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| Speaking in Stone by Nora Valdez who describes her work as how "the dialogue between the artist and the stone becomes a conversation. The artist starts; the stone answers, asks for what it needs." Andre Institute: Brookline, NH Photograph by J. Stimmell 9/10/10 |
We Americans have
belittled art since our Puritan ancestors arrived on the Mayflower. As a
result, it is probably not surprising that the United States has produced
relatively few citizens who, in the words of art historian Robert Hughes, “draw
sustenance from the high-wire acts of the artistic imagination”[1]
The problem seems to
be that American culture has never understood the essence of art – and, by
extension, you could argue – life itself.
We have always
followed our Puritan ethic of valuing hard work but certainly not as an end to
itself – otherwise, artists would get credit for the extremely hard work they
do making art – but as a means to something else: higher status or making
money.
Unfortunately, this
attitude has now even spread to artists themselves. Check out this recent “Quote-of-the-Day”
on my Google Home Page by American novelist, Mark Helprin: “Of course, you
would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet.
Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children’s
future.”
Nevertheless, despite
these enormous obstacles, art quietly thrives, even in America, because it is
so much more than a mere thing to be bought and sold like pork bellies on the
commodities exchange. As Hughes so
acutely observes, Art discovers its true social use, not on the ideological
[free market] plane, but by opening the passage from feeling to meaning…This
impulse seems to be immortal.”[2]
Lewis Hyde has
written the classic in the field, an illuminating book called “The Gift,[3]”
searching for the core impetus that inspires the artist to create. Utilizing a renaissance man’s breadth
of knowledge, Hyde pulls together innumerable threads of disparate evidence,
only to discover that the answer is simple and unequivocal: artists make art
to create a meaningful exchange with others.
The underlying
motivation of every artist is to not to produce a collectible to be bought or
sold but the desire to produce a gift to be freely given and shared.
Hyde begins his book
by noting that the first colonists almost immediately coined the word “Indian
giver” to describe the Native American belief – so uncivilized and distasteful
to the white man – that gifts should not be kept but returned or shared, or in
any case, passed on.
“The opposite of “Indian giver,” Hyde says, “would be
something like ‘white man keeper’ (or maybe ‘capitalist’), that is, a person
whose instinct is to remove property from circulation… (or more to the point
for capitalism, to lay it aside to be used for production).[4]
Later in the book,
Hyde points out that the Peasants’ War in Europe during the Reformation
involved the same “struggle between spirit and property” as the Native
American’s fight with the Europeans: “a war against the marketing of formerly
inalienable properties. Whereas before a man could fish
in any stream and hunt in any forest, now he found there were individuals who
claimed to be the owners of these commons.” [5]
And isn’t that what
OWS is really all about:
A protest against
corporations owning not only our public commons but our government; a protest
against corporations marketing our formerly inalienable properties, including
now even the water we drink, and increasing, the genes and cells, not just of
plants and animals, but parts of ourselves; a protest against being discarded like
last year’s model just because we happen to be poor, old, infirm, or even,
heaven forbid, an artist.
XXX (571 words)
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
[1] Robert Hughes from his
book, The Shock of the New, quoted from Lewis Latham piece, Art and Money
Exchange,
posted on TomDispatch 3/15/10.
2 ibid
3 Lewis
Hyde, The Gift. NYC: Vintage Books, 2007
4 ibid pp 3-4
5 ibid p.
157
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