Sarah Anne Johnson - The House Fire (Winner of Grange Prize 2008)
It may seem strange to read that an artist thinks art sucks, but there you are. It isn’t because there isn’t anything interesting to be done in art, it’s just that nobody cares if it is interesting.
Instead of interesting, it seems that people want something a bit more pedestrian, and that will be declared by the art gods to be genius-level work.
I finally settled on this point by looking at a big shot art site, seeing who is being proclaimed the latest genius of art. The work I saw there was jarring to me. It was plain, flat and cartoon-like. It was very much like the stuff I was doing when I was ten years old. Close enough that if I sent one of those paintings to the hot professional art web site and said it was done by this guy, I’m quite sure they’d put it on their site as another example of the great man’s genius.
But I’m decades beyond that now, and here this guy is the new genius of art?!? Maybe I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. When I was ten it was “not bad for a kid” and probably if I still painted like when I was ten nobody would care.
So I realized that people are just randomly declared to be some sort of genius. Like another artist who paints red squares. That’s it – that’s the big work of genius. Oh yeah, she calls them things like A Dozen Roses – never mind that they look like the same red squares she called Carnations, it’s GENIUS! I should be grateful for even getting to see her work.
Yeah. Now do you see why I have said that art sucks? That and the fact that art is mostly useless. 99% of art is either bullshit like this or mindless wall candy: Pretty waterfalls and barns with lots of yellow light – bright and shiny and signifying nothing.
That said, I have finally distilled the essence of success in art: Being good or doing something nobody has ever done before will get you exactly nowhere. To be a genius in the art world, you just need to have the brass balls to put a dot on a canvas and call it God Speaks To Abraham or whatever. So now we know the whole secret of modern art is to be an artist with unmitigated gall and completely full of shit. Nothing else. Although a complete lack of ability to produce anything recognizable also helps.. as long as you make sure to give your work some pompous name, that is.
I’ve done the cartoony work of the great genius trumpeted by the art mags, and left it behind long ago. I’ve done impressionism, abstractism and photorealism. I’ve semi-settled on figurative impressionism because it represents the greatest challenge next to doing something original in expressionism and it takes a lot of skill and talent.
If you missed my many discussions on this point, impressionism uses simplified shapes and color fields, to create images that rather clearly are representational. It is unreal realism, and that is what I love about it.
I use impressionism to play with the minds of viewers at the neural level, and to present my personal agenda to reform the direction of civilization. I trust that is not too much to ask. And I still love expressionism and even abstract impressionism for its free flow from the animal, subconscious mind to the canvas. Canvas is canvas, paint is paint, the don’t need to pretend to be otherwise, except perhaps to impress the dull witted.
Either way, the art world isn’t going to care.
If you are interested in great art, visit the following link to see a compilation of my paintints: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIX3T8xai0k
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