Any Idiot

With A Digital Camera & An Inkjet Printer
Is An Artist

Michael Andrews

I have been recently informed that collectors, art dealers, critics and curators are not interested in works of art that have been generated digitally on an inkjet printer, because “any idiot with a digital camera and an inkjet printer is an artist.” The implication is that up until now the expense of owning a darkroom and the skills required to produce a print separated the dilettantes from the true artists, and all that is necessary to qualify as collectible art is to possess enough superfluous wealth to buy into an elite defined only by expensive tools and semi-arcane technologies.

“Artist” is here assumed to mean someone who produces bankable artifacts that increases the value of some pre-existing collection. If that is the definition of art, then the cost of your prescription drugs is the index of your health.

This is the intellectual equivalent of such illuminations as “any idiot with a camera can be a photographer,” which makes the same idiotic assumptions as "any idiot with a pen is at least a Shakespeare." The implication here is that the mere possession of a tool implies skill, talent and an interesting world view.

Perhaps the above dictum should be modified to “Any Idiot With Money Is Allowed To Define Who Is An Artist.” People with money do not allow artists to define who has wealth and certainly do not allow artists to help themselves to the contents of their vaults. Conversely people with money should cease polluting my world with idiocy. It is painfully obvious that the skills required to steal other people’s money do not translate into the brains required to identify, define or even appreciate works of art.

The above tidbit of ignorance begs to be corrected. There are a number of issues to rectify but, or course, it only scratches the surface of that imponderable mass of ignorance and entrenched stupidity engendered and propagated for reasons of greed.

The greed vector begins with the collector. The world is awash with unimaginative artists, selling work through unimaginative dealers to unimaginative collectors, all doing what the last guy did, or mimicking the latest fad, or buying what has been bought before. It is understood that collectors are unimaginative, since they acquired their ill gotten gains by making a virtue of having no imagination. Dealers of course have a vested interest in being unimaginative since their customers insist on it. Darwinian market forces, it seems, dictate that the only artists that survive in the jungles of art are the unimaginative.

This is willful stupidity in its most shining moment. Nothing in the world is more exasperating then willful stupidity. It is most prevalent among fundamentalists of any religion, true believers of any color or strip, and the overeducated who have purchased their certificate for outrageous fortunes, to certify that they have paid for the useless accumulation of otherwise useless information, and who now use their education as a disguise and as a convenient excuse to give up entirely on any effort at thinking at all.

In fact, there is precious little art at all, specially in free market societies (most notably arising soon after the Renaissance). Art that can only be valued within a system based on the generation of wealth, can not be art at all. It is at best an artistic commodity, or merely a sophisticated advertisement, or simply a cleverly disguised marketing strategy.

Most of the pre-Renaissance Western art that clutters museum wall space is christian propaganda. For two reasons it really is not art at all:

1: It is commercial art for hire; the artist did not choose the subject. The artist is a hack craftsman who hires out his skills to promote some world view in which he has no special interest other than commercial rapacity. Most of this great sludge of mediocrity is the medieval equivalent of the modern television ad.

2: Even if the world view presented is the artist’s own, it is not worth preserving. It is the equivalent of the modern sitcom, portraying only the least common denominator of the dominating cultural world view. The only goal of predominating world views is to retain political, cultural and economic power at any cost. It expands no horizon; not the artist’s, not the viewers and not the cultures.

Oddly enough, after the Renaissance we find the rise of the art-as-commodity market corresponding to rise of capitalism.

An audience is identified as some significant segment of the population that has some identifiable and easy to manipulate hook, that is a simplistic cultural identification that is easily marketed to, and that as a group has significant wealth, is willing to waste it and is easily parted from their money. The artistic needs of any demographic group that does not spend, even if it is wealthy or large, is a demand that will go unsupplied. Hence television products are created for wealthy adolescents while nothing is offered to the mature adult. This looks suspiciously as if television is an economic predator specializing on stealing from the ignorant, the inexperienced and the gullible. It is hard work to part money from a smart audience.

The only artists currently allowed in the market place are artists whose world view is the market place. They are largely commercial hacks. It is not that their primary goal is simply making money. Their primary goal is making money along with the trivial attention that derives from the reputation of being recognized as being an artist. But, by and large, they have nothing to say, and so they produce commodities that are content free and void of an artistic world view. They do not even notice this vacuum since they are completely absorbed in the infantile pursuit of notoriety.

The world of art is almost entirely populated with empty minds who are recognized as artists simply because they want the notoriety of being acclaimed as an artist and neither the artist, the audience nor the accrediting authorities are capable of even noticing that these people produce no art at all.

They are capable of producing craft. Craft is a teachable skill, often acquired by hard work and diligence, in some media or other. As a teachable skill the university systems soon redefined art as craft, since art is vastly more complex and indefinable craft, it is a much more difficult area on which to cheaply turn an academic profit. On the money end, since the collector is essentially ignorant and willfully stupid, he is more than happy to equate craft with art, since it is easily explained and readily resalable. Actual art with real content and an actual world view worth learning about would require an actual intellect capable of formulating a unique world view, an actual experience of life beyond the market place, a well earned philosophy, a deep compulsion to pursue spiritual quests; in short, all the actual traits needed by a real artist to produce real art in the first place.

The single greatest tool in the art-as-commodity market place is to confuse craft with art. Craft with nothing to say is wallpaper.

The second greatest tool is public relations and marketing schemes.

So, the artistic commodities of pseudo artistic craftsmen, are sold by rapacious pseudo art commodity brokers to ignorant and wealthy pseudo art collectors, which makes the pseudo artist warm and fuzzy with notoriety and a little money, and in turn makes the brokers undeserved fortunes and which, finally, convinces the pseudo art collectors that they have a life, that they have supported the illusion of deep meaning and, more to the point, have invested in some commodity that will eventually become far more valuable since they have bought it. By virtue of buying it, they validate it, which means that other collectors are now authorized to want it and will invest in the same artist for the same reasons which proves to everyone that everyone concerned is a successful and validated denizen of the pseudo art-as-commodity market place.

In all of this, there is no art.

In all of this the end goal is not to value art, but to turn art into a liquid asset which is used as an engine. Money is fed into the art engine and even more money is generated out the nether end.

It is an absolute certainty that art is diametrically polar to the infantile desire to produce artistic commodities simply for the gratification of being recognized as an artist, and/or, for the money.

Another spectrum defining art runs from the types of media involving language at one end to entertainment at the other. Language is the only media that is capable of expressing rational, discrete and analytical modes of thinking. There is simply no world view that can be evolved without such modes of thought, even if the final resolution is irrational and/or a denial of certainty.

Even when entertainment utilizes language it is sanitized to reflect only safely marketable cultural commodities, and as such, represents only the status quo of cultural least common denominators.

In between are the plastic arts such as photography, painting and sculpture. Being, in the main, void of linguistic content, it is far less capable of utilizing rational, discrete and analytical modes of thinking. What it is capable of expressing is largely confined to the region of the reptilian, or limbic area of the brain; pleasant patterns, soothing rhythms, and emotional content. Although this is a necessary component of real art, it is not sufficient in itself to express a significant world view. Such a view may be attached to the work via a large body of other material, by the artist’s life, and by the fact that art is often expressed within an assumed cultural context. Graphic artists, for example, often reflect a world view by choice of subject matter. But, the more dependant the art is on the assumed cultural context, say Christianity or free market fundamentalism, the less capable it is of expressing any unique view that expands intellectual and philosophical horizons.

The proponents of art for art’s sake, which is to say, emotionally soothing work without content, are proposing their own world view that world views terrify them and are best avoided. Because they have chosen to intellectually opt out as having neither the capability nor the interest in solving any of the issues involving the actual fact of life, they choose packaged religions and simplistic cultural slogans, and they espouse the head-in-the-sand approach to art; that is, art that is safe, content free, non-challenging and emotionally soothing pseudo art — in short, wallpaper.

This was Plato’s complaint about artists; they tend to be intellectual prostitutes.

No particular media needs to express all the modes of thought that are required to adequately describe a world view. It is sufficient and necessary that the overall body work of an artist, including his personal life, ethics, relationships, behavior, letters, etc., do clearly reveal a significant world view.

Art, then, is a unique world view that is capable of communicating to and expanding the intellectual horizons of some significant audience. Expanding horizons implies the capability of changing minds. Art that preaches to the faithful is not art at all; it is propaganda. As such, art is comprised of two modes of expression in addition to the artistic craft.

The first mode of expression is some connection to content; some rational, discrete and analytical mode of thinking, if only by context. Without this, art is merely good craft, or wallpaper.

The second mode is the reptilian, or limbic area of the brain; the pleasant patterns, soothing rhythms, and emotional content. Without this the work has no impact, or emotional power. This serves three necessary purposes. The first, and most obvious purpose, is that it gets and holds the audience’s attention. The second purpose is that such impact has the power to change minds, that is, to expand the intellectual horizon of some audience. The final purpose, and most obscure, is obscurity itself. The impact of art is most often derived by tricking the audience. By focusing the audience’s attention on emotional content, it removes it from the direct analysis of the content by the rational, discrete and analytical modes of thinking. The content or world view is delivered most often as subtext, and avoids the challenge of rigorous analytical inspection. Good art is very much akin to subliminal advertising. By focusing the audience’s mind on the primitive limbic area of the brain the actual rational content of the work can be quietly passed into the audience’s awareness while bypassing the critical, skeptical and analytical functions of the higher brain centers. It is the old bait and switch method of mind manipulation.

It is also Nietzsche’s complaint; the poets always lie.

This is the difference between art and philosophy. Rational intellectuals such as Wittgenstein, Bohr, Einstein and Russell deal strictly with rational, discrete and analytical modes of thinking. As such, they present clearly expressed world views that are of incalculable value. And as such, these world views are open to intellectual skepticism and analytical probing. They are honestly presented and may be accepted or rejected by anyone possessing the intellectual horsepower to do so.

They are not artists, in the sense that their content is not delivered with impact and subversion.

Real art contains at least several significant different spectra, the analytical/emotional and the content/wallpaper.

In addition, art, in order to be art at all as defined by how effective it is at changing minds, must be created by an artist who has significant skills at that craft relevant to the media. These skills are not insignificant and they are necessary for art to be effective.

For any significant work of art, skillful craftsmanship involves complexity. Complexity give and artistic work depth. This is not the depth that pertains to the world view, but the depth that means the work is complex and layered and therefore is constantly revealing its content in new ways. It is complexity and depth that makes a work of art eternally fresh, always engaging, much in the same way as human relations are comprised of entities that are comfortable and loved and, at the same time, challenging and evolving. Sometimes complexity is achieved by mixing media, sometimes by context, often within the piece itself. An image of the fractal complexity of a real tree, for example, is more engaging on a long term basis than the mere triangle-on-a-stick symbol for a tree, which palls immediately.

So, as a final definition, art is a unique and significant world view that is capable of communicating to and expanding the intellectual horizons of some significant audience, utilizing skillful craftsmanship, including depth and complexity, and employing a positive connection to some rational, analytical underpinning of its world view by means of an effective emotional impact.