Art is everywhere but in art

I've been thinking and claiming this since many years,
explaining to people here and there why I was so reluctant
to present my stuff into galleries.


But, well, I'm just Cedric Caspesyan,
and sometimes you need one big respected
theorist to nail it down for you.



So here, from Jean Baudrillard himself,
who just launched his new book
"The Conspiracy Of Art" (and it IS a conspiracy
and most of you artists out there suck at it):





"Art is everywhere but in art, art is no longer where it thinks it is."




"There is no more 'formal' difference between art and reality, Art has now collapsed into the aestheticized banality of everything else . . . a 'pornography of transparency' that we can only experience with irony and indifference. It claims to be null: 'I am null! I am null!' But it is truly null!"




Haha !! I luv it.


The question is:

What have we done to ourseves?

What are artists thinking they are doing to shape
the world ?



Why are artists hiding in their ivory towers,
presenting their art in gallerie hoping to make big
bucks from them, just because they release so few copies
of this and that edition, and then not present any images
anywhere, not being available for discussion unless in very controlled
environments, like that high-end magazine, with that other curator that also
lives in the same ivory tower, and why do these people accept so joyfully
that architecture be wasted to present their objects, when we live in a world when so many people have a hard time finding a place to sleep.

Did any artist yet thought of just using their gallery space to
let street people sleep in during the time they're slated ?


What are artists doing to the world but just adding up to a profusion of images
and designs, negociating space simply hoping that their objects and their designs will lift up from the general disparity of everything and say something about themselves or the world we live in ?


What is the signification of a work of art displaced from the museum into public sphere, say, in a Macdonald, without any sign or board announcing it as a work of art or its provenance? How powerful can that be, in 2005? How can it not blend with everything else ?? Whatever you're saying, and with the amount of stuff out there that already exist to harass you in saying something... Don't you think you should just shut up? Do you absolutely need to come grafitti my wall ? Is communication your way of polluting me ?


Could you just leave me alone ? Can I have a talk with the squirrels instead ?



Ok. let's not pull every hairs out.


Truth is that there is still "art in art".
It's just not necessarely where it think it is.


There's no big separation artworld VS outside world, or reality if you will,
anymore.

So there is no need to distinguish that difference and proclaim that there
is "no art in art."



But it is very probable, that the "real art happening in art",
is an art that is hidden from surface and aesthetics, and
even from communication.


It can happen that an artist unknowingly helped
someone through their art having a better life, but
that may have nothing to do with the art itself.
It could be... The fact that an artist hired someone
and that helped them eat bread for a month. That can
be powerful.

I think the art's pretend for beauty (wrether aesthetic,
ethic, poetic, formalist, narrative, etc, any types of topic that
the artist believes he has a commentary to add on)
is not necessarely happening through the surface of screens
(the art work as a screen between its author and viewer).

I think it's happening in the ways that the artwork
has a tangible impact on the lives of the artist or the people
who viewed it.


If these lives stay the same as they were before the act
of art, than art is just a distraction, an entertainment,
a waste space, a drug, a plato-s cave, something that cuts
you off from reality and its possibilities. It's an escape
(and I for one am the first to declare that I my love of art
evolved from an escapist perspective).


But if the art has a positive effect on the way we live,
if it changes our lives in better ways, than it needn't stay. It could be destroyed the minute after, because then it would have done more than it could have hoped for.


And an art that changes your life (and not just through
the commodity of decorating your new house, please),
that has nothing to do with claims of an art piece
that it has this or this to tell you, or the quality
of its expression.


If one day you visit Kassel, and look at all
the oak trees that were planted there by Joseph
Beuys, and then start to ask the people
around about them, they could tell
you if that art changed their lives or not.
Boring as it may sound as an art project,
I think this artist envisioned the problematic
proposed by Baudrillard today.


Artists are at this stage when they are confronted
to the outside world, and need urgently to decide
how they are going to deal with that. What they are
planning to do, or not do, to alter the situation.
If the old definitions of art's place are still
pertinent in these contexts, and if we really
need all these spaces reserved for the exclusive
representation of art.


Let me put things in another way...


Is it not absurd, that late a night,
after a grand vernissage in a grand Chelsea
gallery in New York, that the artist and
a majority of the employees return to
sleep in tiny apartments because they
can't afford to rent for bigger.


Should an artist sleep in a couch
in a corner of his (her) huge badly
heated cold studio, in some bad part of a town.


Is art really been shaping your life the way it should.

Or is art simply at the mercy of people in power who buy it low
to resell it much higher in auctions years later, under the pretense
that they "want to encourage younger artists".






Cheers,


Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com