What is the Value of Art?
What is the Value of Art?
Journal March 5 - April 2, 2000
I’ve spent most of January and all of February writing the essay, “What’s Wrong With Capitalism?” This has consumed all my free time and writing time. It has also consumed my brain. It is depressing to think how enslaved we are to the capitalistic way of life. The essay helped me gain some perspective on how my own worldview is tied and chained to the whole worldview. It’s the stupid economy!
In late 1999, I had a show of Curvism art on display at a museum in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The show closed the end of January. Ezra and I drove to Sioux Falls on February 7 to pick up my art and drive it back home in a large U-Haul truck. No art was sold at the show. On Wednesday, February 9, I received a message from my art dealer Doug Flanders in Minneapolis, requesting that I come soon to pick up most of my art at the gallery because it hadn’t sold and they need to clear it out. So on February 26, I traveled to Minneapolis to pick up a van full of unsold art.
I am rich in art. My garage is full of art. My studio is full of art. My home is full of art. For a long time, I have been hoping to make an honest living with my art and hoping to change the world with my art.
Art! Again, I wonder what is the value of art? It is a question that asks a lot of questions. Today I have no answers.
Today is a Sunday. It is 70 degrees outside and no snow. Either it’s a sign of global warming or an early spring has come to the upper Midwest. Either way, it’s a perfect day for a walk into the woods. Maybe if I walk long enough, I’ll find some answers to my questions. And maybe, if I walk far enough, I’ll be lucky enough to forget the questions. And if I keep walking, maybe I’ll lose my way and get lost. And maybe, just maybe, this time I’ll keep going until I simply disappear. Perhaps this time, I won’t come back.
Afterword March 5, 2000 9 p.m.
I came back. Of course I came back. I have a wife and kids who love me and need me. I can’t leave them now. Besides it was time for supper. We grilled hamburgers outside. In the process Amy set the briquette chimney starter in the garage on a box of magazines where a hot briquette must have come loose and glowed for an hour before starting a fire in the garage. We ate at 6:00 but smelled smoke in the house at about 7:00. It didn’t smell quite right. Amy went to double-check the grill in the back yard and when she passed by the window of the back door of the garage, she saw flames inside. She came running into the house hollering “Fire!” We called the fire department. I ran to the garage and went in through the front garage door. There were flames in the back from floor to ceiling. I moved two paintings and three boxes of drawings away from the fire. I grabbed the big fire extinguisher from the hallway and sprayed the flames. I ran and retrieved another extinguisher from the house and Amy found a third to use against the fire. A neighbor joined in with his two small extinguishers. We managed to squelch the large flames. The fire department arrived in two huge trucks, sirens blaring, red lights flashing. Ten
firefighters poured out of the trucks and into the garage. They used their extinguishers on the fire and hauled and shoveled the smoldering heap outside. Lots and lots of dark smoke flowed from the garage.
Boxes of stored stuff burned, along with a chair, Amy’s bike, my toolbox with most of my hand tools and electric tools all melted together, a dog cage, and other riffraff. The plastic surrounding two paintings melted to the frames. All in all, no real damage, perhaps $3,000 worth of replaceable stuff. A layer of ashes and fire extinguisher dust covers my art. Another ten or fifteen minutes more of burning and it would have been a different story.
According to the gallery and museum price insurance lists, there is over $150,000 worth of art stored in the garage alone. As to the question, what is the value of art? I still don’t have an answer—only questions.
April 2, 2000
It has been four weeks since the garage fire. It was worse than I first thought. Although no art was burned by flames, the smoke damage was nasty, wrecking seven paintings. Everything had to be moved out of the garage. My art was temporarily stored in a truck in the driveway; my other stuff was stored under plastic in the yard. Everything had to be cleaned, all my possessions and all my art, which was, thankfully, mostly all well wrapped. The inside of the garage had to be repainted. I wish I could repaint the smoke-damaged paintings as easily. The art stuff is now in the studio; all the other stuff is back in the garage (minus the two dumpsters of stuff I threw
out). Four weeks of my time, a part of my life, and lots of my energy went up in smoke. I am returning back to normal, a changed man.
Oh, what a burden possessions can be! Stuff. We Americans live a life full of stuff. And art stuff, is still stuff.
I am an artist. As an artist, I manipulate material, physical stuff to discover, symbolize, and communicate spiritual realities. In the process of creating art, art creates me. Art makes me who I am. I am an artist who lives the artistic life. The art itself does not really matter. The art creates the life that’s lived spiritually. The art itself becomes immaterial.
Art is just stuff, not much different from other stuff. The physical reality of stuff is subject to constant change, re-creation. No thing ever remains the same thing. Artists sometimes create things that they hope will have a life of their own and live after they are long gone, extending their own shelf life. But ultimately art cannot live, or live forever. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Stuff to stuff.
So, what is the value of art? The value of art is in the quality of the artistic life that the art creates for the artist. The art and the life of the artist can inspire others to try to transcend the purely physical, material world of stuff, to live more artfully and spiritually. It is, however, only by creating art that art can create an artist. Perhaps art and living the artistic life is as close to the spiritual as stuff can become. Perhaps it is only by attempting to create the spiritual that the physical can become spiritual.