That poster was on the wall in my living room when I returned from Chicago. I guess a tenant put it up. Not sure where it went - maybe she took it with her. Fun, though!
Conflicts a bit with my feeling that artists should get paid at least enough to eat and pay the rent. Haven't resolved that one.
Joe KroArt must have been thinking exactly the same thing when he built the Ocean Gallery (http://www.oceangallery.com/). This is an art gallery in Ocean City, Maryland that is built like your mad grandmother's attic. Tiny corridors that are hung from floor to ceiling with all kinds of art, from cheap posters to numbered limited editions. it is my favorite shop in Ocean City.
I think that there's a balance to be found there. I do think that there is value in a society in which one can be a professional artist, because I know from my own forays into art that there are things I could do if I could spend all day working on my art that I cannot reasonably do because they are too time-intensive to mesh with a day job. I also think that there *is* art which is exceedingly labour intensive or reflected research and thought and planning which take time, and that it's fair to compensate the artist for that work. I have had a lot of "cheap art" discussions with people who do not think any art is worth more than $10 because they value art only at the raw materials that went into making it, procured as cheaply as they imagine possible, and who do not put any value on the effort or time that went into it. I have also had a lot of "art wants to be free / art cannot be property" discussions with people who use that as an argument for stealing art. If someone spends two years of their life working full-time developing a work of art, I do not think selling it for $20,000 is unreasonable -- $10,000 a year is *well* under the poverty line, in fact. If someone spends a month working full time to create a piece of art, I do not think that selling it for $5000 is unreasonable -- that works out to about $31.25 an hour, which for highly skilled work is, I think, fair. I don't think that more expensive art is necessarily better, but I do allow that there are works of art which are expensive either through valuation via recognition or just because of the artist's sheer labour cost where the cost seems entirely justified and doesn't necessarily indicate a flaw in society. I do think that having art be accessible is good, but I think that such manifestos are prone to being taken too far, and that they can sometimes be turned around by proponents to (sometimes not consciously) imply that the work of artists is without value.
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branchandroot
re: Why Cheap Art? manifesto
Date: 2009-05-04 12:55 am (UTC)Conflicts a bit with my feeling that artists should get paid at least enough to eat and pay the rent. Haven't resolved that one.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-04 03:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-04 04:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-04 05:43 am (UTC)