Am I calling for artists to take up arms? Well, not exactly. Just don’t give work to an auction to Save Darfur and expect to sell it, with the only benefit being just another line on an already bloated resume. A little harsh? No, I don’t think so. Times have changed; the role and position artists had when Rauschenberg was a young artist truly meant something to them and to the public. Artists the caliber of Rauschenberg were “Hollywood stars” looked at and appreciated by a broad population, discussed at the dinner table, and debated in bars all across this fine country – not to mention featured on the covers of major magazines and exposed in major museums. They were in the mainstream of a public life, making work that meant something because it was in sync with the advancement of the society’s technological, social, and economic gains – meaning it was as inventive as the discoveries being made every day in other domains.
Today, we are literally bombarded with convenience and compartmentalized stimulus components we know as cell phones, in which our lives, and how we perceive them, have been digitalized, pixelized, and fractured into little bytes of electronic media. And artists can only hope to keep up with, let alone compete for, the public’s attention. Some artists have adapted the strategy of mass-marketing, their unique images becoming rapidly less so, as they print them on everything from coffee mugs to T-shirts and back again. The technological advances and online accessibility to printing and printed matter, has usurped the original. A majority of artists are endlessly reproducing giclées from their original works of art. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that the giclée is not going to sell any faster than the original, even at a reduced price. Why is this? The answer may lie within the image, content, idea, and importance of the original and a generally disinterested public. As the original slips from our view, having now been reduced in size, flattened, and spewed out into the hundreds, did we not also throw out the five senses God gave us and the reasoning and judgment that go with them?
The point is this: we need an authentic direct response by artists to the times and conditions we’re living in. It’s about broadening the scope and vision, the definition of how art and its artists exist in the public eye. This could, in turn, build a broader appreciation and understanding of an artwork, based on its quality and intent, beyond its current and tired public perception of a “universal interconnected poetic meaning,” that no one seems to see or respond to, in quite the same way as its creator or curator. I believe for any of this to work, it is important to change the context and the environment that we find most of the artwork, still seen to this day, by a very limited and select group of individuals. There is no "human condition" that exists within the walls of a museum. It only exists outside in the real world where people are living and dying by it. The key word is human and it doesn't take being an artist to realize this.
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