, the excesses of the contemporary art world have laid the groundwork for a new revolution in art and the re-discovery of a deeper and more enduring value for the entire culture. We have reason for celebration and hope in the face of adversity and can find beauty and wisdom in a myriad of new images and ideas that are re-shaping art and culture.
This is such a powerful read. Any thoughts on art and its value.
Art is Moving an Art Revolution
"one mark at a time"
(don't we all strive for that!), written by Timothy Ferris is an easy read full of a number of tips and resources for an artist striving for success. 
I think we are in a pivotal time for art and how it is changing or being redefined. Especially, in these dire economic times---I think creating art again will become like the actual practice of families actually sitting down for a home cooked meal. It will become a thing of the Present.
