Saturday Evening Post Apocalypse, or Social Conscience is the Black Beret of the Early 21st Century

Hilton Kramer is an asshole. I guess that's why it was so hard for me to admit that I agreed with him on several points. That's the danger of living a life out in left field; sometimes you go so far left you end up on the right again. I do find his moralizing repugnant, especially when he feels free to make a big loophole for Picasso (who, according to Jonathon Richmond and the Modern Lovers, was never called an asshole). I also don't really love a lot of the art that Kramer so staunchly defends;  I love some of the reasons why he loves it, but that's not necessarily something to be proud of.

Art can be challenging, often time the sole purpose of a piece is to challenge the audience. As the audience, the challenge can be frustrating. I feel like Hilton Kramer is the type of person who would've perhaps preferred a more static discipline. Sometimes I find myself wanting that as well. I sit around and study art history, memorizing thousands of slides, only to find there are other centuries and other regions that I haven't even begun to contemplate. That sense of accomplishment is so fleeting. And trying to synthesize different art traditions is like trying to synthesize entirely different cultures. Our world politicos are often trying to do that, with minimal, violent success. The other option is to ignore or belittle those artistic traditions, which Kramer has made a career of.

Ever increasingly, more information that does not directly relate to ones own personal experience becomes available to the masses. This means that artists and plumbers alike must begin to make decisions about what to do with that information. Kramer postulates that liberals in general and artists in particular react with a certain amount of guilt. This is why they can't be the great ego centric artistes of the 20th century, they are too busy losing sleep over starving children in Africa, instead of losing it with coke whores in Soho. Suzi Gablik disagrees with him, she believes that we live in a world where people are inherently selfish and turn a blind eye to strife. I think they're both right. Aids babies and coke whores for everyone.

Satish Kumar, on the other hand has a little more faith in humanity. In fact, he simply has more faith. Kumar champions the idea that humanity exists spiritually as a kind of collective, and that that collective directly relates to the world (nature) itself. I like Kumar's educational ethos he has cultivated with the Small School, and I appreciate his moral code in a very agnostic way.

This is one problem I am consistently running into when relating to some of the more social and ecologically conscious movements in art, and especially here in Eugene. There is this prevalent association of nature to spiritual, and I cannot help but associate the spiritual to religious. I am not a big fan of religion. And sorry to all the hippies out there: Buddhism is a real religion which is more than just getting "Zen" (read stoned) and playing with your Sharper Image rock garden, and Rastafari is a really misogynistic, scary Christian sub-sect. I digress. What is relevant to the greater conversation is that I am just as wary of Kramer's Saturday Evening Post Christian morality lesson as I am of every other kind of spiritualism. I see it as the snake devouring it's own tail. Fear is combatted with faith, faith breeds religion, religion (eventually, usually) inspires fear in the non compliant, who then attempt to subvert the system by instilling faith in a new paradigm, and these paradigms are very rarely based in logic and the well being of others that are unlike you. I feel like on its better days, the emerging artist movement in America is at least pretending to take those things into account.

Now on to Jack Ryan. Kramer would hate a lot of his work, Kumar might like it once the relevance was explained. I think Ryan was an appropriate choice for this weeks lecture. He has the sort of "traditional" skills exemplified by his drawings, and then he also has that social conscience that is so integral to art these days. I think we may have to begin to think of this type of social responsibility as another medium in the artist arsenal, just like paint and clay and humor and angst. It should be employed when it is the most relevant tool to the final outcome of a piece of work. I think if we try to didactically prescribe it's use, the way Gablik is sometimes in danger of doing, it will lose its poignancy and become a marginalized joke.

*** Speaking of  jokes: before I saw this a million times I was able to imagine living in the shitty town where this billboard was, and what it was like to be the kid that got up there and scribbled "to Slayer", the type of kid who probably scribbled "Slayer" on lots of stuff, and just how immediately important something like this was to them, and their community (especially to those it undermines). Is it funny? Yes. Is it socially relevant? Yes. Is it art? I hope so.