Yesterday over at The Abundant Artist Facebook page, one particular artist made a comment stating:
“If you’re making a living being an artist and you’re not represented by a NY or European gallery selling your work for thousands, you’re a cog in the wheel, a hack, not a creative fine artist.”
it used to be a common assumption in the United States of America that if you didn’t own property, then you didn’t count. Only men could own property – white men of a certain class, in fact. Therefore poor white men, all women, and all non-caucasian men didn’t count. They couldn’t vote, and their opinions didn’t matter.
Gallery owners and certain art collectors would have artists believe that their art isn’t legitimate unless they recognize it as such. This strikes me as the antithesis of what art is about.
Art is an individual’s interpretation of their dreams, emotions, or thoughts. Art can be inspire fear, awe, laughter, pain, joy, ecstasy or any number of emotions. It can inspire different emotions for different people looking at the same piece of art, in fact.
Art is wild, unrestrained. Art has always pushed boundaries. Most of history’s great artists pushed boundaries on what was acceptable in the art form. Today’s pioneers and rebels are people who are using information and the free flow of ideas as their form of rebellion. I would contend that artists like Banksy are every bit as legitimate as the ‘fine artists’ who are represented in galleries across Europe and NYC.
What do you think? Are the galleries of NYC and Europe still the arbiters of what good art is, or have we moved past that?
More on selling art outside traditional galleries:
How to get your art in front of customers without relying on a gallery
As I said on FB, I think this is baloney. And very NYcentric. Art isn’t art because some clique says so; it’s art before anyone but the artist sees it. And probably 99% of the art being made today will never be seen in NY–because those in NY believe this same BS and don’t look past the Hudson River.