This Really Kind of Explains It

... maaan," says college sophomore, taking a bong hit while sitting on the floor of his cluttered dorm.

Against Elitism In Art

A while back, I participated in an online discussion about the relative importance of high culture versus popular culture. In the discussion, there were some arguing that high art has a special place above mere "popular" art. I made the point that much of what we consider today to be "high art" was made by craftsmen working to please a patron for a payday, and that renders the distinction between the two less clear than it may seem.

As strange as it sounds, a production artist on a movie or in an advertising house works under virtually the same constraints as Michelangelo: he is paid to deliver a certain piece in a certain medium by a date specified by someone else. And once one understands that "high art" and "popular art" in western culture have almost always shared a commercial motivation, enforcing boundaries between the two categories become more difficult.

I paint at an art school that teaches traditional and Renaissance drawing and painting methods; Bistre & Verdaccio underpainting as well as direct painting. But the school also teaches manga, superhero comics, illustration, origami, and has even given classes on miniatures painting. The director of the school told me that a student once complained to him that someone was painting a cowboy in one of the Renaissance painting classes. "Why is he painting that in this class?" His reply: "he just likes cowboys."

Here is a person who has every reason to look down at pop art, a person who has spent his whole life immersed in classical Western tradition and has forgotten more about Renaissance painting than most anyone will ever know, waxing enthusiastic about cowboys and "mere" comic book artists. It changes one's perspective.

I am in favor of standards, just not standards that depend on the age of a piece or an arbitrarily determined list of classics. Sure, Michaelangelo is great: but not because he's old; it's because he spent a lifetime honing and mastering a craft, and his work shows that. So does the work of Bernie Wrightson.

Right now is truly a unique time to be alive -- the luxury of leisure time has allowed large numbers of people an opportunity to both consume and even produce art in incredible quantities -- far more than a single person could ever absorb in an entire lifetime. Let's celebrate the skill and passion, and not worry so much about creating a canon.

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The Purpose of Travel

"There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign."
--Robert Louis Stevenson 

"One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things."
--Henry Miller.

 "If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home."
--James Michener

" The traveler is active; he goes strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes 'sight-seeing.'"
--Daniel J. Boorstin

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."
--Mark Twain