When Sheep Leave the Fold

One of the more difficult things about being an artist selling your own work, is the letting go process when a painting sells.

Not only have you put your inner mind and thinking into a visual statement for everybody to see, but you also are srending that statement out into the world on its own, without hope of getting to revise it or even explain it.

Of course, this makes artist very vulnerable – but it also is the one thing that makes art so intriguing, and it is what lets art critics earn a living: they get to come up with what they think the artist was intending to say out loud in his/her artwork.
Which of course is, in very many cases, very largely guesswork and a big dose of speculation combined with imagination.

Unless the artist has put his intentions and the mind behind the work into words somewhere, all one can go by is the visual statements the artist has made.

This is why I find “the serious art worrld” so entertaining in many cases: who is to say, what was going through Piccasso’s mind when he decided to draw people out of proportion with really screwed up facial elements?
Who says Pollock wasn’t just flinging paint at a canvas, just because it was a fun thing to do on a Thursday night?

Hopefully someday there will be some art critics standing beside my “Haulin’ Ass” painting, trying to interpret it in some way other than it was intended – that is a tour in the museum I really would love to be on…

It will be the perfect opportunity to play BS Bingo – mark off the words as the art critics and tour guides mention them; feel free to laugh loudly, as none of these were part of the statement I was making with “Haulin’ Ass”:

“Social Influence”
“Metaphor”
“Subversive Political Commentary”
“Artist’s Intentions”
“Deeper Meaning”
“Metaphysical Impact”
Etc….

Add more art world bs words liberally, and see how many you can find in the review and critics’s speaches…

Don’t forget to yell BINGO! at the end….

Too bad I won’t be around for that…the main reason dead artists are more famous than live artists, is that they shut up about what is being said about their work….

Tags: , , ,