If you take up the study of art, particularly in higher education, you will be barraged with "isms."  Dadaism, neo-realism, post modernism, and so forth.  There are, however, only two basic "isms" in the history of art.   Impressionism (or some degree of abstraction) and realism (or graphic representation which attempts to as closely as possible resemble a photograph).  The first human art, including sculpture, was abstract.  The French cave paintings so admired by Oregon author Jean Auel, and the fabulous carvings found in the tombs of Egyptian kings, are perfect examples.  Abstraction (in painting, not sculpture) remained the method of the day until about a millennia and a half after the death of Christ, when, possibly via the use of mirrors, men now called "the great masters" began with their work to simulate what later would come out of cameras.

Oregon has some very good impressionists.  One whose work is more abstract than that of Hans Schiebold (featured in another piece in this issue)  is the pastelist, Bob Fergison, who works on the east side of the northern Cascades.  Some of Fergison's work goes beyond lovely to striking.  (Of further interest in this case is that Bob Fergison was once a "suit."  An executive in the part of the communications field known as public relations.)

Subsidizing art

With the exception of Van Gogh's brother, the financing of art has always been a matter of patronage.  (Support by the wealthy or the government.)  The only reason it was generated by "public support" in earlier times is because back then the government owned all the property. Prosperity at any level is a function of individual ownership rights -- of property or other things. The fewer people there are who are legally allowed to own anything, the more concentration of wealth there is in a given geographic political entity. Machiaveli's book, The Prince, was about those who in his time controlled the wealth and the government of the municipal monarchies of Italy. 

To compare "public" support then with "public" support now is technically inaccurate. "Public" (government) patronage today is a subtly different animal -- a bureaucratic animal whose choices are anti-thetical to the essence of art, which is freedom of expression. 

The perfect example of modern public patronage in America would be the famous Guggenheim exhibit which displayed a representaton of the Virgin Mary, spattered with cow dung - a purely leftwing political symbology.  A painting of Fidel Castro which was spattered with cow dung would not appear in such a venue, today.  It could not receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts (or any of the major "arts" foundations like the MacArthur or Carnegie funds).  And, even if it was produced by some artist on his own, it would not be accepted by any major gallery.  Art (painting, sculpture, poetry, literature, film)  in America today is the sole property of the Left.

Those who love government hate the church.  You will see no publicly financed art today which fails to support leftist ideology.  Beyond our borders, public art is also essentially political in nature.  Examples are the statues of Lenin, Stalin and the mythical heroic worker (Soviet union era) and, more recently, Saddam Hussein.  Present-day government support for the arts sucks.  It creates ideological junk, not masterpieces.

You get far better art when the patrons are kings, popes and evil, bloated, capitalistic imperialists -- the real ones like those who used to finance symphonies. While politics (the necessity of promoting the funder) was prominent, such sources didn't directly instruct the methodology of the artist.  Socialist art is garbage. Art financed by taxing the proletariat, or even the petite bourgeoise, and fitered through the taste of the bureaucracy just don't cut the mustard. 

Artists as philosophers

Even when an artist manages to make a political statment with his work, it is from that standpoint one-dimensional, and so philosophically useless -- even harmful.  Picasso's Guernica (below, and a hotlink to a PBS page about it) is commonly said to communicate a universal horror of war, and so condemns even the American Revolution, the Civil War and WWII.  All three of them were critical to the freedom of artists to make philosophically incomplete or downright misleading comments about war.

Artists are, because of the blood of patriots at Valley Forge, Gettysburg and Normandy, free to believe, and to paint, their incomplete philosophies.  But, as long as there are people who understand the truth of things, and who write that truth in places like this magazine, the damage done will be only of a temporary nature -- and only to the unsophisticated among us, most of whom are artists, teach art in universities or run art museums.  Art critics.are also idiots.  Here is a sample critical review of a modern painter's work.

The post-industrial psychological brutality in Brusco's "Woman with wrench in her nose" reflects on the ethical transformation of synaptic response as viewed from the perspective of regurgitave elements of the duality movement codified in the work of non-neo-surrealists from the Baden-Weisenhimer, or Schlock, school.

Pay no attention to art critics.  They're as stupid as French intellectuals.  When you see a painting that works with your wallpaper, buy it.

(LL)

© 2003 Oregon Magazine   Bob Fergison provided the fencerow paining graphic.  The Guernica graphis is a link to its source