In my last piece I briefly posited a distinction between the terms Genius and Intelligence, the former having lately become a measure of the latter that has somehow morphed into a near mystical end in itself which ironically may not involve any meaningful intelligence at all.

When I was a teenager in the 1970s, attending a pretty radically liberal boarding school in the crunchy farmlands of Vermont, one of our teachers — an enormous bearded man named Bob Williams, a sort of poli-sci Hagrid in charge of the often magically altered creatures at our counter-cultural Hogwarts — subjected us to an array of viewpoints along the spectrum of then current political and ideological hot-button topics. We read texts by thinkers from either end of the conservative to liberal arc, engaged in lengthy, often heated, classroom discussions on same, and sometimes attended talks and events at other nearby institutions. Dartmouth College was just across the state border in Hanover, New Hampshire and we were bussed-over from time to time to steep in the heady intellectualism of its various programs. In one such case we attended a now infamous debate between a conservative professor named Jeffrey Hart (an editor at William F. Buckley’s National Review) and the former conservative, but by then left-leaning Libertarian Anarchist, Karl Hess.

To the degree that I understood, at fifteen, what those two men were arguing about at all, what I did come away with was a strong intuitive sense of the relative openness and curiosity, or lack thereof, embedded in their opposing viewpoints. Hart appeared to be regurgitating and defending a static architecture of received wisdom on the various issues under discussion, where Hess called each into question and proposed alternative positions which seemed more dedicated to the principal of skepticism itself than to any particularly lock-step interpretation of existing doctrine. In short, to me at least, Hess appeared reasonably intelligent where Hart did not.

So what do I mean by intelligent? This is one of those words we all regularly use with a presumption that we understand exactly what it stands for, but which may have more nuanced implications than we typically assign to it. I see it as something more than a quantity of mere smarts, and relating more substantively to the precise manner of their use. As with the also too-casually deployed term Genius, intelligence is not only about a metric of thinking or creative capacity, or even of a volume of accumulated knowledge, but also a critical weighing of the way in which those capacities can be best accessed and deployed in the real world.

Surely Mr. Hart, a noteworthy and venerable Dartmouth professor, was a smart and learned man. He may in some ways have been more so than Mr. Hess, whose arguments, while passionate, seemed less rigorously researched, and perhaps a tad more impulsive. Was my reaction tied to political ideologies that I, as a budding liberal, favored? I don’t think so. Even then, I was innately suspicious of ideology in principle and found the positions and policies of the far left to be every bit as vulnerable to obtuse idiocy as those on the far right. An old classmate from that same school in Vermont that I attended, who is quite conservative and still a Vermonter, often refers to his nearby state capital as “Commie Burlington.” Far from being offended by this characterization, it makes me laugh and in many respects I’m inclined to agree in spirit. As a former longtime citizen of “the People’s Republic of” Berkeley, California I have often mused that there is no more humorless and inflexibly ideological tyrant than an aging hippie.

It would seem then that intelligence, in my formulation, has less to do with a quantitative measure of stored data, or any particular ideological attachment to it, than with an openness to the principle of questioning the conclusions towards which that data or alignment might seem to point. In other words, perhaps what intelligence really involves are the smarts and knowledge coupled to a willingness to challenge the rationales which our most narrowly self-interested impulses use to prop up all manner of foregone conclusions.

We hear a lot these days about the shrinking presence in our polity of the skill of critical thinking, which is perhaps just another term for the sort of intelligence I am describing, the aim of which, presumably, is to arrive at as near an approximation as possible of some verifiably plausible truth. Useful though they may be, ideas posses no inherent truth whatsoever. Truth, to the degree that it exists at all, only does so in relation to what can be seen either to work, or not to work in the world once our ideas are set in motion. Even then, it’s a pretty subjective thing. One can, as the whole civilizational project of our so-called “developed” world has done, author elaborate ideological rationales for the unchecked, extractive plunder of the fragile environmental resources that sustain life on this planet which we share with all our less charitably characterized global neighbors. We can similarly use those rationales to justify the intrusive destabilization of those neighbors’ cultures and even for the outright killing-off of large numbers of them. The architects and enactors of such policies may impute some seemingly rational truthfulness to that practice. But when that course is inevitably arrested at the reality of a world whose societal stability is shattered, whose resources are gone, whose environment is no longer sustainable, and with all its species, including our own, poised to go extinct as a result of our having so devotedly followed it — identifying and acting to forestall that (always fully predictable) outcome would rather seem to have been the more intelligent choice.

I don’t believe in god. But I do believe in that sort of intelligence, and data all by itself simply does not possess it, because both the data and the purportedly conscious algorithms we have built to amass, access and fabricate yet more data from it does not exist in the wider world whose material truths an actually organic intelligence is able to know. It’s just the accumulated mathematic quanta of available information which we humans have invented as such. To the degree that we can access, sort and understand the implications of all those trillions of discrete bits, they can become more or less useful to a genuinely intelligent actor. The Earth itself, and the universe beyond, represent a bewildering resource of such information, which science forever strives to identify, parse, de-code, re-code and understand. But we humans, along with the earth and the universe beyond, are also theoretically intelligent in some essentially different and interconnected whole way that transcends the components of all that data even as it incorporates them.

Or does it? Perhaps this is the penultimate chicken and egg riddle: as in, which came first; was it the information or the intelligence? Science and religion would each have us believe that they know the answer to that one. I don’t get the feeling that either does.

We make such a fuss about AI. It is the monster that will destroy us even as it builds for itself and its masters a dystopian future in which humans are surpassed and relegated to the tragic dustbin of evolution. Like Diane Fossey’s beloved mountain gorillas, we will perhaps be cordoned-off into some artificially maintained preserve, enabled by our artificial game-keepers to carry on our backward existence for their occasional and sentimentally condescending entertainment. “Look, Claude, aren’t they beautiful and tragic? So primitive — you can almost see some real intelligence in their eyes. It’s too bad that it was so limited. Despite those promising opposable thumbs, they just didn’t have the tools!”

As an old friend, a Polish tough from the Brooklyn waterfront who I knew in college, used to say:

“Wrong, Bonzo!”

This “Western Culture” of ours, which has so pervasively overspread the globe and has, along the way, consumed and altered so many other peoples and cultures in its wake — not to mention the ecosystems on we all together depend — operates on a handful of ideological assumptions so deeply embedded in all that it does that to recognize, much less call them into question is nearly impossible, and for many, completely unthinkable. We mistakenly identify the self-awareness that makes such dubious choices as the locus of intelligence, when in fact it may be one of the most effective obstacles to its actual attainment, forever flattering ourselves that our science, industry and tech make us more advanced than all those other societies who have not prioritized the same goals. We sincerely believe that we are more intelligent than they are. But isn’t it precisely due to that hubristic correlation of our innovations to the very concept of intelligence itself that we are now so ready to accept that a yet more advanced and necessarily more intelligent technology is poised render us obsolete? So long as we limit our understanding of intelligence to the narrow range of activities that have enabled this particular technological advance, I suppose that we are indeed in danger being replaced by it, and if so, that we may even deserve to be. Despite being quite clever and canny, we are — like AI itself — pretty far away, at least as a collective body, from any truly impactful genius at the universal level. I’d even argue that the gorrillas in the mountains much are nearer to that plateau of understanding than we are, being as they are so fully integrated into a real and, at least until we came along, sustainable ecosystem which in its totality was and still is astonishingly and genuinely intelligent.

Watts, a British ex-pat, settled in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1951 where he soon fell in with the likes of Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlingetti, and fleshed out already existing connections to Jiddu Krishnamurti, Joseph Campbell, D.T. Suzuki and other contemporary luminaries of both the West Coast and the wider global spiritual and philosophical counterculture. Previously ordained as an Episcopal minister in Evanston, Illinois (where he briefly held the post of chaplain at Northwestern University) Watts finally left the Christian church behind and headed west to further a lifelong self-directed study of the whole arc of Eastern spiritual philosophies, from the Hindu Vedanta to Indian and Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism, Chinese Taoism, early Chinese and later Japanese Zen.

Watts died relatively young, and somewhat mysteriously, in 1973, but not before he had helped to turn a whole generation of aspirational West Coast seekers on to these, then still comparatively exotic, Eastern paths. The circumstances of his passing, at just fifty-eight, are somewhat opaque. It’s tempting, absent any publicly revealed chronology of contributing illnesses or risky lifestyle choices, to indulge in speculations about why he went so soon, but these are ultimately immaterial to his work or ideas. The latter we can thankfully access fully because his family maintains a website with hundreds of hours of audio files that Watts himself had the prescient, if sometimes embarrassed, wit to record for posterity. De-contextualized and psychedelically animated excerpts of these recordings (too often overlaid with cloying New Age instrumental soundtracks) sometimes pop up on platforms like YouTube, Instagram or Facebook. But the full, unadulterated direct talks available from his foundation are the mother lode of the real stuff and well worth the purchase price.

Sometimes dismissed as a mere dilettante by more pedantically academic scholars and true-believing practitioners of the various disciplines that caught his interest, Watts was in fact deeply skeptical of both academia and of organized religion, and not remotely interested in being made into anybody’s spiritual leader or ‘Guru”. He was refreshingly open about his own human shortcomings as well as in admitting to a kind of healthy self-interest from which he reckoned that we all operate irrespective of any feigned appearance of selfless altruism. Perhaps most of all, he was an original and insightful interpreter of the oppositional phenomena of individually questing mysticism on the one hand, against strictly liturgical religious practice on the other. He was also a visionary commentator on many of the thorny socio-political topics of his time, and of ours too, which he foresaw with sometimes startling clarity. For example, in the years bridging the decades of the 1950s and 60s, as the computer was just emerging as an influential technology in the business world, Watts predicted both the intimately personal computing of the smart phone and the eventual pervasive infiltration of Artificial Intelligence into all facets of our lives. His reflections on the possible advantages, as well as the many likely disadvantages that such innovations might bring, were always thoughtful and intelligent, and as it turns out, also frequently accurate.

These observations were generally offered up by Watts through the lens of the proclivity of a handful of Axial Age oddballs such as the Buddha, Christ and Lau-Tze to independently develop more highly-evolved plateaus of human consciousness than the “merely living for back and belly” daily grind we endure in order to survive in a hard and unforgiving world, and which the commandments of religious doctrine feel entitled to impose authoritatively from without. Watts often posited the innovations of mid-twentieth century tech against this ancient tradition of looking inward for more organic, and perhaps more genuinely transformative advances in the ongoing project of human consciousness and intelligence. At the same time, he wasn’t at all shy about pointing out that all the different religions, despite their transformative pretense, only rarely get us there. In a favorite quote of mine from one of his many discourses on Zen, he said, “Religions are always involved in some kind of sales pitch. They say — ‘if you would do what I tell you, or what we preach, it would be good for you; it will make something better’. And endlessly, endlessly, it doesn’t.”

One way in which religions impose their authoritative interpretations of scripture on their followers is by elevating the merely human originators of those various ideologies into deities of one kind or another, whose revelations must necessarily be too sophisticated and esoteric for us ordinary mortals to understand absent the Church’s instructive intercession. Martin Luther made a little bit of a dent in this practice but it persisted nonetheless in both Protestant and Catholic Christianity, as well as many other sects and paths of both the middle-eastern Abrahamic religions and the far-eastern meditative paths. If you raise a lone mystic, such as those cited above, either to literal godliness, or else to a plateau of sagacity almost equally super-human, you do rather excuse yourself from the challenging problem of learning see the world as clearly as they did. At the same time, you can condemn the comparatively human failings and immoralities that would presumably prevent us from ever getting there under our own steam. In another deliciously pithy needle into the ribs of convention, Watts described this program of enabling doctrinal sanctification as “the distance of excessive reverence.”

Household Saints:

I grew up in the orbit of a small pantheon of artisanal family deities who shared a near religious zeal for a supposedly correct way of thinking about and making things. The root stock of this creative family tree was my grandfather, a calligrapher, letter and relief carver and occasional sculptor in stone who also had an influential career as an art school professor and author of a pair of widely-circulated instructive volumes on his calligraphic craft. He was a tall man (six-foot four) and by all accounts smart, charismatic, reputedly quite funny, a fiercely opinionated aesthetic theorist and not a little bit of an eccentric. He was also conveniently dead by the time I came along, having expired in his mid-fifties, just four years before I was born and while all three of his sons were still mostly in their impressionable teens.

That tragically early exit served to simultaneously conceal my grandfather’s actual human frailties from my whole generation, none of whom had personally known him, and also to arrest his sons understanding of who their father was at a phase of life when, the younger two at least, had not yet had the opportunity to do the mature work of discovering that our parents are mere humans like ourselves. In short, he was a hard act to follow and one who was far too conveniently fit for either sanctification or dismissal, which both my dad and his younger brother seem alternately to have done with him. But follow him they did, and quite impressively so, however differently they bent their own considerable gifts and characters to the job. Both became well-known and highly respected artisans in their own right, well on a par with, and eventually even eclipsing their father’s accomplishments and renown. The eldest son, who perhaps had a clearer view of the actual man, eschewed his father’s artisanal life altogether and instead became a sort of adventurer and professional aesthete.

All three brothers were also natural-born teachers, with a collectively stored compendia of both practical and esoteric knowledge about the physical world, as well as a wide range of physical things made by man. They too were funny, lively, engaged and energetic raconteurs and demonstrators of their considerable toolkits of skills and knowledge. Being the first child born into my generation, and initially a bit of an only child — at least insofar as it was some time before I had anybody other than the grownups in our family to relate-to — I took a great interest in each of them. Right out the gate I put myself in as close and attentive a proximity to all three of those men as I could, spending long hours over many years hanging around and pestering them as well as briefly working professionally for each of them in turn. It was so much fun, and so interesting to learn about what they knew, what they could see and what they were able to do. So I greedily soaked all of that up, especially as it became clear, even in my pre-teen years, that my goal was also to make a life in the arts.

But one caveat to that engagement which I did cotton-onto quite early was that, for my dad especially, his father’s outsized and pedestalized ghost was a near insurmountable obstacle to any lasting happiness or satisfaction. It was probably because of this that I intuitively resisted the hierarchical totem-pole positioning that each of those brothers was in some way maneuvering to establish between themselves personally and also professionally in their august departed father’s wake. They correspondingly expected me to observe that ranking in turn as an appropriately lower figure on the pole. But for better or worse, I never did accept the assignment. To begin with, they were far too young to command that sort of awe — not so distant from me, nor from having been teenagers themselves — so I tended to regard them more as big brothers than revered elders. I loved them all, and sincerely admired their knowledge and skills, but their personalities were too much like my own young, flawed self to facilitate any sort of deification. As we all aged in concert, I got to see each of them go through the changes of life that I too would soon experience, and that also prevented any truly excessive reverence from creeping in.

On Excessive Artistic Reverence:

As my regular readers know well by now, in many of these essays I offer some criticism of the institutional and commercial art world. It may seem that I see the whole thing as rotten and irredeemable, or that the art it produces is uniformly deserving of our contempt. I don’t actually believe either of those things. Much as I loved and took an interest in my own family of makers and thinkers, I love art and artists, and also relish my connections to a whole cast of its enablers and supporters in both academia and the commercial and curatorial world of galleries, museums and foundations. Watts himself sincerely delighted in the creative ornamentation of all sorts of religious traditions, albeit with a sometimes jaundiced eye, and understood that at their best they could supportively contain the self-guided mystical explorations which he saw as the real business of spiritual seeking. I feel the same way about the whole wide world of art, with its kaleidoscopic array of differing ideas and movements within any one of which genuinely individual awakenings are always possible.

But if there is one undermining flaw in that world that I do consider worthy of rooting out and discarding, it would be in its near deification of certain individually celebrated artists by bestowing an excessively reverential view of them that effectively places them too far away from our self-guided understanding and our own potential to create equally worthy works. There is no other word in the lexicon of terms employed by the art world that irks me quite so much as the term GENIUS, which in its gross over-usage has come to signal an internalized oxymoronic irony, it being in itself such a profoundly stupid concept. It is, in fact, the defining label of excessive reverence, and in so many more spheres than just the arts. Our rapt, almost superstitious awe of so-called geniuses permeates our sciences, technology, politics and well nigh every other avenue of the human urge to learn and know and to be creative. It is a totally closed term, a veritable black box of impenetrably gifted causes and capacities that must be identified by an initiated priesthood, and which designation the rest of us are expected to worship as something so far above our primitive ken that we must perforce accept it as godly. For proof of this we need look no further than the current state of this country: art aside, our whole crumbling socio-political system has lately fallen into the hands of a tiny cabal of purported tech and finance geniuses who might just be the least intelligent actors to have ever historically mounted that stage.

Intelligence, conversely, is an open term. Intelligence is what all the most transcendent achievements of human effort are made from, be they the awakenings of religion, the discoveries of science, the leadership of nations, or simply in the most moving expressions of every sort of art. Intelligence is neither mysterious nor godly. It is the quintessential, if too often undervalued, capacity that we share as human beings. And despite that some people arrive in this life bestowed with a smidge more native intelligence than some others, we nevertheless all own the potential to gain and build greater access to it. Talent is a gift we are sometimes given. Intelligence is what figures out how best to use the talents we have. It just requires some hard, but also quite pleasurable work. And talent, or an inborn potential to do a certain thing well, is far more prevalent than it may seem. Everybody has some kind of natural facility, but developing the intelligence to identify and use it is so rare that many people never find it at all. For me, the great artistic exemplar of this principle was Paul Cezanne, who was not a conventionally artistically talented guy at all. But boy, did he ever have a talent for being Cezanne!

One of the big artistic revelations of my life came in my early thirties when I very briefly taught painting to a mixed class of high school students drawn from all four grades at a little prep school in Santa Fe. The kids in the class spanned those crucially formative years between fourteen and eighteen, and their various capacities charted a graph from less to more experienced and knowledgeable. Before that class, I had always assumed that artistic talent was an on/off switch; either it got switched on at birth or it didn’t. If it did, it looked a certain way, as in a natural ability to draw, to use a brush, or model clay or plaster with some graceful facility and even bravura. But what I found in that big bullpen of a studio was that every single one of those kids was able, quite naturally, to do at least one thing reasonably well. Perhaps one of them drew elegantly, but had no color sense. Another had the color, but simply couldn’t grasp composition, and so on. As I encountered this variety of aptitudes, I quickly shifted from seeking out the more conventionally talented kids, and began to look at how to encourage and nurture whatever capacity each of them actually had. For the most part, few of them had disappointed me by the end of that workshop. The binding glue that enabled all their most successful experiments were the partnered factors of that one natural, often previously undiscovered, capacity that we had to ferret out together, alongside a curious intelligence and a confidence in the belief that making something good was not beyond them — in other words, that it was not elevated to some unattainable height.

As I am sure must be evident by now, I am not a fan of hierarchy, but simply a devotee of real skill, of dedicated intelligence and of genuinely transporting creative awakenings and revelations on those rare occasions when they can be seen to have arrived for one fellow human or another. There are people in the world who make it to these sorts of plateaus and we need them to act as guides, helping to direct us to awakenings of our own. They are deserving of our admiration, but not of deification, which only serves to rule us out of any opportunity to get there ourselves. So I will close with a last quote from Mr. Watts:

“Do not fall prey to the distance of excessive reverence.”

I’ve been putting up these Substack essays about art and the artworld — and about my own life as a painter — for a couple of years now. The earliest ones go back about five years before that to some earlier posts on the Wordpress site, and all my writing here follows a run of essays and articles published in a variety of other periodicals, books and catalogues since about 2006.

But why do I do it?

The first answer is that I enjoy it. For some reason writing comes easily to me. It’s both pleasurable and satisfying to do something challenging, but which one doesn’t have to struggle too hard with, and much of that satisfaction flows from having done it myself without any help. I will say for the record here that I categorically refuse to use Artificial Intelligence for any part of this process because I cannot imagine wanting to surrender its inventions and explorations to anybody or anything else. I can barely tolerate being edited by another human being, so the notion of handing any of this work over to a robot is not just unthinkable, but anathema. Writing is too essential to the ongoing health and functionality of my own brain to forfeit any whit of my autonomy in its making.

Beyond this simple enjoyment, there are also specific motives and objectives embedded in all that I write. It feels worthwhile however, as more and more people have been reading these pieces, to say clearly just what those motives are before committing any more of my admittedly opinionated bloviations to this very public medium.

I turned sixty-six last March, which I find astonishing. I feel eternally twenty-five, at least mentally, but every morning the guy in the bathroom mirror insists on reminding me just how delusional that is. I’m not exactly an old man, but neither am I any longer a young one. That said, the ideas and observations offered here all flow out of my many years of making one sort or another of art, and also of finding ways to get it out in front of an audience and into the hands of collectors.

I started making a variety of things with my hands in childhood and got quite serious about oil painting in my early teens. I’ve been doing it ever since, and I think it fair to say that I am reasonably good at it by now. I’ve also been relatively successful professionally, at least insofar as a large part of my living has come from my painting over the past forty-odd years.

I’m not a famous artist though, and despite having always craved the admiration of peers and colleagues who might be in a position to know the difference between good and bad painting, I’ve never especially wanted to be more generally famous — at least not as a celebrated innovator or buzzy exemplar of the artworld zeitgeist. One does hope to be well enough known to facilitate a dependable livelihood, but that isn’t the same thing as being famous; it’s more akin to the kind of reputation an exceptionally skilled and knowledgeable surgeon or physicist might enjoy. I just happen to have built that sort of skill and expertise around art.

Coming from that realm of practical experience and knowledge, I write for two distinct audiences; one comprised of people like myself who either already have, or who intend in future to dedicate their whole lives to the making of the highest possible quality artistic stuff. My second intended audience are all those other people out in the world who are not themselves artists, but who look at, love, support and collect the things that artists make.

Addressed as my writing is to these two audiences, I am always working to articulate two core ideas that not only feel worthy of communication to people like that, but which are also essential to the life of art itself, and more so now than ever.

The first of these is that the artists and works which the artworld establishment (e.g. the art fair-crawling-consultancy, the big corporate galleries, the academically embedded theorists of aesthetics and the straggling remnants of our critical class) are telling us is the best, most culturally relevant and worthy of investment, will only rarely turn out historically to have been any of those things. A whole lot of it these days just isn’t all that good. So the folks who are telling us that it is must be either fully corrupted by, or otherwise beholden to the market those works were designed to serve, or else they’re just not very smart. It’s not that the work they champion isn’t good at all, or has no value whatsoever, but that it is neither as important nor as valuable as they would have us believe.

The second idea is that there is a rich and variable vein of truly worthy art out there waiting to be found in places where we aren’t necessarily looking: work that is often significantly better — i.e. more intelligently conceived and expertly made — than much of the stuff we are being instructed to revere. This, furthermore, is work we can find on our own without always resorting to the costly interlocutory agency of the commercial or institutional artworld. The people best positioned to guide us to such things, because they are the ones whose material experience is the basis of some actually objective expertise, are the artists themselves. I don’t mean by this that we should go to individual artists to validate or promote their own work, but that we should find those artists whose work we most admire and then find out who they most admire. If we do this consistently, over a long period of time, we stand a chance of developing a personal instrument of discernment that will obviate the need for any other sort of expert advice.

All well and good for me to say, you may argue, but who am I? Well, I’m a person who knows how to make the kinds of things he’s generally talking about and who gained that knowledge in equal parts by actually making artistic things on the one hand, and on the other through decades of direct critical examination a whole lot of the things that other artists have made. Does your art fair consultant have that kind of deeply-absorbed practical skill or knowledge? Highly unlikely. Do the auctioneers, gallerists or the curators have it? Well, a very few do, and some are quite good at seeing real quality when it exists. I have several curator friends who are absolutely exceptional, and not only because they have collected my own work; I even admire them when they don’t. But there are a great many others who don’t know much more than what their customers will buy or what their institutions will support.

That’s not discernment; that’s gatekeeping and marketing.

Perhaps it seems that I think all contemporary art is garbage. Not at all. I find a lot of it to be very good indeed, and even quite wonderful. In many ways we are living in an unusually lush artistic age. There are so many terrific painters working today especially, and I follow and seek them out with gusto. My point is that the top-end, “blue-chip” market on which so much of our attention is commanded by the artworld to be focused relies on the projection of an aura of greatness onto the products it is most interested to peddle to us. But the reality is that there is very little truly great art in play at that level. Yes, there are some very fine things to be found there. But much more of it is mediocre at best and some is just abject junk. The actually great stuff is as rare as the proverbial hen’s teeth. That’s why we call it great, because it’s so damn unusual.

A case in point:

Some years back I traveled from Santa Fe to Denver, Colorado to see an astonishing exhibition of some genuinely great art which drove the rarity of that level of achievement home to me in a way that only a few other similar experiences have been able to do. I’ll get to that in a minute, but some personal background is needed first in order to properly flesh-out the experience I had there.

At about age twelve, I began experimenting with various kinds of printmaking. My dad had somewhere got hold of a cache of extra fine end-grain boxwood blocks for wood engraving. He also had his father’s engraving tools on the workbench in his home studio. Rather than shooing me away from these precious things, he encouraged me to try my hand at them. I made numerous, rather sloppy, early attempts at the medium, then moved on, over the next few years, to etching, whose tools I also had access to in an uncle’s nearby printmaking shop.

When I began to get into that process, that same uncle handed me a copy of a book titled Rembrandt, Experimental Etcher. I still have it in my studio today, dog-eared and stained with greasy black fingerprints. Those inked and printed drawings were a titanic revelation to me. At the time, I wanted nothing so much as to learn how to make something that good myself. I beavered away at it, off and on, through my late teens and into my first year at art school, but never put in the time it would have taken to really excel, much less master it. Painting soon overtook everything else and the printmaking gradually fell by the wayside.

I need to say here though that one of the assumptions that drove my early experiments with etching was the notion that, were I to apply myself with sufficient determination, I could eventually learn to draw and etch as well as Rembrandt himself. The exhibition at Denver, titled Rembrandt, Painter as Printmaker, finally disabused me, once and for all, of that childhood delusion of grandeur.

Walking through those museum galleries and looking, one by one, at the actual physical things that I had known so well and for so long in reproduction, had a stunning impact on all that I thought I knew, not only about that medium in particular, but also about visual art more generally. To sum it up, what I saw there was that no matter how I might try, there was no way that I could ever make something of that kind anywhere near so well, nor as brilliantly, as Rembrandt had. Furthermore, I am not aware of a single artist working today who exceeds, much less meets that level of artistic achievement. There are some very good ones to be sure. If I had to make a list of those who, for me at least, hover at the edges of that kind of quality it would include a tiny handful of names. Kerry James Marshall is one, Vija Celmins another, Rackstraw Downes, Stanley Lewis, Antonio Lopez Garcia and the Leipzig painters Neo Rauch and Matthias Weischer, among a handful of others would round it out. But the preponderance of celebrated art stars whom we are supposed to accept as members in that firmament today are not even close to being in the running, and the people working so hard to convince us that they are either don’t know enough to know the difference, are too high on their own product to see it, or are intentionally manufacturing an impression of importance in order to drive the market. I suspect that it is a bit of all three.

This is nothing new. The intellectual and commercial engines of the artworld have been sloppily pairing diamonds with paste for as long as there has been a critical and market apparatus dedicated to persuading rich people to buy artistic things. I am not only talking here about the more traditionally representational kinds of art into which Rembrandt fits, or whose contemporary descendants I have cited above. This is how the genuine material quality of also great abstract artists such as Mondrian, deKooning, Pollock or Rauschenburg, have been too often and too casually lumped together with a hack like Barnett Newman, or conceptually provocative but materially lesser makers such as Jasper Johns or Gerhardt Richter. And don’t get me started with the likes of Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons. Each of those were and are extraordinarily canny at facilitating the manufacture of their branded emanations. But that isn’t remotely the same thing as what we can see when we look carefully at Rembrandt’s Hundred Guilder Print or DeKooning’s Woman, Number One

It turns out to be relatively easy to get good at making a splash in the contemporary artworld; you just have to know how that game is played and be willing to play it. It is much, much harder to become exceptionally good at making art. Sometimes those two aims do coincide, but only rarely.

So, to return to where I started, why do I bother to write such outrageous things? Is it because I want to tear the system down or persuade you that all the stuff at the supposed top is wholesale crap? Not at all. First, I don’t actually believe that that is so. As I say often and have repeated again here, there is some very good art basking right there in the artworld limelight alongside its less worthy brethren. But being in the artworld limelight isn’t what makes it good. What I am saying is that there is actually some other work languishing offstage that is far better than the least worthy examples of the celebrated stuff. You can go out and find it for yourself. Get to know an artist whose work you like and ask them who to look at. You may even be able to buy some really good stuff for a tiny fraction of what the lousier fare at a place like Gagosian fetches. Don’t be so easily led. Learn to see for yourself. Like writing without AI, it’s a lot more fun and you will feel much smarter for doing it.

I wrote here last week about my friend Leah Grear’s artist residency and teaching studio in Lyme Connecticut. I visited her there last summer and was quite taken with the independent spirit of her whole enterprise. A year earlier, I had made a similar stop, also in Connecticut, to visit a different pair of creative friends: Edgar (“Gar”) Waterman and his wife Thea Buxbaum, who have also built a space in which artistic things can happen. Gar is a sculptor and Thea, a gifted community organizer and impresario of urban renewal, has been especially active in creating and promoting a lively artistic enclave in the Westville neighborhood of New Haven, where she founded and ran an organization called Arts Lofts West, (ArLoW). Gar is a maker of things, Thea a creator of the necessary places in which such things can be made.

In 1996, the couple purchased a derelict warehouse in Westville, the former property of a construction company, at the time overgrown and home to a squatting menagerie of wildlife and drug addicts. The building had been taken by eminent domain by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1980s when they were brought in to build a retaining channel for a nearby river that had overflowed its banks, flooding the neighborhood. Once the waters had been successfully re-routed, ownership of the structure reverted to the city, which promptly forgot all about it, leaving it to languish through a decade of neglectful squalor in which the whole area was equally forsaken and down at the heels.

Scouting New Haven from Woonsocket, Rhode Island in search of a new beachhead into which their flag of artistic autonomy might be profitably staked, Thea and Gar found their way to Westville and its idle warehouse. After doing some research at city hall they began negotiating with the powers that be to buy it. This went on for a couple of years. They were put over the top at last by a friendly alderman who, after discovering serious problems with the still-live electrical wiring in the warehouse helped persuade the city fathers that the decrepit, imminently-combustible pile was a sufficient liability that New Haven would best be rid of it. The couple offered a dollar for the purchase and the building, along with its resident fauna and other myriad challenges, was at last theirs.

In this partnership, Gar and Thea exemplify the entwined and mutually reinforcing roles out of which any artistic life, along with the objects and ideas of its labor, can most fruitfully grow. We artists love to think of ourselves as lone wolves, but we would be nowhere, and could not in fact exist at all, without the people who make the supportive spaces — be they material, moral or financial — that contain, enable and protect our creative lives. It’s always a team effort, no matter what anybody might tell you to the contrary.

A Sculptor of the Life Aquatic

When I was a boy in the 1960s, living at the edge of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay, there was a mania in the air for every aspect of underwater exploration. My favorite TV show at the time was Sea Hunt, featuring a young Lloyd Bridges as Mike Nelson, a crustily charismatic scuba diver who had implausible weekly adventures in the deep. Jacques Cousteau was also then at the height of his international popularity, and The National Geographic published several glossy color photo essays of outlandish undersea diving bells, submarines and possible habitats for human life below the waves, all bulbously futuristic and usually painted bright yellow for some reason. The toys I coveted most in 1965 and 66 were Hasbro’s GI Joe Deep Sea Diver and their wet-suited Scuba Man with propeller-driven Sea Sled. This was also the era of the epic underwater fight scene in the James Bond film Thunderball. Enamored of all these trends, I and my older cousins across the bay were all avid “skin divers”, regularly donning masks and fins every summer (they kitted out far more impressively in half-wetsuits and even armed with spearguns) to scavenge the underwater kelp beds, small caves and canyons of the rocky New England coast.

Gar Waterman, a few years older than I, didn’t have to fantasize or play-act this undersea ideal however because he lived it with a father who was a real-life Mike Nelson and Jacques Cousteau rolled into one. Stan Waterman was a professional diver and underwater cinematographer who worked on famous films of the period; most notably on Blue Water, White Death, for which he was a co-creator and principal cameraman. He also advised on the Hollywood production of his friend Peter Benchley’s novel The Deep. Beside those more noteworthy assignments he also had an incredibly long life of diving, working and filming underwater all over the world and his kids were right there with him for much of it.

I write a lot, often quite critically, about the cannily engineered styles and contents of professionalized contemporary art. But for the great majority of artists who don’t live in, nor are even angling for position within that sort of celebratory limelight, the stuff comes from different places. For many of us it is mostly born from a tricky dialogue between our internalized historical memory (which we tell ourselves that we understand, though we really don’t) and the equally incomprehensible present. These conversations set up the alchemical reactions that feed a kind of imagery better understood intuitively, by both maker and viewer, than analytically. They are the material repositories of our ever hopeful, but frequently vain efforts to grasp what our lives in this world are truly all about.

To put it as simply as possible, Gar spent his childhood in the water, and so he makes art out of his memories of the living things from the sea that populated that world which formed him. Some of these creatures are winsomely familiar; others are so abstract and even off-putting as to be a little frightening, despite the lovingly assembled and polished contours and colors of the carved stone that is his medium (see the image at the top of this page).

I saw quite a bit of Gar’s art when I visited his compound in 2024 and liked pretty much all of it. But the one piece that stole my heart was, and remains, his speckled squid, which was still on the bench in his workshop that day awaiting some finishing flourishes.

Part of what drew me to that piece was the semi-accidental nature of its manufacture. While drilling holes in a large block of pale green Persian Onyx preparatory to splitting off a smaller blank for the squid, he drilled a little too deep and left a resulting circular bore into what would later become the squid’s body. Despite that we may initially despair at such accidental intrusions into a work in progress, and even at that point throw the whole thing into the trash, they can also sometimes be the whole fulcrum upon which a satisfying resolution turns. A “mistake” demands engagement with the mess it has caused, enabling a force larger than the maker’s intention or ego to breathe some problematic life into what might otherwise have been a too-pat outcome. There is a famous story of a Zen Monk painter who would dip his long hair in Sumi ink, then wave it across his ground as the start for a new painting. Whatever chaos the inked hair created on the paper or silk would then point the direction in which the monk would then pursue a new landscape. What Gar’s bore-hole demanded of his evolving model of the squid was the abandonment of its, perhaps intended, uniform sleekness through the introduction of a spot on its hide, which he fashioned by inlaying a disk of black Belgian marble into the perfectly circular bore.

But then, who ever heard of a squid with one spot? (I’ve never heard of a squid with any spots at all, or certainly not one with the perfectly circular polka-dots of a Christian Dior and Yayoi Kusama collaboration). So Gar drilled more holes all over the creature and filled them all with that black marble. Once they were fared-in flush to the body and polished out, this already alien and usually rather menacing cephalopod became strangely both endearing and comical while yet serious and imposing. But then Gar himself is all of these things, so there you have it. An accidental intrusion into a planned work, inspired by personal history, found a surprising and unintentional way to reveal the maker.

That to me is the very best sort of art, and it doesn’t find us in the rarified white box of the tony gallery with its snooty gallerina scowling behind a chromed desk, but in the raucous disorder of our actual lives, out of which raw material it is made.

Substack has become such a rich resource for the sharing of practical experience. I know this has happened in other forums and in other ways in the past, but there is something about the immediacy of this medium that encourages the expressing and working out of ideas extemporaneously, even conversationally, as opposed to the more polished treatises of conventional publishing. But where social media also does this in the too often reactive and even hostile opining of the short Twitter, Facebook or Instagram Threads post, there is a sort of Goldilocks just-rightness to the breadth and style of the Substack article. This allows for an elegant balance of both deliberation and freshness and, at least so far, also in the cordiality and generosity of the exchanges that happen here. I see this in all the different topics tackled on this platform, but especially in our conversations around art.

One of my favorite arts writers on Substack is the UK art dealer and advisor Greg Rook, whose Blackbird Rook page rarely fails to be both surprising and encouraging. Greg writes beautifully (better than I do, but then he’s English and they do teach them to do that over there). He also writes clearly and relatably about the most difficult challenges faced, not only by the collector in understanding and appreciating artistic things, but also by us makers in our working lives. He has written several outstanding essays lately on this very subject. An especially helpful one from this past week is on the problem of how the artist can make a living and continue to practice at full throttle when the means for supporting that work do not come directly from it. As I said in a note while reposting that piece, it should be required reading for every young person in an arts college prior to receiving their degree. As good as it was though, it also made me reflect on my own ways of keeping the lights on through a now fifty-year career as a painter which, while in line with the solutions Greg posed, have also been somewhat different. He spoke of looking for avenues of employment in a variety of professional arts-related fields, organizations and institutions. I responded in a direct email that another useful path to self-support is in the trades, and at his urging I now offer that response more publicly here:

An artist’s living needn’t only be about finding a complimentary paying career path in the credentialed professional world. So many of the artists I’ve known, and some of them very well-known ones at that, have also been tradesmen and women. The trades only require an investment of practice and skill-building to give one a marketable tool for self-support. They don’t generally involve a costly education (or the resulting debt burden) nor a validating degree. And while one does have to navigate a variety of sometimes quite challenging clients, there are also few institutional gatekeepers or hierarchical bureaucracies barring the way to employment.

I started learning marketable trade skills in my early teens, variously as a carpenter’s, a graphic designer’s and a photographic printer’s assistant. I went on to alternately study and apprentice with masters in each of these fields throughout my early twenties and began practicing all three for hire in my late twenties and thirties. I can build a house or a dining table, do graphic, typographic and book design, and I regularly do high-end digital editions printing for older darkroom photographers who never learned those skills. In another traditionally fine arts-centered trade, I also worked for many years as a portrait painter for hire. I’ve become adept enough at all these things that after my late twenties I never had to go, hat in hand, to an employer in order to find work in any of them. I do them well and the people who need them done well tend to find me by word of mouth.

The trades have been looked down upon by the professional university-educated class for quite some time now, so much so that it seems not to occur to higher-educated people that they are a remotely worthy path for the serious or intelligent. In fact, they can be a perfect path for the artist, because so many of the skills required in a trade are so fundamentally creative and even artistic. They are also essentially entrepreneurial callings in precisely the way that an artist needs to be, in that you have to take that skill, go out on the streets, and drum up your own business.

One final advantage of the trades that shouldn’t be underestimated is that they put you in direct contact with a wider and deeper socio-economic spectrum of the populace — from the working class of your fellow tradespeople all the way up to the wealthy clients that hire us to do these sorts of refined work. It makes us more conscious of the experiences, knowledge and actual sensitivity of people to whom the educated classes too often dismiss or condescend, while also able to mix and converse comfortably with all the other tiers of caste, be they overtly acknowledged or more subtly concealed. I suspect that one of the reasons why my paintings have always made me a good bit of my living is that I have always made things that intelligent people from any class or background can understand and relate to. I am not sure I would have been able to do that if I hadn’t spent a lifetime rolling up my sleeves and working right alongside them.

Like Mr. Rook, I too have long felt that our art schools need to make their students aware of the importance of figuring these things out early. A comprehensive acquaintance with the trades would be a useful component of any such program.

I gripe a lot about the Art World. It deserves to be griped about, but the complaints do wear thin, even for me. The other side of all that is the far more satisfying world of art and of creative people, many who are not at all a part of that big commercial machine, in which I actually move, live and work. So maybe it’s time to take a break from those critical fulminations and just talk about some of these good folks.

Last summer, our youngest son, Fisher, graduated from a small liberal arts college in central Illinois called Knox. Knox was founded by abolitionists in 1837 and has carried on ever since as a little island of liberalism smack in the middle of the conservative, corn-growing heartland of the American Midwest. Despite our dark times, the graduation was sunny and hopeful. Fish (a bass-playing philosophy major) and his band-mates put on some performances in the days leading up to the ceremony, and Illinois’ Governor, JB Pritzker, came on the day to deliver a rousing commencement address. He started off remarking that he could have done the speech at some fancy Ivy-League university on one of the coasts, but that this felt a more fitting spot given that so many ordinary middle class Americans — like many of the kids getting their degrees that day in so called “fly-over country”— are struggling so hard to get by while the top tier catered-to in those loftier bastions of the coastal elite are running away with all the spoils. He also cited the college’s cred as a bastion of diversity in this divisively bigoted MAGA age by pointing out that in 1858, Knox, and indeed the very spot from which he delivered his speech, had been the site of one of the most important of the Lincoln/Douglas debates, in which Abraham Lincoln clearly articulated the evils of slavery for the first time.

After graduation, Fish and I climbed aboard my big red cargo van for a road-trip pilgrimage to the East coast, where I had grown-up and where he was born, to visit family and friends and pick up an etching press from another artist pal in New England. As such trips often do, it turned into a base-touching tour across the far-flung community of artist friends and colleagues that I’ve been lucky to build and tap-into throughout my own career. Most of these, like myself, are people who make their way in the wider world of art and artists outside the beltway of the far narrower Art World I so often grumble about here.

We spent a week in Rhode Island visiting family, then began to wend our way back through New England, making stops with various artist friends on our way to pick up the press in western Massachusetts before heading home to New Mexico. In Connecticut, we paid a morning visit to an organic farm in Lyme where Leah Grear has built an artist-in-residence compound and teaching workshop called Sterling City Studio. This is a place where artists can come to stay for some concentrated creative time, as well as a teaching facility where students both young and old can be treated to some direct, hands-on tutoring in a variety of disciplines.

Leah comes from another creative Rhode Island family much like mine. Her father Malcolm was a friend and colleague of my dad’s and a fine graphic designer who taught at the Rhode Island School of Design. My grandfather also taught lettering and design there in the 1940s and Leah and I both studied painting and printmaking at RISD in the ‘80s, albeit about six years apart. She is a gifted and skilled artist who makes beautiful things out of pretty much any material she happens to pick up.

Like her father, Leah has also had a long career as an arts educator. Her project in Connecticut — a converted barn with a long ground floor of ceramics and printmaking workrooms, and a loft above that is divided into a residence apartment at one end and a drawing and painting studio at the other — combines both her vocations in a single container. This is not a museum, a gallery, or any other sort of curated and therefore precious showcase of rarified things to be awed or impressed by. It is a relatable, comfortably inviting space where the real work of art happens and where the products of that labor inhabit the space, not as rarities on display, but as the natural accoutrements of a thoughtful life. The whole place beckons us in with an implied promise that art is not some remotely incomprehensible mystery, but an accessible process ready for engagement. It is also a work of art in its own right: an architectural manifestation of the refined but also practical and fully functional aesthetic consciousness that people who grow up in creative households can sometimes absorb by osmosis before ever beginning their official schooling.

I often wonder if I shouldn’t write a stand-alone essay on the informal apprenticeships that sometimes occur across multiple generations within artistic families like ours. Where a university arts program offers a focused academic survey of what art is all about, growing up, year after year, around people who make the stuff every day can result in a different but no less intensive form of training. And in a sense, it is a deeper training, at least insofar as it models the complex compromises, labors, conflicts and commitments that an artistic life actually entails. To be born into a world like that and to be formed by it, is a kind of lottery ticket not unlike the other sorts of gifts of privilege that can give us a leg up in life. But unlike physical beauty, exceptional talent or physical strength (all of which are raw and abstract endowments) being raised in a world of creative people is like being handed a box of tools that you have already been shown how to use before ever venturing out on your own. What is to me so unique and valuable about Leah’s project is that she has created a place explicitly designed to pass those tools on to others. Historically, this is what some of our best, and sadly now too often shuttered small schools for the arts and humanities always were — places like Black Mountain, Penland, Goddard College, the Oregon College of Art and Craft, Marlboro College, and the Woodstock Country School where I went in my teens. These were intimate environments populated by small groups of teachers and students who operated much as a family does, and where the learning was less academically codified than organically catalyzed. They were working environments where intellectual and practical experimentation was encouraged and where Socratic dialogues prevailed, rather than academic institutions designed to indoctrinate and credential a professional class.

We are under such a relentless siege today by the rise of artificial intelligence and an enabling socio-economic model that discards every other measure of human value for the many, in favor of the most extractive, wealth-concentrating machinations of commerce for the few. It’s bad enough that this is happening at all, but the purveyors of this dystopian vision add daily insult to injury by lecturing down to us that this is as it should be, that the changes which benefit them and hurt the rest of us are the inevitable and divine right of the power and wealth they have amassed for themselves.

It can feel so satisfying to point at these villains and blame them for everything, but it is important to see just how and to what extent we enabled their rise over the past half century through an almost superstitious worship of business-centered professionalism. I have long despaired at the overtaking of art by business, but I began to see this problem in the wider culture as well when, as young father in the early 2000s, I served for a time on a public school board in a little rural New England town. All the hardest fights we had on that board, as we attempted to forestall the closing of a group of small neighborhood schools to make way for a big centralized facility, had to do with business. We were told again and again by the boosters and would be developers of that consolidation that the business model was the smartest, most efficient model for education in our age; that we should run our schools like a corporation under a superintendent headhunted from another state who proudly boasted of his CEO-like skills. In the end, we fired the CEO, hired a former classroom teacher from within our own local ranks to take his place and preserved about half of the small schools in their original neighborhoods, while only slightly expanding them. In the era of George W Bush’s Orwellian “No Child Left Behind” policies (on the board we called it Every Child Left Behind) this was an admittedly small but nonetheless satisfying victory.

The socio-economic and political mess we are living through today can feel alarmingly sudden and unprecedented, but as that story illustrates, it has actually been building for decades. Since the early 1980s that more intimately-engaging style of education which my generation had access to in those small liberal arts schools I listed above (and which I was fighting to preserve for my own kids on that public school board) have been systematically sidelined, bled of resources and shut down one after another. In that same era, the independent, one-owner galleries that nurtured and built so many worthy artistic careers between the 1950s and ‘90s have also been gradually disappearing, to be replaced by big international art fairs and a handful of corporate mega dealers like Zwirner, and Gagosian and Pace.

Art can certainly hold up a mirror to the injustices of our culture, and I suppose it should do that where and when it can. There are, however, other things it does equally well and possibly even better. But the life of art — how its makers operate and exist in the world — can also be a beacon of fresh thinking about possibly better ways to do things. Running public elementary schools like a corporation was never a good idea for the life of learning, any more than it was a good idea for the life of art to create and sell over-hyped and correspondingly overpriced art-like commodities in corporate galleries and auction houses. It may be that the key in this moment is not to see art (nor teach it) as a pathway to professional success or public acclaim, but as a smaller-scale, more sustainable, personally rewarding and locally responsive way to live. The late anthropologist and author David Graeber wrote and spoke often about our need to reclaim the best original ideals of communism; not of the state-enforced socialist Soviet or Maoist kind, nor even of the private property-denying Marxist variety, but of its earliest image of a society built on the direct and equitable exchange of abilities and skills between people who actually know, care about and wish to support one-another “from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs.”

Leah Grear and I got to spend our childhoods in worlds that worked that way, so we come naturally enough to the belief that it is still possible to build something like that, even in an age that wants to drown all such visions in the snake oil of capitalized technological determinism. Luckily for all of us, she has decided to make a place where that can happen, not only for herself, but for anybody else who is willing to knock on her door.

Since I had made a deliberate decision not to climb aboard the gimmicky trends dominating the downtown galleries in Manhattan in my post-college years, I started to look more intently at the immediate predecessors to, as well as contemporary practitioners of a kind of picture-making that felt more compatible with my own sensibilities and aesthetics. There were many mature artists like that whose work was shown in galleries and museums in New York, and who were therefore incorporated into its world of art, even as the emerging Art World of younger, trendier celebrities and the critical and curatorial scene that supported them was beginning to look down its collective nose at all such things.

I have always had a “painterly” approach, meaning that my drawing with the material is evident through a relatively gestural sort of brushwork. There have been periods when I’ve been diverted into a more formally-rendered realism, but a clearly hand-painted surface is present in all that I do. Beginning in my mid-teens, I naturally gravitated to San Francisco Bay Area figurative painters like David Park and Richard Diebenkorn, who were quite modern but had also comfortably reclaimed representation in a period that was otherwise hostile to it. Some East Coast realists were also getting attention in my immediate post-college years, especially the portraitist Alice Neel, who was “discovered” by the Art World in the 1980s after living and painting in impoverished obscurity right there in New York through most of her long working life. A retrospective at the Whitney museum in 1984 for the New England figurative and landscape painter Fairfield Porter also felt encouraging. Like the work of the Bay Area Painters, both these artists made representational pictures that were couched in abstract gestures and sensibilities. I also liked Neil Welliver and Rackstraw Downes, two accomplished and quite modern landscape painters who were both at work in those years.

Looking further back, all the things I liked flowed directly out of a long line of quietly modern, yet also art-historically sophisticated British and European painting, including the work of Lucian Freud, Stanley Spencer, Balthus, André Derain, Giorgio Morandi and on back to Bonnard and Vuillard before the war. Another triumvirate, who particularly resonated with my own family history in the coastal northeast, were Rockwell Kent, George Bellows and Edward Hopper, all of them born in 1882 and all students together at the Chase School in New York in the early 1900s. Another who was especially influential in my Brooklyn years was Charles Burchfield whose retrospective of darkly comic midwestern Depression-era paintings was held at the Metropolitan museum, also in 1984. That work resonated very much with the already cartoonish cityscapes I was drawing and painting at the time.

I tried throughout my twenties to find a gallery in New York that would show my pictures, dutifully shopping my sleeves of slides around the town, knocking on all the doors that felt as if they might open up to me, but I had no luck. I was always too much behind the zeitgeist of my own generation — there being no Eric Fischl-like suburban ennui or transgressive irony in my work, nor any of the raw, punky, expressionism then in vogue among painters like Susan Rothenberg, Jean-Michel Basquiat or Julian Schnabel, who were all hot stuff in the downtown galleries at the time. I also wasn’t yet polished enough to show alongside the elders whose work I had more in common with. Besides all that, I had no clearly marketable signature style because rather than engineer a market ready and brand-worthy “look”, I was still in search of a kind of mastery that much of that sort of work lacked (as did mine) but which I stubbornly persisted in believing was worthy of pursuit.

When I was living in Brooklyn after dropping out of art school, I paid the bills as an apprentice cabinetmaker and went on throughout that decade to make part of my living in the building and carpentry trades. But I also managed somehow to spend about a half of my time in the studio painting. Since the work wasn’t selling in galleries, and I wasn’t embarking on a salaried career as a teacher, I had to figure out how to make enough of my living from my art, outside the gallery system, to bankroll the time it took to make it. I got a little bit of financial help in those years from my grandmother and one of her sisters; enough at any rate to fund a month or two of studio time here and there. Family members and friends also frequently bought things from me. Early on, I also began to paint on commission. This could mean making a picture to order for whose production the client felt my style and abilities were fit, or else just finding someone willing to pay me to paint the sorts of pictures I was already predisposed to paint. Since there was no gallery brokering these projects, my initial sales depended on a kind of hustling outreach to create the interest and the relationships from which such transactions might grow. As often as not, I would find somebody who already liked the kinds of pictures I was making and simply propose making one specially for them. In this way, I found commissions for an assortment of coastal scenes, house portraits and one large and ambitious architectural landscape with figures in it for a house my architect studio-mate was designing for his parents in rural Pennsylvania. I also began in my late twenties and early thirties to paint portraits for hire, completing about forty of those across a ten-year span. These were mostly made for private clients, but later also for universities on both coasts, for whom I painted several official portraits of college Deans.

Very gradually, my skills improved and my prices correspondingly rose. I had my first solo gallery show at twenty-six in a beautiful, light-filled room over a frame shop in my hometown of Newport, Rhode Island. A handful of paintings and drawings were purchased there by family members, friends and former commission clients. But I also quickly saw — by the sorts of pictures that sold well, as opposed to those that didn’t — that the Northeast wasn’t going to be conducive to building a career that could support me financially while also allowing the mental space to make meaningful, and not merely decoratively appeasing (i.e. the boats and seagulls market) contemporary paintings. A year later, I filled a van with tools and paints and moved, sight-unseen, to the bustling art market city of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Santa Fe was then, and still remains, a lively outpost of what I referred to earlier as the world of art. Its trade has long revolved around the exhibition and sale of Native and Hispanic arts, both historical and contemporary, and of the works of renowned Modernists like Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin. There were a handful of strong, mid-century Southwestern realists there too, like the married couple of Peter Hurd and Henriette Wyeth, who lived and worked in a rural area southeast of Roswell. There were also masterful early twentieth-century regionalists such as W. Herbert “Buck” Dunton, Victor Higgins and the printmaker Gustave Baumann. From that top end, the market spiraled down into a morass of rankly commercial tourist art (the cowboys and coyotes market) running the gamut from skillfully made things to outright ineptitude, but all of it decoratively derivative of the higher quality original forms noted above. When I arrived in 1988, Santa Fe also had a small but growing camp of contemporary galleries and exhibition spaces looking to inject some more urban, international and avant-garde blood into its regional scene.

Scanning the whole complicated environment on my arrival, I staked out a place somewhere in the middle of everything by making paintings that looked superficially like traditional southwestern scenes but which, rather than mistily romanticizing the place, attempted to reflect the actual grittiness of the hardscrabble economy that proliferated just outside the carefully curated plazas of the tourist and interior decorator fantasy of the “Santa Fe Style”. In reality, New Mexico is a tough, edgy, impoverished and also whimsically irreverent place, with a sardonic native and working class insouciance that felt a lot like that of the industrial and fishing communities of coastal New England in which I had grown up and worked for years as a tradesman. It was therefore familiar and alien all at once and offered up both an interesting physical reality and a quirky cultural personality to try and capture.

Within a year of landing in Santa Fe, I began showing with one of its newer contemporary dealers. That started a trend which lasted off and on for the next thirty-five years, even as I drifted from one part of the country to another, spreading my work and imagery out into new and different markets and worlds on both coasts, as well as in a growing list of engagements in both urban and regional museums all over the US. Throughout that time I continued to make pictures that were relatively quiet and conventional, but in which I was always trying, in an anti-gratuitous way, to reflect some aspect of the modern realities I inhabited wherever I went. Because these pictures are relatable to most anyone who lives in the same I world do, they have tended to sell reasonably well, but even in those periods when we have done a brisk trade together, it has always been an uneasy alliance between myself and the galleries.

I’ve had a couple of dealers who became dear and longtime friends and collaborators, one in Rhode Island who I still work with, and another in San Francisco who died way too young about fourteen years ago. There have been others with whom I did well for a time, but later fell out of favor with for one reason or another. The main obstacles for me in this relationship have always been the twofold stumbling blocks of the entrepreneurial independence with which my career began (and which I have continued to insist on throughout) and also with my tendency to shift gears whenever a particular style or subject begins to feel too formulaic, or else when I feel that I have learned as much from it as I can. I have never yet become, nor do I expect to be an Art World artist, however much I’ve found welcome venues and collectors in places connected directly to it. My pictures will never appear in Art Forum nor will my persona be profiled in the pages of The New Yorker. I have no doubt that it must be satisfying to find that sort of acclaim, but there is also something about it that I can’t help suspecting might be challenging to live with. But that’s ok because despite having now stuck a wider arsenal of artisanal trades under my belt to help pay the mortgage and keep the lights on in the lean times, I have, since those first years on the Brooklyn waterfront, also made the majority, and sometimes even the whole of my living from selling my oil paintings.

As the mentor I quoted in an earlier essay once said, “I’m just a painter.” That to me is a pretty satisfying thing to be. And judging by the fact that I own very few of the many pictures I’ve made over the course of this journey, those things must also be satisfying enough to the people who bought them that they felt ready to live with them then and continue to do so today.

And how can you beat that?

Several years ago, my brother Nick and I published an illustrated collection of ninety-one short, first-person essays (not “artist’s statements”!) by a diverse international community of makers of every imaginable kind. We began with three contemporary practitioners of very early art forms: an indigenous dancer, a poet, and a singer of English folksong. From there we went on out to stone carvers, chefs, calligraphers, book artists, blacksmiths, photographers, painters, sculptors, ceramicists and conceptualists, among various other disciplines. We ended the collection on a group of teachers, with the rationale that at their very best they are the makers, or at least the midwives, of human creativity itself.

The reason for asking all these people to write for us was to take a pulse, across the spectrum of different pursuits in which artistic creativity arises, to hear directly from its makers (rather than through some academic or critical interpreter) just how and why they create, and exactly where the art of their various disciplines resides. What we found, which was a little bit surprising but also quite heartening, was that almost all of them shared a feeling that art itself is a journey of discovery rather than design.

That crucial distinction was precisely what my skeptical intuition was reacting to, both as a young art student, and in the aftermath of having abandoned my school’s charted route into an Art World career. An old friend and erstwhile collector of my work shared some lyrics yesterday from a song in the 1959 Broadway musical Gypsy. The lyric was funny, but the title of the song itself —You gotta have a gimmick — goes right to the heart of this issue of design versus discovery. The art that inspired me to be a painter in my early teens, and which continued to fire my aspiration to become a good one right through college and out into the early days of my studio and gallery career, was all of the discovered kind. It was also mostly modern, by which I mean that it arose in those most freely exploratory epochs of the medium which are for me bookended at the beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by Francisco Goya and J.M.W. Turner, and at the other end by the modern American abstractionists, realists and figurative painters who had come up between the World Wars, many of whom were still alive and working as I was beginning my first serious study in the early 1970s. But the kind of art that began to dominate the conversation in my early twenties, for which my school was increasingly grooming its students, and on which today’s contemporary Art World and market are alike built, was all about front-loading a potentially marketable artistic identity by design — or, as in the analogy of the Gypsy song, of coming up with a successful artistic Gimmick.

Another aspect of the academy-to-marketplace mill of the contemporary Art World which is well-known to artists, but rarely remarked upon by the institutions grooming them for it, is that there are only ever a tiny handful of celebrity art stars who rise to the top. What then happens to all those thousands of other aspiring members of the club who tumble out with newly minted bachelors and masters of fine arts degrees in their hungry, and now deeply-indebted, little fists every year? How do they continue to make their art? Well, the simple answer is that a great many of them don’t. But even for those who do, the problem of a livelihood is rarely answered right away by whatever sorts of work they are able to continue making. Some become gallery personnel; some intern in another artist’s studio; others go to work in museums or other non-profit exhibition venues. Some even abandon the arts altogether and ferret-out creative pathways in more conventional occupations. But what a great many of them also do is to become art school teachers themselves. And because they never went out and actually built a career as a working artist, nor had a chance yet to put in the lifetime of labor required to accumulate the deeper skills and experience on which the real mastery of any kind of making is built (as opposed to the faux-mastery bestowed by the proverbial sheepskin of an advanced degree), all they can realistically offer their students is a regurgitation of the same ideological and aesthetic prejudices that their teachers had just recently handed down to them. In this way the whole enterprise of the market-partnered art education industrial complex becomes a giant, myopically self-referential feedback loop. The deep irony of so many of the most purportedly ground breaking young art stars of today is that they are in reality fundamentally academic. They aren’t radicals at all. They are the Bouguereaus and Gérômes of Trump’s grotesquely gilded Era.

As I began to work in my Brooklyn studio, and also weekly visited New York’s rich terrain of galleries and museums, the conjoined problem of how to discover my own most natural artistic voice, while also learning how to make things that other people might be willing to buy (so that I could continue to paint and hopefully keep getting better at it) took center stage. If I wasn’t going to invent a marketable gimmick for The Art World, which was largely centered right there in that city, I would have to find my livelihood somewhere and somehow else. For whatever reason, I also had no desire at the time to work in any sort of art-related business or institution, nor to become a college or even a high school art teacher. I wanted to make my living as a painter and it was that, admittedly stubborn, determination to do so which propelled me out into the alternative world of art.

Part Three of this series can be found here:

Between those Free School days and the launching of my college career, there elapsed about seven years of early artistic practice and study, both self-directed and working with several outstanding teachers, all of them college and university level arts instructors. This phase unfolded both in and out of actual schools and other extra-curricular programs, in the studios and shops of artist family members and some of their colleagues, for whom I worked as a paid apprentice from time to time. In this way, I found employment throughout my teenage summers as a graphic designer, a set painter on movies, a house painter and construction worker, a restorer of Colonial era headstones, and later as an assistant pressman in my uncle’s offset printing shop. By the time I got to college, I’d also graduated from a radically alternative co-ed boarding school in Vermont, founded in the 1940s by some Black Mountain School people, where art, literature and philosophy were all encouraged and sex, drugs and Rock and Roll reigned supreme. All this experience brought me to the realms of higher education as a slightly older and rather jaded freshman, as well as a more experienced maker than many of my classmates, including those a year or two ahead of me. I was in no sense a master of anything, mind you; other kids at the school were both more skilled and gifted, but I did know more or less know how to paint in oils, as well as to do a variety of printmaking techniques, from etching to monotype, aquatint and wood engraving. I was also already fully committed to painting, and so mostly ignored a worthy — but to me largely superfluous — Foundation Program that had been put in place to expose incoming freshmen to a variety of disciplinary paths prior to choosing a major. I already knew what I wanted to do with my life and consequently needed no help in figuring that one out.

I tell this story of my early studies because it bears on how I responded to the mindset and tastes prevailing among my teachers and fellow students on my arrival at art school. The most salient of which, though also the most challenging to describe, was an insistent, yet largely unspoken hierarchy of types of work considered in that milieu to be respectively acceptable or unacceptable to pursue. As a comparatively traditional, albeit Modernist-leaning representational oil painter, almost everything I liked to do, or hoped or try my hand at, was at that point — and in that particular program — rapidly becoming un-acceptable.

American art and design colleges, some that had, like mine, been founded originally as training schools for industrial artisans, didn’t begin to grow into what they are today until after the Second World War, when soldiers returning from Europe and the Pacific went back to college on the GI Bill in search of careers. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, the US was engaged in an aggressively imperial project of cultural exportation, for which the Modernist art that evolved here between the Great Depression and postwar eras — along with our cars, films and music — became a billboard to the rest of the world of our presumptively global economic dominance. It has even been revealed in recent years that the CIA engaged in a program in the Cold War years to promote modern American art for this very purpose, and likely saw its potential to do so after Jackson Pollock was made famous when the popular, glossy picture magazine LIFE published its notorious profile of the artist under the cheeky headline “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” What it was perhaps also suggesting, between the lines, was that Pollock might actually be the greatest living painter anywhere. Within a couple of years of that publication, the first fine arts masters degree program was planned at Harvard University, with others soon to follow across the country, many with a clear mission to inculcate a new generation of artists with the intellectually highfalutin gospel of this distinctly American avant-garde.

Despite the high-minded rhetoric of our Modernist movements at mid-century, the mission of their academic dissemination in the postwar years was neither a purely intellectual nor a solely aesthetic project, however much some of the artists and teachers involved may have hoped that it would be. It was also a fully commercial venture from the minute that LIFE commoditized Pollock and his work as fashionably branded emblems of our global domination. By the time I entered my school’s painting department in my sophomore year, the top college and university arts programs here in the US were in the process of transforming themselves from places where the history, methods and ideas of art were mainly taught as a template for subsequently independent artistic explorations, and into a sort of business school for the building of “important” and also potentially lucrative careers, like Pollock’s, in the marketplace then coming to be known as “The Art World”.

Since the mid 1980s, this system, along with all the preparatory arts programs across the country that now regularly feed it with fresh student blood, has increasingly mirrored the professional pipeline running from MBA programs at schools like Harvard, Wharton, and Columbia into urban financial centers in New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Not surprisingly, the products of this MFA track soon began to cater directly to the tastes, proclivities, values (and wallets) of the MBAs. The contemporary art market, which had gotten a big postwar jolt with Ab-Ex painters like Pollock, Frankenthaler, Rothko and DeKooning, then skyrocketed on both sides of the Atlantic through the second half of the century, fired by the easily-monetized celebrity of a parade of innovators in cyclically, and imitatively, “ground-breaking” artistic movements — from 1960s and 70s Pop Art and the Neo Expressionism of the 1980s, to the YBAs (Young British Artists) and Yale and Columbia-groomed MFA art stars of the ‘90s. It has long struck me that LIFE’s Pollock profile was ground zero for the whole rapidly metastasizing organism of international art fairs, giant corporate galleries and the ever-churning racket of top-tier auction houses like Sotheby’s, and Christies that we know today. Without that system, there would be no Jasper Johns, no Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Gerhardt Richter, Cecily Brown, Damian Hirst, Lisa Yuskevage, Dana Schutz or any number of other artists whose hyper-celebritized status has less to do with any intrinsic quality in the things they actually make — which certainly sometimes exists — than with the malleability of a cannily-conceived brand to a market trading on the fashionably fresh and seemingly momentous; all of it fed by a smokescreen of critically predictive art-historical gravitas to which its speculatively inflated dollar values are routinely pinned.

Not only did none of this appeal to me aesthetically as a young guy, but I also became convinced, right at the starting gate, that the whole scheme hung on a conforming acquiescence on the part of the starry-eyed students who were being primed in the classroom to hunger after their own little slices of Andy Warhol’s promised fifteen-minute pie of fame. All of this felt antithetical to the sincerely experimental spirit of creative non-conformity that prevailed through the early pre-war years of Modernism and from which, at least to me, the most moving and genuinely original art of our time has always grown.

I finally dropped out of art school at age twenty-two when my distaste for the whole enterprise at last outweighed any anticipated benefit from seeing the program though. I moved instead to New York, where I rented a raw industrial loft space on the Brooklyn waterfront with a former classmate, and began to look my future squarely in the eye. The problem was how to make the best art, meaning the most personally challenging, contemporarily conscious and skillfully executed work that I could (which had always been my goal) while doing so outside the Art World system described above, and which I had just rejected. Still very much a student, but no longer pursuing my studies in somebody else’s program, I began to look around for useful templates of a different way to think about and make my pictures, as well as a different path to turning that work to the problem of making a living, without which income I wouldn’t be able to continue to do it with the focus and persistence upon which all my aspirations depended.

Part Two of this series can be found here:

Given how often and how crankily I criticize the contemporary Art World, the reader may suspect that I do so out of some wistful nostalgia for a supposedly better time, or a superior artistic order to which I wish we could all return. Just to be absolutely clear, I don’t want anything of the kind, nor would I ever argue for it. I do often wish that our understanding of artistic things could be more freely defined for us by the people who actually make the stuff, but that is as much about a hoped-for future rebirth of that sort of creative autonomy and freedom than pining for some lost and idealized past. One of my first essays that was ever published — written for an online arts magazine about sixteen years ago — took on a reactionary Neo-Classicism that was on the rise at the time in the so-called “Atelier Movement.” In it, I argued that methodology and style (whether self-consciously traditional or conversely innovative) are not where the art happens. It flows instead from the quality of our engagement with whichever method or style we choose, and with how that labor can take us out to something bigger than our own egos, of which all such dogmatically methodological posturing is, to me at least, a mere extension.

My own aesthetics, and the specifically oil-painted type of picture-making that feel most natural to me, may have their roots in an art history that mostly took place between the end of the eighteenth century and the middle of the twentieth (from Goya and Turner to Bonnard, Porter and Neel), but I see extraordinary art in all the myriad forms that arose over the past century and a half and right up to the present day. So whether we are talking about the evocatively ghosted body imprints of Anna Mendieta, or Anselm Kiefer’s epically-scaled murals of post industrial dissolution and ennui, Jay deFeo’s astonishing The Rose, Jack Whitten’s always mobile experimental arc of painting and assemblage, Donald Judd’s distilled sculptural geometries, or Yoko Ono’s sweet, hopeful conceptual poems — all of this, and so many other things that artists have done in our time are worthy, inspiring, GREAT art in my book. But to me, the most lively and genuinely innovative recent artistic era was the one book-ended between the reigns of two dominant and respectively constraining Academy-to-Market systems — the first being the classically-oriented Parisian Academie and Salon, and the second in the reborn Postmodern academy of art colleges and universities, with its pipeline to international art fairs and mega galleries like Zwirner and Gagosian — whose institutional power has been gradually cemented here in the US between the Reagan and Trump eras.

The other astonishingly original creative arc that grew within that same interstitial early-twentieth century epoch of artistic freedom was that of Jazz music, which I increasingly see as one of the highest, most transcendent expressions of true art to which this country of ours has ever given birth, not to mention that it was a movement which inspired and set fire to so many other innovative Modernist forms within the painting that was being done it its time, from Piet Mondrian to Stuart Davis and so many others. The extraordinary subtlety, variety, intelligence and sophistication of Jazz and its “age” should burn to the ground every demeaning racist stereotype that white America has ever attempted to attach to the great black communities that have always formed one of the principally foundational cultural, productive and artistic pillars of every success we have ever achieved as a nation.

Even in the present day, despite the dominance of the market-driven Art World with which I find so much fault, there are so many outstanding artists working all across the globe, and often well outside the limelight of the academy and art fair buzz to which so much of our print and digital “ink” is devoted. Both elder and younger women especially are among my favorite painters working right now. My good friend and occasional fellow exhibitor, Sue McNally, is a powerfully original painter from my own age group and New England hometown who has made her way on her own terms, largely outside the mainstream market of galleries and fairs, by getting her work into museum collections and shows and in other non-profit venues all over the country. Anh Nguyen, a younger artist who lives and works in Australia, and who I randomly stumbled across on Instagram a few years back, is also one of my favorite contemporary painters, with a style that resonates with the same art historical lineage as my own, but whose pictures never fail to wake me up with their bright freshness and originality.

Art is in the things we make when we are working to the very pinnacle of our own aspirations, however those aspirations may be guided, shaped or defined. Where it does NOT live is in the inflated hammer price at an auction, the gushing runway-show patter of the art consultant class, or in the arcane critical languages and theories of the philosopher, the historian, the reviewer or the curator. We need those folks for sure, but they do not make the art! They are just the audience out in the darkened theater, watching the real stuff happen.

I wrote an article yesterday about the pretentiousness of the art world which included some critical remarks about the wealthy class that often supports and increasingly drives it. One of my longtime patrons took some offense at the piece, so it only feels fair to quickly follow up with a qualification of my intent in writing such things.

There is a cartoon from the 1980s that has hung for decades in all of my various studios across the country (I’d reproduce it here, except that to do so would probably risk a copyright infringement, so I’ll just have to describe it). In it, a neatly dressed man in a suit and tie faces a more disheveled figure with one hand held out and a paintbrush in the other. The painter is saying “can I have a grant so I can finish my art?” Behind him is a portrait on canvas of the suited man’s head with a label beneath it that reads “FUCKING ASSHO –”.

We aren’t supposed to talk about this uglier side of the sometimes uneasy relationship between artists and patrons, but that doesn’t mean that it is not real, or does not happen. The cartoon is funny because it happens all the time. I have kept it on my studio wall all these years, partly because it always makes me laugh, and partly to remind myself not to be like the artist in the drawing. I’ve been lucky to have some wonderful patrons, some of whom are relatively wealthy (though not egregiously so) and a great many others others who are, like me, people who live somewhere in the middle of the wide economic arc that used to exist in America between extreme wealth and extreme poverty — i.e., doctors, lawyers and other skilled professionals, or else folks with some family money, who have had the wherewithal to buy my pictures from time to time.

Except in those cases where one or another of the galleries I’ve worked with sold my paintings to strangers whose exact means were unknown to me, and who — in that more impersonal kind of transaction — had no desire to know or have any actual contact with me, I have always worked directly with collectors towards whom I bear no ill will or resentful inverted snobbery. They are all good folks whom I like and admire, for whose support I am grateful, and whose company and friendship I enjoy. I also far prefer these sorts of direct relationships to the distanced exchanges of the gallery trade. In fact, the only sales I ever knowingly made to very rich people whom I might not have liked, and would have preferred not to deal with had I known them, were when pieces went through a couple of different dealers to members of the tech elite. The most troubling of these happened when one of my Santa Fe galleries managed to sell a large painting to a very famous software billionaire. The gallerists were pleased to make that placement and called me into their offices to discuss it in hushed and reverent tones while placing before me a document of a sort I had never encountered before. It was a Non-Disclosure Agreement, which by signing prevented me from ever publicly uttering or otherwise publishing the identity of this oligarchic titan. The transaction felt wrong to me, and yet I went through with it because it meant a good sale for my dealers and some good money in my own pocket right when I was working hard to support a couple of growing boys, one of whom was about to go off to college. Still, the whole business of the NDA always rubbed me the wrong way and I regretted acquiescing to it before the ink was even dry. What it implied by its very nature was a presumption by the buyer that his identity and prestige were too socially important to be sullied by association with my lowly self in any way beyond his ability to take something that I had made and hang it in one of his many houses as some sort of a trophy of his wealth and importance. I imagine — though I do not know this for certain — that had I been a famous artworld celebrity like an Andy Warhol or a Jasper Johns, he’d have been happy enough to have me spread it about that he had bought one of my pictures, because some more prestige would have come his way as a result of that association. But as a comparative unknown, I was only to be seen and not “heard”.

Funnily enough I felt far dirtier, and far more compromised, in accepting that particular bit of patronage than I ever did in the years when a small-time drug dealer was regularly buying my pictures with bills pulled off of big rolls stashed in his voluminous sweat-pants pockets. The latter was a nice man who I personally liked and with whom I remained friendly even after he was caught, prosecuted and “did his time”. He sold recreational drugs to grownup partiers of his own social circle and was in that respect a far less objectionable character, to me at any rate, than the silicon valley tycoon with the NDA. I never had to sign an agreement with the drug dealer, we just trusted each-other to be discreet about our relationship. And in a way, we were actually both engaged in the very similar trades of selling different sorts of pleasures to people with more means than ourselves who otherwise hadn’t the ability to create those pleasures for themselves.

Money has always set up uneasy alliances and potentially fractious relationships across the divide between those who have it and those who don’t. There are a great many artists, especially nowadays, who make a pointed practice of using their work, like the painter in the cartoon, to critique the very class which supports them. I have never been as much interested in doing that as I have in simply making low-key portrayals of the world in which all these things unfold without offering much in the way of an opinion about it, except to say that I saw it. I leave it to others to decide for themselves how they feel about the world we live in. But I am not unaware of, nor indifferent to the growing hypocrisies and dysfunctions — or the many layers of corruption — that flow from the extraordinary wealth gap that has grown up in our country since I first began, in the early 1980s, to make things that rich people might like to buy. I do often write about this disparity of means because I see the negative influence that it has had, and is having, on the world of art, on its markets and on its makers most of all. The economic fundamentals of our now much benighted Republic have tipped too far and too unhealthily out of balance. Talking about that is both a valid and an important aspect of our cultural conversations around art. I don’t need to make paintings about it, but I do live and work in one tributary of the economy that is profoundly impacted by these realities. I therefore owe it to my own work, as well as to those who support it, to use these written musings to describe the problems I see as honestly and openly as possible.

What do I mean by this? What is so awful about the Art World? At the largest scale it is the desperate compulsion for self-aggrandizement which seems to drive the whole promulgatory apparatus of art’s instruction, production, critical interpretation, marketing and consumption. This mindset manifests for the maker in a near-neurotic need for every move one makes to appear more original, innovative and more suffused with an aura of exceptionalism than whatever every other artist happens to be doing at that moment, or even to have done in the past. But if I had to boil all of that down to one underlying flaw, it would be the absurd pretentiousness of the whole endeavor. And to which pretense its supposed cultural “importance”, the celebrity of its most lavishly praised makers, and the often absurd monetary valuations of their products, are all together pinned like so many brilliantly-hued butterflies in a dusty museum vitrine. The general public, to whatever extent it even figures into productions primarily targeted at the very rich, are expected to be awed by this projection of cultural and philosophical gravity, but without any correlating sense of a right to know why. An architect friend once summed up the effete arrogance of the art world when he interpreted some forgotten French aesthete’s attitude (uttered in a cartoon maître d’ voice) as: “You could not possibly comprehend all of this!”

One of the areas of my life in which the actually alienating nature of this pretense is especially clear is in my marriage. My wife, Cybele, with whom I have been partnered now for thirty-eight years, is one of the most modest, rational, sensible, down-to-earth and intelligent people I have ever encountered. She is also not an artist. An Ivy-League educated teacher and nurturer of both young and older minds, she spent most of her career working with teenagers from tough economic backgrounds in public middle and high schools, first in New Bedford, Massachussetts and later here in Santa Fe, where we have lived for the past twenty years. More recently, she has been training other teachers, in annual institutes all over the country, to do the same kind of work. Within that educational milieu, she has always been committed to making life better for people for whom the available ladders to such improvement are too often in scant supply. She appreciates and is supportive of my art, but mine is a very different and more self-consciously rarified realm from the very practical one she inhabits both professionally and personally, and nobody is better or more quickly able than she to bring home to me the narrowness of supposedly “high” art’s actual public appeal.

Cybele and I are happy and compatible partners. We are also quite different from one-another. We share the same politics, ethics and social values, but our commonalities tend to end there. We have a life and a network of friends that we share, but much of our day-to-day social activity also unfolds in the fully segregated realms of our respective careers. Within each of those opposed workaday worlds there are always some people in whose personalities neither of us can find much comfortable purchase or simpatico, though not in any particularly antagonistic or hostile way. For Cybele, these are my more self-consciously intellectual artistic friends, the ones who are always wanting to have intense, sometimes heated discussions about what is and is not worthy in one sort of art or another. Such debates are of no interest to her whatsoever. She even finds them somewhat ridiculous. There is an exchange between characters in the 1999 film The Thomas Crown Affair, which neatly sums up these feelings of hers. On discovering that an elaborate cat-and-mouse theft of a priceless Monet from the Metropolitan Museum has unfolded under his nose, the hard-boiled New York City detective in charge of the case says to the posh trans-Atlantic art insurance investigator who has become embroiled in the fiasco — “The week before I met you, I nailed two crooked real estate agents and a guy who was beating his kids to death, so if some Houdini wants to snatch a couple swirls of paint that are only important to some very silly rich people, I don’t really give a damn.”

The point is not that my wife is some aesthetically insensitive philistine, she has a fine aesthetic eye and has taught the history of art to her students for years; kids whose native and Hispanic New Mexico communities are awash in genuinely artistic things, but who have not been exposed to much the of the self-important art of the contemporary gallery and museum scene. While still teaching her young students in the classroom, she was always working to dispel the intimidation that such lofty cultural emanations can inflict, and bring them into a more relatable context so that, for example, Michelangelo’s Pieta could be recognized by them as belonging to the same iconography of Northern New Mexican Retablos and other sorts of Catholic liturgical art that they live with every day. She likes art very much. The point is that what leaves her cold are the big conversations about the stuff upon which the art world and its markets tend to turn.

I suppose that, like Cybele, I have always been more responsive to the directly communicative potentials of actually artistic things than to the ideological posturing and battling for position that seems always to accompany their public presentation. Having grown up in a family and community saturated with working artists of all sorts, as well as respected teachers in some of our most prestigious American art colleges and universities, I was exposed from an early age to both sides of this life — e.g., the pure sincerity of the creative impulse on the one hand, and the pretense of its projected cultural or academic importance on the other. Right from the beginning, the former aspect enchanted me, while I couldn’t help feeling deeply suspicious of the latter — a distrust that only grew when I entered art school in the late 1970s and ran headlong into a fog of rules and hierarchies as to which sorts of work it was or was not acceptable to make, or even to like. In those days, the code of artistic correctness was transitioning from the formerly prevailing superiority of pure abstraction to pretty much everything else, thence into Pop Art’s ironic appropriations of commercial culture, Minimalism’s austere reductions, and especially to the crudely child-like iconographies of a semi-representational Neo Expressionism then emergent on the downtown New York scene. I looked at, studied and came to understand all of these forms intimately, admiring them well enough when they felt worthy of that admiration. But as a reasonably straightforward maker of pictures, none of it felt like the right path for me, and even less so as a devotee and aspiring master of the material alchemy of oil paint itself, for this was the era when any interest in mastering the medium was giving way to a mastery of ideas for which such material underpinnings were ancillary at best, and at worst completely antithetical.

I have loved to make pictures for as long as I have been a remotely conscious being, and have been a dedicated scholar of the physical and formal languages and methods of my own discipline throughout my working life. Materially, I am a very good painter, which may or may not have anything to do with being a good artist. The first I can say proudly and with certainty; the second is frankly none of my business. I mostly have no idea if I am a good artist or not.

This last is a subtle but an important point. Once, when I returned in middle age to complete an art school degree I had abandoned as a younger man, I overheard one my professors say of my work to a class of much younger undergraduates “You need to look at this guy, because he is able to do things with oil paint that people spend their entire lives trying and failing to learn how to do.” A lovely compliment to be sure, but the person who said those nice things about my skill was actually never a fan of my art, which he saw as a lesser kind for the very reason of my perennial non-compliance to the reigning art world ethos. I was just making un-ironic pictures of ordinary scenes from my own relatively privileged life and that was never quite enough for him. To merit the title of Art with a capital A, my pictures needed to “say something” either culturally critical or otherwise challenging to the comfort or ideological complacency of the viewer — though, it never seemed to occur to him that what I was doing was actually a direct and intentional challenge to his own ideological complacency.

If I had to identify some overarching aesthetic tradition from which my work descends, it would reside in the now thoroughly un-hip works made by a relatively small generational cohort of representational painters on either side of the Atlantic, but especially here in the US, in the decades between our Civil War and the Great Depression: specifically, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet in France, and Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, George Bellows and Edward Hopper in the American Northeast. There are a great many other painters who came both before and after that era and right up to the present day whose works I admire no less, and some I even regard as greater artists than these. Many of these have also influenced my own work. But the painters I’ve named are the ones whose way of looking at the world, as well as their methods of rendering that vision in this very unique material of oil paint, are most naturally kindred to my own. They are also, and perhaps more importantly for this essay, the last generation of painters who made pictures in this direct way prior to the overtaking of all art by the aggressively ideological intellectualism of the Modernist Avant-Garde which arose in revolt against an academy system that held sway in France towards the end of the nineteenth century. Those same revolutionary Avant-Gardist values were then codified and institutionalized in a resurgent academy system here in the US in the decades after the Second World War — the very system, with all its tributary curatorial, critical and commercial outlets, which we now think of as The Art World. For a painter like me, what makes that world awful (despite that it also contains much that I care a great deal about) is how myopically exclusionary, dismissive and discouraging it can be to any maker who does not wholeheartedly leap aboard the bandwagon of whichever ethos happens to be driving it at any given epochal moment.

Towards the end of his life, the painter Peter Devine — my most influential mentor and a dear friend of forty-odd years — ceased any longer to think of, or at least to describe himself, as an artist at all. He said to me shortly before he passed, too young, at seventy-seven, “Chris, I’m not sure I even know what an artist is anymore; I’m just a painter.” This may smack of the disappointment of a maker whose work was deemed insufficiently refined by the gatekeeping cognoscenti, but Peter was not an unsophisticated man. He was one of the most erudite, learned, and least judgmental scholars of the history of art, including of all its most modern and contemporary permutations, that I have ever met. What he recognized in his final days was that as the Art World turned away from a willingness, or even an ability to see the value — and in fact the tremendous sophistication — in what he liked best to do (which was to make the finest, most thoughtful and original pictures he could of the world around him) he nevertheless persisted in the belief that the calling to do so remained supremely intelligent, meaningful and worthwhile.

It is so risky to look back on an earlier age and project our present day longings, presumptions or beliefs onto it as if they, rather than its own inevitably unknowable original nature, represent some formerly prevailing truth about the best way to be human and live in the world. And yet we do this all the time, I suppose we do so because it offers us the illusion of a satisfying resolution to the most uncomfortably unresolvable shortcomings of the always messy here and now. “Things were better in the old days than they are today, so surely we should go back there!” This sort of reactionary fantasizing about a more perfect past is just the mirrored opposite of our partnered fantasies about perfectly utopian futures. Both are completely unmoored from reality which, if we can find no more dependable definition for it, exists nowhere else but in the inconveniently incomprehensible present, where it perennially defies any sort of pat explanation or discernable order.

Throughout my career, I have stubbornly continued to be what, for lack of a more intelligent term, is referred to as a “traditional” painter. All that really means is that whether in my representational or abstract work — and truthfully, all of my paintings straddle both realms — my work is clearly related to and descended from the things that other painters made before me. That doesn’t mean though that I am either imitating what they did, or attempting to live in their past. Because I am persuaded of the present’s eternal and unknowable reality, I’m also ready to see the artistic emanations of the past, not as products of some distant, different, dead or anachronistic sphere, but as coming from a place that was equally real, messy and unknowable to this one. Earlier, and even ancient art is therefore not historical to me, but alive and present. That it can sometimes lift itself up and out of the timeline and communicate the simultaneously familiar, yet eternally mysterious character of this human life is actually what art does best for me. So I think of myself as part of its perpetually living nature, rather than someone striving to either reclaim what it once was, or to alternately set himself at the leading edge of its future arc.

There are things that oil painting does exceptionally well. Studying both past and present examples that excelled in meeting that medium’s extraordinary potentials, then attempting to make something new that carries-on a dialogue with that past while remaining fully true to where and who we are, just feels to me like the ideal place to be. It’s a challenging place to get to for sure, and I don’t claim for a minute to have fully succeeded, but that is always the goal.

This little oil on panel from 2012, titled Back in the Bullring, is an homage to Francisco Goya, who has always been one of my favorite painters from the distant past. He’s in there somewhere, but so are a whole host of other influences which will probably be clear enough to my fellow painters. Even so, it’s still my painting and not Goya’s, or Hodgkin’s or Diebenkorn’s or any other of the painters whose languages are part of my own operational painter’s eye. It’s not a pastiche, but a variation on a tune we all have liked and which I was playing in the here and now of that day when I made it.

I recently stumbled across a fine article here on Substack about the history of my family’s stone carving business in New England. I reached out to the author, Richard Pelletier, complimented and thanked him for writing it, to which he responded by sending a photograph he’d taken of my father some ten years back while researching the original article. Unbeknownst to Richard in this exchange was that the object my dad was studying on the worktable in front of him was a portrait of me taken by his brother Chip when I was briefly working as Chip’s studio assistant in the early 1980s.

An art history teacher in college told me once that all writers have a pet subject that they are always working to understand and convey through their prose. I remember noticing, when I first began reading the painter Fairfield Porter’s essays and art reviews, that while he covered quite a bit of ground, there were themes he returned to often, and one in particular (the juxtaposition of art against technology) about which he could become quite animated. He delivered a long, passionate, sometimes incomprehensible tirade on the topic in a lecture at Yale a few months before he died. The essence though — that art and technology are diametrically opposed activities — was clear enough, as was Porter’s conclusion that while the latter may threaten to kill us all off and destroy the planet, the former still holds out some hope for our sanity and salvation. I can’t say that I disagree with any of that.

Looking back, it was the gift in the late 1990s of a volume of Porter’s essays on art from another photographer friend that kicked off my own writing on similar topics. Over the past thirty-odd years, I have been composing these essays, as well as reviews for a regional arts magazine, texts for various art-related books, and articles for publication in museums’ and other arts organizations’ catalogues and periodicals. I’ve tackled many subjects in this work, but the makers of art and the world they inhabit are the focus of much of it. The underlying subject though is always the same and it is about something bigger than art, but for which its making, viewing, public presentation and marketing can provide a useful analog and metaphor. In a sense, I have also always been writing about that formative relationship with my father because it had so much to do with shaping my own feelings about what art is and why I or anybody else might want to make it.

What interests me is freedom, and the idea shot through all my writing is that there are voices, institutions and cultural conventions all around us which live to tell us every day, and in a thousand ways both large and small, not only that we may not have it, but that we should feel ashamed or be morally upbraided for daring to want it in the first place. No, we must accept all that we find counterproductive to our most heartfelt pleasures and aspirations and toe the line of whatever paradigmatic mindset, economic model or aesthetic order currently stands guard at the gateway to our “success” in attaining them. And yet, the making of art is by its very nature an act of defiant resistance to all such dictatorial influences, and my message is invariably that those voices can and should be challenged, rejected and thrown down whenever and wherever we encounter them; that the genuine successes of discovery, creativity and happiness are all fully contingent on finding ways to achieve this rebellion against conformity in all that we do.

My dad, a famous artisan and a hidebound conformist to a whole catalogue of rules, rituals and conventions, nevertheless betrayed a sometimes heart-breaking yearning not to be so constrained, as well as a sneaking regard (and not a little envy) for those of us who somehow felt a right to break free of the yoke. He once wonderingly said to a friend, the etcher and sculptor Leonard Baskin, “You just make up whatever you want!”

Even as he was often ready to tear his hair out in his attempts to bend my unruly nature to his elaborate diktats about the best ways in which to work and live (the former always leading the latter on his moral roadmap) I sensed that somewhere inside he was actually cheering me on. At no time was this more clear than on a day in my early teens when I was being castigated by one teacher or another for failing to do my homework in the correct way (or perhaps even to do it all) and he said:

“. . . when they give you the lined paper, WRITE THE OTHER WAY!”

So where exactly are those lines? What is this freedom of which I speak, and from precisely what sort of bondage am I suggesting we break away? I would argue that it is the feeling of indebted obedience to the pervasive constructs of Hierarchy, Authority, Moral Righteousness and any feelings of Guilt that might arise when we refuse to accept those debts. These are the essential components of ideological capture which telegraph outward into almost every kind of activity in which we humans engage. They are often so subtly disseminated across the networks of our social interactions that they become difficult to see clearly and are therefore almost automatically accepted as the simply necessary compacts of a social life. We may not recognize them for what they are, but we certainly understand that to refuse them is to risk being cast out altogether.

Heady stuff, I suppose, and perhaps a tad vague and generalized as stated above. But the principle can be readily applied to all sorts of pressing issues that we are facing, en masse, in the current cultural and political era. Take, for example, the rise and heralded forthcoming civilizational takeover by Artificial Intelligence. Whether or not it is true that AI is going to take over the world, interfere in every aspect of human life and personal agency and render our intelligence too slow or obsolete to any longer be allowed a place at the table of our own affairs (I do not believe that it is) being instructed by its creators to believe these things are forms of:

a. Hierarchy — as in: AI is better at thinking and doing practically any formerly human task than we are.

b. Authority — we, its creators, marketers and boosters are in a position to know better than you that these things are true, and . . .

c. Moral Righteousness — to fail to accept that these things are true is a sign of your intellectual inadequacy, backwardness and cultural contemptuousness, i.e. your total lack of moral legitimacy and virtue.

If, instead of accepting each of these positions at face value, they are summarily rejected, AI may do whatever it is actually going to do without compelling any sort of acquiescence to those aspects of its development to which we might personally or even culturally object. I can comfortably state that, at least on the personal level, it is not going to come for any of my various jobs because I intend to keep doing them and feel fully confident that doing so will only make the products of my labor — as a painter, printmaker, photographer, a writer and designer of books, a finish carpenter and builder, and lastly as a sort of kitchen table philosopher — more appealing to those who will always appreciate and support those very human kinds of activities.

I could list many other bombastically pronounced orders, hierarchies and inevitabilities against which we might profitably claim a right to resist, but I suspect the reader gets my gist well enough. Instead, we’ll circle back to art, since that’s my general “wheelhouse” and one which seems to me to offer an especially malleable analog to almost every other activity in which we might become engaged in the day-to-day business of living a life.

Apart from the ancient letter-carving craft he practiced professionally, my dad was an art-educated sculptor with a particular love for the figurative aesthetics and values of the Italian Renaissance. He compounded these deeply traditional skills and proclivities with a punishing Puritan work ethic, inherited from his mother’s Yankee Quaker ancestors, which measured everything he did, both professionally and privately, against my posited yardsticks of Hierarchy, Authority and Morality. Pleasure took a distant backseat to all three if it was permitted at all, and yet he was in many ways an unusually self-centered and at least a passive-aggressively self-indulgent pursuer of his own pleasures — “failings” for which he felt eternal moral guilt and a resentfully partnered self-righteous pride.

He was a complicated guy.

Growing up in his orbit, I formed an initially cautious, but increasingly fierce, resistance to being hierarchically or morally compelled to do anything whatsoever, probably because from a very early age I could intuit — if not quite articulate — just how unhappy that sort of moral self-flagellation had made him. If hair shirts were available in his time, he would probably have proudly, if miserably, worn one.

My dad did a lot of different creative things apart from his paid-work as a designer and carver of lettered inscriptions. He played folk music, sailed and built boats, made silver jewelry, designed typefaces, designed, built and flew elaborately engineered radio-controlled sailplanes, wrote a book, and in his last decades of semi-retirement became a dedicated and accomplished figurative sculptor, sometimes of portrait busts in clay, plaster or bronze for various well-heeled clients, and in a years-long series, in those same materials, of nude and mainly female figure studies.

Coming into the world as an already artistically inclined being, I was met head-on with the elaborate Gothic architecture of rules, expectations, morals and obligations that stoked my father’s various creative engines. There was not only a right and a wrong way to do every single thing that one might venture to try, but even a correct and incorrect way to feel about doing them. There are many ways in which one might describe the reasons and logic of my response to this, but the sum conclusion of all such conjecture would be the same. I stubbornly refused to accept it.

One might assume that this would make me a perfect candidate for embracing the NEW. Ironically, I had virtually the same stubbornly resistant reaction to the supposedly revolutionary and innovative postures of modern and contemporary art once I left my world of origin and ventured out, first in high school and college art classes, then ultimately into the wider realm of galleries, museums, periodicals and the collective cultural “conversation” that we refer to as “The Art World.”

I will happily confess that I passionately detest the art world, even as I adore and thrive on the company and community of my fellow makers. No matter what they choose to make or how they might believe in the worthiness of doing things in that way, artists themselves are almost always alive, engaging, intelligent and curious beings. But the structures and institutions that would contain, define and drive them (at least as those forces have evolved since the middle of the last century) are almost uniformly unimaginative, deadly to genuine originality and deeply, bafflingly stupid.

I blame the academy most of all for these limitations but the market plays no small role either, especially as it has, through the past seventy-seven years, become so absurdly besotted with celebrity and so correspondingly economically inflated. That’s an exact number because I date the downfall to the 1949 Life Magazine article about Jackson Pollock. That to me was the signal moment when the lively, unconventional reality at the heart of art was left in the dust by all the other impulses and distractions of Hierarchy, Authority and Morality which have so successfully codified and monetized its emanations ever since. Artists generally start from a genuine place, but it is the hangers-on to the artistic life — be they academics, critics, dealers or auctioneers — who, by endlessly concocting, then attempting to impose elaborate theoretical or morally hierarchical orders of belief about how, why and in what manner the artist should create in order to be granted the title, set themselves up as the very antithesis of every enlivening aspect of creativity itself.

To be an artist is to be free of all of that.

My dad is gone now, and I miss him, even though he often felt like a line-backer hunkered down between myself and the goal posts of my own aspirations for artistic pleasure and freedom. More than one reader of these essays has suggested that I am always looking for a father (or for the one I hoped for and never got to have). But this is not at all true. I had one who I loved very much, while also feeling profoundly sad for him. I only ever wanted to see my dad happy — to be genuinely free. He could be enraging sometimes, as I could too, and this friction lead to some spectacularly heated, sometimes even violent conflicts between us. But he never prevented me from doing what I wanted to do, even as he clearly felt that the obligations of parenthood had somehow gotten between him and his own yearnings. Somewhere inside though, I think he knew perfectly well that he had only done it to himself, however unwittingly, and through all the resentment, rage and disappointment he could feel towards me, I think that he secretly relished my ability to insist on a kind of freedom he could never quite claim for himself.

We sometimes hear, in the “great conversation” about art, that something has died. Painting is dead, or sculpture, or some other medium that had a heyday which has now passed, never to be revived. But almost as soon as such pronouncements are made, somebody comes along to prove them premature, if not simply wrong. One of the art-related practices whose death I’ve heard lamented in recent years is that of art criticism, a complaint that tends to issue from critics themselves. There is such a stunning variety of art being made nowadays, in so many different ways and for so many different reasons, that it can feel as if we have completely lost the capacity to usefully sort and evaluate it all; that quite literally anything goes.

If critique is indeed dead, I am not so sure that this a bad thing. Not because art doesn’t need criticism, but because this might be an opportunity to revive its most constructive qualities in a new kind of critique while letting go of older ones that maybe didn’t work so well. One of the characteristics of contemporary art today, and one that the critics might reasonably be despairing over, is a propensity among its makers to feel that because they did something in its name, it must be good (it’s art because I made it, and because I made it it must be brilliant). I suppose that anybody has the right to call anything they like “art”. It doesn’t follow though that the rest of us either will or should agree that they did that thing exceptionally, or even well. Just because anything goes in art, doesn’t mean that anything made in its name is automatically worthwhile or good. The purpose of critique has always been to offer us a reliable guide to knowing which is which. But how is a critic — or anyone else for that matter — supposed to know the difference in an age when all the former aesthetic and ideological guardrails have come right off the road?

I’ve written a few times here about how we can assess art’s quality by looking to see how well a given work achieved whatever it set out to do, rather than by comparing it to something else. Quality in this sense being something more straightforward and relatable than more mystical terms like “greatness” and “genius” that get handed down from on high by the critical, academic or curatorial establishment. Those sorts of pronouncements are generally made with an air of certitude that can establish and prop up the marketability, celebrity status and supposed future historical importance of art world superstars, but which one feels obliged to accept without quite feeling a right to question what they mean or why we should even believe them to be true. The bestower of such tags feels their judgements to be true and we are expected to accept that truth because they have proclaimed it, or because it issued from within some respected bastion of cultural authority. I.e., it must be true because I read it in Art Forum, or The New Yorker. But the limits of all such expert artistic analysis — as distinct, say, from scientific or legal expertise which rely on verifiable precedents typically vetted by other working peers — are contingent on the fact that the experience of art is so fundamentally subjective and anti-scientific by nature. Much of its critical review is therefore beholden to a thicket of presumptions, prejudices and quirks of personal taste that cannot help but color its conclusions, but which we may not, and need not, remotely share. All that a critic speaking from within that sort of knowledge base can know with any certainty is how well or poorly a given work, or the artist who made it, measures up to those ideas, tastes and prejudices in which they have invested their personal intellectual stock.

Some works of art, however, are in fact more nuanced, more skillfully made, and even more truthful, to whichever standards or ideas drove their manufacture, than others made in the same spirit. Some are so superior in all these respects that we can even reasonably regard them as great works, and thereby also hail their makers as great artists. But the discernment of such things is not achieved by hierarchically mapping out their historical, philosophical, political or merely fashionable cultural merits — all of which can be, and often eventually are legitimately questioned — but by literally seeing the actual qualities inherent within them. This is why we say of one possessing that ability that they “have an eye.” And to be fair, there are critics who have a terrific eye, they just tend to confuse the objective merit of a particular work within its kind, which they do genuinely see, with an inevitably myopic subjective preference for that kind over others. For example, the critic Clement Greenberg, who wielded tremendous power in the American art world in the 1940s and 50s, was right to recognize the quality of the “drip paintings” made by Jackson Pollock on the floor of his studio through a spontaneously choreographed physical dance, or “action.” But he was wrong to presume that every other approach to painting was necessarily less good or even deserving of cultural contempt, as in his blanket condemnation of any work made on an easel. Pollock wasn’t making the right kind of art, he was just making the right kind for Clement Greenberg, which happened also to be a remarkably good way of making that precise kind of art which Jackson Pollock intended to make. Alice Neel, a portrait painter working on an easel at roughly the same time that Pollock was dancing around his studio floor, made comparatively traditional things in an acutely contemporary way that are no less good than Pollock’s at what she was trying to do. Greenberg, had he deigned to notice her at all — which he did not — would very likely have condemned her for working in a “dead” art. And yet, she is regarded today as one of the major American painters of the twentieth century.

So what is the nature of this discerning eye, and how does it work? My point is that the attainment of near perfection within a given kind of art is the only meaningful measure of real quality, and thereby the only one that can be critically stated with anything approaching objective accuracy. I cracked open one of the monstrous volumes in a recently inherited set of the Oxford English Dictionary this morning in search of a workable definition of perfection. There is a whole page worth of entries below that word, but this one seemed to sum them up:

3. The condition, state or quality of being perfect or free from all defect; supreme excellence, flawlessness, faultlessness. But often treated as a matter of degree: comparative excellence.

That caveat about “comparative excellence” strikes me as the salient term here. To be dependably objective, any sort of artistic evaluation can only fairly assess a work in comparison to other examples from within its own class, style, school or method, all of which we can presume to share a common set of standards and intentions. When critics disparage a whole method, or deem it to fall short of the worthiness of some other method which they particularly revere, that has nothing whatever to do with whether or not the works in which it is employed are objectively good or bad, but merely points up its relative success or failure to conform to that critic’s most idiosyncratic tastes and prejudices.

If we can accept this principle of assessing works of art in relation to other works of their own kind, we can see the big historical movements, with their stylistic, methodological and philosophical shifts, less as evolutionary advances along an always ascending linear path, and more as refreshing epochal cycles within which art has a chance to be re-invigorated when prevailing norms grow stale through formulaic repetition, or when they cease to reflect contemporary cultural realities in a way that satisfies the people of their time. It is fine to say that some paintings made at the height of the dominance of the French Academie and Salon became moribund or formulaic, and even that they lacked freshness in the era when they were made. But better to disparage Bouguereau or Gérôme as being the authors of an exhausted style in comparison to another academic painter, such as Delacroix, whose works were full of vitality and originality. That the Impressionists seized on the moribund qualities of late Academic painting and used it as a springboard for renewal, does not automatically imply that all Academic painting was that exhausted, or even that all of the Impressionists thought so at the time (they did not).

Revolutionary cycles respond to the tastes and conditions of the times and places in which they occur, and that response creates a framework within which a fresh qualitative standard has a chance to be set in a new kind of work. The critics who come to prominence within such cycles generally pass their judgements based on the standards most revered in that exact cultural milieu. But we should remember that revolutionary cycles are themselves quite transient, so that the brave new thing in one era will invariably strike a later era as an anachronism, unless it happens to find a way to incorporate some more inherently transcending quality. Quality itself, however it may be set by the type or kind of art in which it is achieved is therefore the superseding constant that rises above all such fashionable phases and attains a plateau of self-determining perfection to which all art’s shifting languages can equally aspire, however uniquely they happen to do so. It follows too that a failure, or refusal to conform to the norms of a prevailing cycle — its so-called Zeitgeist — does not rule out the attainment of such quality. A work’s inherent merit is precisely what enables it to dodge destruction in those periods that do not embrace its kind. As was the case with Johanna Van Gogh Bonger (Vincent Van Gogh’s sister-in-law, who safeguarded and advocated for his work when nobody else wanted it), at least one person can see the value of an under-appreciated form clearly enough to think it worthy of preservation, so that it might be “discovered” when tastes shift enough to bring it to wider public attention.

In the end, the merit is always there, or not, regardless of the relative cultural neglect or nurture of its kind, so that we might say of the best art that the “tree” of its real quality makes a noise when it falls in the forest irrespective of the presence or absence of someone to hear it. The hearer is in fact already there, incorporated into the work in the person of its maker, who knew in the making exactly what was achieved.

I am going to leave off talking about the narrow little universe of art for a day or two and pause to reflect, as I sometimes do, on the wider world. As we all know too well, this past week, Donald J. Trump threatened, out loud and in public, that “an entire civilization will die” if it fails to capitulate to his personal demands.

For me, the word civilization was the stunner in that declaration, because it encompassed not only the living people inhabiting the geographic place under threat, but every vestige of that people’s astonishing history of achievements — of thought, of art and even as the “cradle” in which our own western civilization was first nurtured and began to grow.

How have we given the awful power of the American presidency to a person not only capable of contemplating, but of publicly and even gleefully articulating such a despicably murderous intention?

How exactly did we get here?

Well, I’ll venture to suggest that we have always been here. Donald Trump is merely the chicken of the darkest strains in our national character that have been with us from the beginning, and which has finally come home to roost in the hallowed marble halls of the great American Experiment. Greedy, bigoted, violent impulses have always been woven right into the fabric of our national psyche. And one of the core factors enabling those impulses to thrive throughout our history, but especially to the degree that they are thriving today, is the self-justifying fantasy of our fundamental goodness; that “American Exceptionalism” expressed with such comic unselfawareness in the oft-repeated image of the “shining city on a hill.”

I am an American through and through. I love my country, warts and all. Much as I long to leave and go to some imagined better place right now, it feels correct to stay, to see this awful time through and do whatever possible to oppose what is happening here, however feeble my attempts at resistance may often feel. As is true for many of us (and not only those of us who happen to identify as “white”) my own heritage mixes old bloodlines from the original English colonists four hundred years ago with the patchwork quilt of other nationalities and ethnicities who came later, either by sailing down from the Maritimes in the mid-nineteenth century, as the tribe from whom I get my surname did, or through Ellis Island at the beginning of the twentieth. All these people were scrappy immigrants looking to build something new and better in a hopefully better place than the ones they had left behind. Some were decent, hard-working folks and some were not so nice. The majority most likely charted a wavering middle path between those poles. In my family line, we can find both the Puritan theocrats of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as well as a guy named Roger Williams, one of that colony’s clergymen who advocated passionately for the separation of church and state and even made it a first principle of the smaller colony he founded next door to Massachusetts after it banished him for his heretical beliefs. We also had slavers from the triangle trade and emancipators on the front lines in the Grand Army of the Potomac. There were warriors and pacifists, pirates and merchants, plunderers and planters and one military ancestor who was so appalled by what he was commanded to do to the native Seminole people in Florida that he resigned his commission and became a Quaker.

This is not my story. This is the American story. And just as there was some good in my own family line, so has there been some goodness in the nation as a whole. The core tenets of our Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights — of a democratic and diverse republic enabling freedom and freely-thinking opportunity for all its people — were always the worthiest of aims. Those occasions when we have exerted our tremendous military or economic might (at others’ invitation) for the sincere furtherance of those aims, whether here within our own borders or in the world beyond, have at times even been heroically admirable. This was especially true in our own Civil War to end slavery, in our interventions to stop the spread of Fascism in Europe and the Pacific during the Second World War, in the Marshall Plan that rebuilt the world after that war’s end, and in the NATO alliances which forestalled potentially more devastating Nuclear destruction during the Cold War.

But if the Trump era teaches us nothing else, it ought at least to finally compel us to look squarely in the mirror at all the less admirable qualities we have failed to confront in ourselves since our founding. Having nearly wiped out the indigenous population of this continent, enslaved African people for nearly two hundred and fifty years, created the social harms and environmental damages of the industrial age and the gross economic inequalities of the first Gilded Age which it enabled, having supported the rise of McCarthyism, our disastrous incursions into Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran, having then again cheered-on the rise of yet another capitalist oligarchy that is even more unabashedly antidemocratic than that of the Robber Barons of the industrial age, and which has now thoroughly corrupted both our political parties, and finally considering every other one of our darker interferences in the lives of our own people and of peoples and nations abroad — what single lesson can we take from all of that?

Simply this: we are not always the good guys, but neither are we uniquely bad. In other words, we are NOT exceptional. Like every other people on this earth since the dawn of time, we are both good and bad, both benign and malign. This is just what being human has always entailed. If we seem at times to have wrought more than our fair share of chaos in the world, it is not down to some unusually dastardly aspect in our collective nature, but to the unprecedented scope of the power we have managed to gather to ourselves as a nation. As some cleverly moralizing Englishman once put it, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Never was that statement truer in the past than it is of the United States of America today.

The runaway greed for money and influence that we see in both of our putatively polarized governing parties, as well as in the corporate and tech sectors that now fully own the levers of that government’s power, merely reflect underlying human flaws that every one of us encounters and struggles with in our daily lives. We see them, writ small, in our relationships with individual family members and friends, with colleagues and co-workers in our careers, and thence out to the wider cultural agglomerations of neighborhood communities, cities, states and nations. This is just what people are like. It is why we continuously erect institutions, however imperfectly conceived and implemented, of both religion and of socially binding constitutions and rules of law. We are forever looking for ways to keep our worst impulses in check, even as our baked-in propensities for self-seeking schemes work overtime to bend the institutional guardrails to more nefarious ends.

It is so challenging, given how fully embedded we are within these big, complex systems that have operated in a certain way for now hundreds of years, to imagine any workable alternative that would not adhere to the same logic and rules over which the current order has so long prevailed. And yet, right from my earliest consciousness of a world larger than my own immediate surroundings, I’ve felt intuitively that it is not only possible, but also imperative that we do so. We need to find a better way of living, and one that is truly, radically different from the one we know.

I honestly don’t know how to get there. My fear is that, like the supertanker that is too large and has too much momentum to turn away from the rocks before hitting them, this vessel of our civilization, which has been so deeply dysfunctional for so long, will simply have to crash in order for any genuinely improved model to have a chance at being launched. The trouble with that scenario, however, is that it necessitates an implosion into a kind of chaos out of which it can be very difficult to rebuild anything resembling a rational order (call it the Road Warrior model of civilizational collapse).

What does give me some hope is that better systems have succeeded in the past, and were even made right here in what is now the USA. I recently caught a little video clip on Instagram of the late, great Lakota actor and activist Russell Means discussing the roots of American democracy in the governing philosophy of the Iroquois Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which overspread the whole of our northeastern region and much of eastern Canada for a couple of centuries before Europeans arrived. As Means points out, our Democracy was in no small measure based on the principles of that confederacy, to which French missionaries were exposed on their first arrival and which then permeated the strains of philosophy in Europe from which the ideas of the “Enlightenment” grew. The first peoples here had a system that worked reasonably well, just as we have taken ideas from them that also have enabled our systems to work reasonably well from time to time.

I don’t know how to get back to something like that, nor have I any idea how to gingerly dismantle all that is not currently working in order to get there. It is a mess that makes the legendary Gordian Knot look like the loosely tied bow on a child’s sneaker. But others do have some good ideas, and there are some profoundly rational and insightful voices today, especially right here on this Substack platform, who speak directly to this need for real systemic change. As a group, their reporting, ideas and commentaries are beginning to comprise a plausible roadmap to sanity. The four who I now regularly read or listen to, after having carefully sorted through the cacophony of available options over the past few years, are Heather Cox Richardson, Timothy Snyder, Wajahat Ali and Corbin Trent.

The elder Richardson and Snyder are accomplished professional academics and historians who respectively offer up an almost daily analysis of current events, both here at home and abroad. Their reporting is couched in deep historical knowledge and a practical understanding of the mechanics of statecraft in both local and international politics, economics and wars, along with clear surveys of the powerfully influential actors behind them.

Ali and Trent are both younger, scrappier commentators, each of whom offers a bracing influx of fresh air into the hovering effluvium emanating from all the dead horses of our presently received political and economic wisdom. Ali daily interviews a motley cast of thinkers, writers, activists, economists and politicians who are questioning the system in which we are stuck, and who come at it from every direction of ideology, bias and preference. I don’t always agree with the conclusions of every interview I listen to there, and even Ali and his interlocutors don’t always agree, but the discussions are lively, informative and unafraid of tipping over a whole heard of sacred cows.

Trent to me though is one of the most hopeful and inspiring political observers and activists I’ve encountered. He sees clearly that where truly radical change is what is called for, it would be safest to effect it right on the foredeck of that rocks-bound tanker by redefining and retaking our politics (on both ends of the ideological spectrum of our “culture wars”) within the existing framework of the Democratic party. He consistently and intelligently articulates exactly what is needed to bring about such a sweeping overhaul, as well as exactly what sorts of approaches will not succeed. He has even gone so far as to found a progressive PAC dedicated to bringing these changes about.

I can’t have much of an impact on this big messy world from within the little artistic bubble where my daily life, and these writings play out, but if some of my musings online have managed to reach a handful of readers, I urge those of you who periodically tune in to take a look at the writers I’m recommending. If nothing else, they’ve kept my sanity and optimism on life support through these dark days. I am adding links below to their various sites, all of which eschew paywalls in the interest of getting the word out as far and wide as they can. Have a look and see if they don’t inform, if not always brighten, your day.

Here is my list:

Heather Cox Richardson — Letters From an American:

Timothy Snyder — Thinking About:

Thinking about...

Opening the future by understanding the past.

By Timothy Snyder

Wajahat Ali — The Left Hook:

The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali

A political, cultural, and intellectual playground for the rest of us with writer Wajahat Ali

By THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali

Corbin Trent — America’s Undoing:

America's Undoing

Why Corporate Democrats can't beat Trump, why America can't build anything, and what a real political revolution looks like.

By Corbin Trent

I read somewhere recently about an elderly Zen monk who continued to do heavy physical labor at his monastery even as his body began to fail. His younger companions in the community tried to protect him from injury by keeping him away from such risky projects, but his simple answer was “No work, no life.”

I seem to be at work on something all the time. Even on Sunday, the one day in the week when a complete break can sometimes occur, I often find a project in which to become embroiled. Yesterday, for instance, it was a morning of helping our youngest son to move the last of his things from our house to his new place, and then an afternoon spent out in the sun with my wife, staining some fifty-seven boards for sheathing the roof of a shaded portale I’ve been building along the back wall of my studio over the past year.

Like the monk, I can’t imagine not working. As for retirement, that idea is completely alien. As has been true for all the artisans, painters, sculptors, writers and musicians whom I have known right up to the ends of their lives, I hope at that moment when I too head out the door to have only just put down my tools.

But there are different kinds of labor and very different ways in which we do it. Creative people work to many different drummers beating many different rhythms. For those of us who aspire to artistry of some kind, those patterns are bound up in, and conditioned by, a range of expectations — both externally commercial and internally philosophical or even moralizing — against which our most satisfying creative breakthroughs often strain. Late in his life, Edward Hopper famously took a very long time to get around to making a painting. There is a passage in one of his biographies that describes an empty canvas on his easel which, his wife Jo informs a visitor, he had been looking at for a whole year. Dean Richardson, a painter I studied with in college, was given a Guggenheim grant early in his career and reportedly spent the whole year it had paid for “turning his dartboard inside out.” Willem DeKooning took two years to complete Woman Number 1.

On the other hand there are those who get up at a regular hour every day and beaver away in the studio, shutting out the world entirely, for a full eight to ten hours. I know one older painter who seems to put in strictly scheduled daily regimens like that and who often has several different paintings going, in several different workspaces in his compound, at the same time. Another younger painter friend frequently boasts of periods in which he has made “forty” or “fifty” new pieces.

I am lucky if I make ten paintings in a year. Sometimes I manage as many as twelve, sometimes less than five. Perversely (like Dean and Hopper) my actual productivity frequently wanes in direct inverse proportion to the amount of free studio time I have been able to bank. Throughout my twenties I worked more or less full time in a cabinet shop on the waterfront beside the Brooklyn Bridge, but somehow also got quite a bit of painting done, either in evening or weekend sojourns in my nearby studio, or in the week-long breaks I could sometimes pry away from my employers when enough cash had piled up to underwrite a longer session.

All through my post-college years in New York I chafed at my day job, grumbling my way through the tasks at hand and resenting them for stealing my cherished painting time. Every Fall I applied for grants that never came, dreaming always of that mythic fantasy of a year in the studio with no other distractions. At one point, a kindly aunt did give me enough cash to take a trip to England and then spend a few months back home painting what I’d seen there, but I was still working in the cabinet shop to keep the lights burning.

I finally decided late in that decade to engineer a grant of my own. After my first solo gallery show, and having also amassed a small cadre of patrons for whom I had done commissioned pieces, I proposed a compact to these folks in which they would fund a year of painting out west at the end of which I would bring back enough pieces to enable each of them to select from at least two examples as repayment for the advance.

It was a cheeky scheme, and some of those I petitioned declined to participate. But I did pull together enough of a group to make it just barely possible. So, at twenty-eight, I set off from New England in a Chevy van filled with art supplies (and the woodworking tools I was cautious enough to also pack) to paint the desert southwest. Arriving in Santa Fe and renting a tiny one-room casita, I quickly proceeded to do — nothing.

The year stretched out to two, then to two and a half. The money had run out within the first few months and I was soon back to carpentry and some other part time work in the studio of a book designer friend. I traveled, photographed, explored the strange desert and mountain landscapes of the American West, but I did not paint.

By the beginning of my second year in New Mexico, after multiple trips to the San Francisco Bay Area (where I met my future wife) I’d found a bigger house on the prairie twenty miles outside town where I could barter carpentry for rent from a pair of artist landlords. It was a bare little half-finished, two-story adobe shack; a Navajo-style round house, stuffed like a coffee can into the side of an arroyo. It had been built by a painter of presumably Irish extraction named John Hogan (the locals called it “Hogan’s Hogan.”) Heat came from a propane unit in a nicely finished bathroom wing and from a big horizontal oil-drum woodstove on the ground floor where I painted. The kitchen consisted of a sink, a hotplate and a rusty old 1960s fridge. A little metal table and a futon bed sat on a platform opposite the kitchen counter and under the open beams of an octagonal roof from which a variety of alarming arachnids sometimes tumbled into bed with me. I also shared the space with gigantic centipedes, mice, a Mexican long-eared bat and a cranky Russian Blue cat named Frank, who appeared one day from the arroyo and adopted me. I lived on beans, rice and morning excursions for coffee and pastries from a hippy bakery in town. Frank helped himself to the plentiful prairie fauna. One winter I burned much of my furniture just to keep the pipes from freezing. But I did finally begin to paint, and by the time my Californian girlfriend and I moved back to New England in a caravan of wagons and trailers, I’d landed a good gallery in Santa Fe, helped my landlord finish a new kitchen at the Hogan and was hauling enough paintings in the trailer to satisfy my long-suffering backers at home. The Mexican bat came to our going away party.

Forty years on, I still wrestle with the same old rhythms of work, contemplation, avoidance and distraction. This winter I managed again to carve out a chunk of time in which to paint. I didn’t buy myself that mythic and perennially yearned-after year in the studio, just a few months. I’ve done some ok things in that time: one painting that I actually like and a handful of monotypes that also feel pretty good. But now I’m onto a big canvas and although there is a multi-layered start on it, it has completely stalled. The metaphorical dartboard calls.

Day after day, week after week, I dawdle, avoid or simply ignore this big mustard-hued mess on my easel. I work on my website, do small odd jobs for print clients, visit with artist pals, cobble some carpentry for the family home and sell an occasional print or painting to keep the coffers full. But the act of painting itself has stopped. That old “Puritan Work Ethic” that my Yankee father (one of those dogged nine-to-five guys) lathered me with as a teen carps in his voice from one musty corner of my brain while another voice — my own I suppose — reassures me that this is just who and what I am and have always been. This is how I get the work done.

So if painting itself isn’t the whole of “the work”, what exactly is this part? I hesitate to make qualitative generalizations about the ways in which other artists ply their trade. There are many different paths to the goal and one way is not perforce better or more morally upright (as my dad seemed to believe) than another. What I do know, however, from my own patterns and experience is that it is much easier to get down to work on a project of skill than one of exploration. I am not stalled on this big canvas because I don’t know how to paint, but because I’m pretty good at it. It doesn’t follow though that my art is always good as a result of that skill because art — it turns out — is not about skill. Skill is certainly part of it, and maybe it’s the part we have to learn first. But the most important breakthroughs and revelations cannot be arrived at by the merely dogged application of expert labor, or that vaunted 10,000 hours which the writer Malcolm Gladwell and others posit as some sort of ironclad metric of mastery.

If the good stuff comes at all, it sometimes comes by arm-wrestling one’s own most dependably satisfying aesthetic habits, formulas and solutions down to the table and doing something instead that feels completely wrong in one way, but fully liberating in another.

I write a lot about how the market has corrupted this calling to make art in a spirit of discovery and risk. And I’m sorry, but dependably marketable artistic products — works that readily lend themselves to “branding” — are in every way antithetical to this dangerous place where actual art can sometimes find us. We don’t make it. What we make are the conditions in which it can occur. And these hours, months or even years of deliberation and even avoidance through which one’s conventions and habits get broken down, are one of the doorways through which it occasionally arrives.

I try to post one of these essays every two or three weeks and don’t usually follow one right up with another. But a friend asked a worthy question in response to a recent post in which I had suggested that one painter’s work was good while another from the same school was not so good. What, my friend asked, did I mean by “good”? As I responded in the comments, I only meant to describe how well either artist had made the kinds of things that both had chosen to make, which in that case were abstract expressionist paintings. But as I also acknowledged, this matter of art’s material quality can be a very tricky subject, and one we’ve tiptoed around as if on eggshells for decades within our wider conversations about art. I believe this discomfort (we might even call it a neurosis) about quality stems from the exclusionary and hierarchical rhetoric of the critique that grew up alongside the Modernist movements in European and American art during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: an often bombastic staking of ideological flags into the supposed cultural superiority of one form to another. In all such assessments, an artist’s worth is measured by how correctly they reflect the party line of whichever approach is deemed ascendent in the moment. Yes, skill and quality might be discussed, but always in reference to the avant-garde project of art’s commanded forward trajectory. Those seen to be holding it back are reviled while its boldest innovators are crowned with the mantle of genius. Strangely, this hierarchical critical sorting continues today despite the supposed end of art history now forty six years behind us in the rearview mirror.

In reality, there is no advance and never has been. Art is always an expression of what and where we are, and while the where might change, the what often stays pretty much the same. Artistic movements follow naturally shifting cultural tastes and interests from one generation to the next, as well as from one maker to another. Sometimes we see an evolution from a seemingly simpler method at one end of such a shift to a related form that feels more sophisticated. But the movements themselves are more often lateral, or even circular, than ascendent. The art of the Baroque was not superior to that of the Renaissance (save in those aesthetic ideals that Baroque artists preferred) any more than Renaissance art was inherently better than Romanesque, Greek or Egyptian art, and so-on right back to the neolithic caves. Neither was Western art as a whole ever superior to all the myriad art forms of other peoples in other parts of the world.

The writers who talked about and assessed artistic things prior to the Modernist revolution tended to be connoisseurs (knowers) of the styles they cared about most, making qualitative distinctions between the physical characteristics and levels of skill present within them. Historians shuffle the modes and ideas of those works in and out of specific movements, but for a long time critics mainly discussed a work’s inherent worthiness within its kind. Modernist critique, however, began to walk away from the concerns of the connoisseur and pay more attention to the competing dynamics of ideology. Some modern critics — like Robert Berger, Robert Hughes, Roberta Smith and Jed Perl — still cared about and deployed a degree of connoisseurship in their analysis, but towards the end of its trajectory in the Postmodern 1980s and 90s the idea of any objective standards of quality seems to have been written out of the critical discourse altogether and replaced with a weirdly oxymoronic stew of hectoring deconstructionist theory on the one hand and a gushing reportage on the seasonal cycles and colorful personae of art world celebrities on the other, which frankly feels more akin to Haute Couture.

I don’t mean to suggest that the quality of a work of art is only about its physical makeup. It resides in every way that the physical thing communicates the truest expression of whatever vision, understanding or emotion that particular maker discovered through the making of that particular work. But the quality of such visions is inextricably bound to the quality of their delivery. Lee Bontecou’s Untitled, 1966, or Jack Whitten’s 9-11-01, wouldn’t move us as they do if the artists in question had not made them in the exact material ways that they respectively did. They did what they did so well, and so much more artfully than a great many other people who have tried to make “good” physical things, that we single them out to be preserved, looked at again and again, and both remembered and revered. It is precisely this intrinsic quality that enables the strongest art to live on irrespective of the critics’ or market’s approval, or even of the wider culture’s limitations and prejudices. Though somewhat ignored for long periods, both artists cited above eventually surfaced in the public eye because quality has a life of its own that operates above the chatter of our shifting cultural tastes and the rising and falling tides of fashion. Our best museums are a testament to this reality in that they eventually house some of those works whose merit is genuine enough to have finally emerged through the less worthy chaff that time itself sorts out. It is not therefore only the critics, historians or curators who decide what will last, but the art itself. Good work has a way of outliving its detractors, while the lesser stuff is often forgotten right alongside the experts who insisted so vehemently on its importance.

Tricky though it may be, we should never shy away from studying, learning and talking about artistic quality. It is crucial though, in all such conversations, for both the artist and the public to recognize that it does not result from successfully applying some academically codified metric of methodology or ideology to our work, but of subtly marrying the most challenging external means at our disposal to our most demanding internal aspirations. It resides entirely in the relationship of the physical material we choose to that more insubstantial content of our uniquely personal visions. These two components form a partnership that enables them to rise or fall together. Some art does it well where a whole lot of other art does it badly, and it is perfectly okay to point this out, provided that we have truly learned to know the difference by teaching ourselves to be true connoisseurs. It might help though to begin all such critical examinations by throwing out the hierarchical prejudices of intellectual, philosophical or stylistic classification altogether, because there, to me at least, is where all the trouble resides. Saying that one artist is better at making a particular kind of thing than another, as a connoisseur does, is not the same as critically declaring that the kind of art one chooses to make is somehow intrinsically superior or inferior to another kind — i.e. realism versus abstraction, conceptualism versus aestheticism, minimalism versus expressionism, and so on ad-infinitum. That is the stuff of the fashion show, which is precisely what the art world has now become.

In the end, it matters not at all what kind of art we choose to make. What matters is how well (how artfully) we make it. If we can’t accept this, why bother to call it art at all? Without an interest in the actual art of doing what we do, we may as well admit that we are doing something else.

The sheer volume of artistic works to which we are now daily subjected through our digital devices and services can be both dizzyingly disorienting and also often quite discouraging for us makers. There is just so damn much of it, and so much variety in the styles, ideas and intentions for it, that it can be challenging to feel any certainty about what we hope to achieve in our own work; or worse still, whether the things we’ve already made can have any meaning or presence at all in this riot of attention-seeking clamor.

I read a fine article here on Substack earlier this week that had just this sort of dampening effect on my own always tenuous grasp of hopefulness about the artist’s life — or more accurately, about the life of art itself. In a piece titled The Strange Grief of Moderate Success, gallerist and art advisor Greg Rook comes at the subject from the point of view of those artistic careers that measure their success in direct relation to the approval or indifference (in the forms of financial, critical and institutional support or lack thereof) of the market. It is a well-written, thoughtful article and one that tackles an important aspect of this life that is generally glossed over or ignored in the more public conversations about it: namely the feelings of disappointment and even grief which can hit hard when the recognition, success and forward advancement of a career stalls at a respectable but no longer promising plateau — where some recognition, a reasonable livelihood and a degree of critical praise have all been achieved, but the next boost to that higher stratosphere of acclaim simply never comes. Strangely, this is a reality of many dedicated careers in the arts which the programs and teachers in art school rarely warn us about. Amongst ourselves, of course, we talk about it all the time, and especially so as we grow older and have lived for many years with the day-to-day challenges of winning attention for and a livelihood from the things we make. It can certainly make one feel glum, and that can take the shape of a slowly building unease and sadness over the long haul, if we choose to focus our hopes on such things (and I think we probably all do hope for some kind of validation for the things we make). I often describe myself to others who don’t live this life as something akin to an aging prize fighter who has had some victorious bouts, but also keeps gamely climbing back into the ring after getting knocked down. More often I just shrug and say “it’s a tough racket.”

I will however attempt here to offer an antidote for this kind of malaise to both Mr. Rook and to any of my fellow makers who may be feeling it.

The variety and quantity of artistic things that assaults us every day through online platforms like Instagram and Facebook, and in the magazines, galleries, fairs, museums and other venues where art is put on display, can feel daunting. We may be reassured by those celebrated works which affirm our own aesthetics and values, but can just as often succumb to anxiety at the attention (and the high market premiums) lavished on works we do not care for at all. “If they like that stuff”, we fret, “how on earth will they ever see or understand what I am doing?”

The surprising secret about much of this variegated output, however — and especially so at those exalted heights which Mr. Rook pinpoints as the presumptively overarching goal we too often fail to attain — is that so much of it is actually alike. The variety, novelty and fashionable market “buzz” that attach to such things are a performative scrim that can deftly obscure a repetitive sameness at their core. They may not even be art at all, but mere art-like products made to attract the celebrity status and critical hype which both the makers themselves and the culture as a whole have come to misidentify as the defining locus of artistic quality and success. The ephemeral metrics of novelty, innovation and an appearance of originality upon which the art world is so fixated feed an insatiable hunger for riches and fame within the aspiring hearts of those artists who have drunk this particular brand of Koolaid and more so in the commercial brokers and critical boosters who hope to reap either a financial or reputational gain from their works. There is an intoxicating pageantry in these emanations, but one that often lacks a crucial substance without which there is scant promise of an ongoing life for any art so calculatingly conceived. The result is an ironic inversion of the old Greek maxim of Ars longa, vita brevis (life is short but art is long). In this formulation, the life of art, like that of a mayfly, can be as brief as its seasonal cycle as defined by the market we now think of as the central and indispensable “world” of art. As the old Bard put it:

“. . . These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.”

But if this cycling pageant we associate with artistic quality and success is not where those things truly reside, where then might they be found? What gives art its real life and where does it actually live? I don’t mean to suggest that good, or even great art does not happen within the bounds of the art world or its markets, or that originality and innovation are not valid components of its success. Of course it does and of course they are. I am only saying that it is not the art world that defines, designs or creates that quality, whether through high-minded critical discourse or in the high ticket financial transactions in the galleries, fairs and auction houses. The quality always has to come first and that is something wholly created by the maker, regardless of the degree to which it may or may not have been sparked in reference to other things happening within that world. It is not therefore the zeitgeist of the current fashion that accounts for the quality of a work. In fact, the forming of any stylistic or conceptual trend is often the first step away from real originality or genius, and into the mediocrity of a merely calculating and formulaic commerce. Willem DeKooning, a great innovator and painter of the Modernist New York School, worked in the company of some lesser artists (Barnett Newman always comes to mind for me) who achieved nearly equal acclaim on the back of works not nearly so original, masterful or intrinsically good as deKooning’s. What the lesser artist in any such “school” is good at, is milking the enthusiasm of a shared art historical moment for the celebrity status, critical and financial gains that can get attached to it in the public mind. It was DeKooning himself who said (when a younger Robert Motherwell lobbied their group to coin some defining title) “It would be a disaster to name ourselves.” The point being that the most meaningfully innovative movements flow out of quality and mastery. It doesn’t work the other way around.

I visited an old friend recently who plays Irish folk music. He’s done it professionally from time to time, but his main career — at which he also excels — is in an entirely different and unrelated discipline. The music is something he seems to do for his own pleasure and satisfaction. I play that kind of music too, though not nearly as well as he does, but well enough to sit with him from time to time and swap some tunes and riffs. On this recent visit he said something about this genre we both love which goes right to the heart of this question of what art is and where it lives. Irish music is quirky, technically-challenging stuff that is clearly not for everybody. Some folks love to listen to it and others just can’t stand it. What my friend said that struck me so is that however you might feel about it from the outside as a listener, you kind-of have to “play it yourself to truly get what is so wonderful about it”, because the wonder is really in the playing, and playing alongside somebody who does it better than you do, so long as they have a generous spirit, is one of the most nourishing creative experiences we can have.

I can only speak for myself, but I do know that my reasons for becoming a painter are very much like those of almost every other of my artistic peers with whom I am friends and who I most admire. And this is not so different from my reasons for playing Irish jigs and hornpipes. The goal was always to figure out how to do all such things as well, effectively and originally as those artists who move me most. I didn’t become a painter because I wanted to be as famous as Vermeer or Van Gogh or Turner — all of whom inspired me when I began painting as a teenager — but because I wanted to be able to make works that would be as intrinsically good as theirs and powerful enough to move somebody else in the same way. That is still what I want, now fifty years later.

The joy, as well as all the struggles, hurdles and disappointments of being an artist of any kind all reside in the lifelong project of learning, through careful study, what makes other people’s work great, and of discovering the path, through much trial and error, that might one day lead our own work to that goal. None of that has anything to do with becoming famous or rich, however much those rewards might result from the effort. Furthermore, any art made solely for those purely promotional purposes will last no longer than the cycle that brought it acclaim. It is only the other kind that lives long, and that stuff often achieves no fame in its own time.

I got up this morning too early, as I often do nowadays. Four to five am seems lately to comprise the regular waking window at that end of my circadian rhythm. I can occasionally claw back a couple more hours of shuteye, but rarely more than that. My mind is usually too agitated right out the gate to allow for any more rest, so there’s nothing for it but to get up and go to work, which is easy enough to do as my studio and press are down a long interior hallway at the opposite end of our house. Most of the time, I’ve already completed half of my workday, still in my pajamas, by about ten in the morning. Despite some inconvenience, this new reality of my old body’s patterns is one of the myriad irksome conditions of aging that I can accept and adjust to well enough. I manage it with an afternoon nap and by not staying up too late at night. A more challenging recent development is the feeling of despairing malaise with which these early morning risings are too often accompanied. This too may be a symptom of age, but it is also clearly a symptom of the age through which we are all presently living.

Through most of my life I’ve been a general — if a pragmatically skeptical — optimist. I’ve enjoyed some privilege, but have also experienced an equal and challenging share of hardship and loss. The privilege enables me to believe that things can be ok sometimes, that happiness and contentment and balance are all attainable. But the harder passages have proved that each of those states is inevitably ephemeral. Setbacks, sorrows, losses and failures (including and especially my own failures) are all woven into the fabric of life. We all make mistakes, cause others pain, or suffer from the outcomes of mistakes and endure the pain that others can sometimes inflict. There’s no getting around any of that. The ability to navigate the immediate personal terrain of these shifting conditions and to build a resource of resilience to them is a skill we hopefully learn through time. But no matter how adept we may become at that internal project, it is far more challenging to navigate an external world that is falling apart all around us; when a self-reinforcing spiral of compounding calamities sets in and squats over our lives like a stalled front of bad weather, grinding away in place with no hint of a forthcoming break.

Still, even against such seemingly overwhelming odds I do sometimes find a way back to a slightly more hopeful place. It is likely down to the autonomy and self-direction upon which I have always insisted as a non-negotiable condition for my life that such a state remains achievable, however tenuous it may be. I also think more and more that this is a mindset we need to cultivate en-masse if we are to have any hope of turning things around.

I always wonder when setting out to write one of these usually arts-related essays what possible use they could be to my non-artistic fellow citizens in such a worrisome time. I persist though because the life of the artist strikes me not only as a useful, but also a crucially instructive template for a way of thinking and living that, were it somehow kindled across the whole culture, might help us to overcome the thornier difficulties we face and begin to build a more satisfying and sustainable world.

To commit to being an artist of any sort is to take on a life which much of the society around you sees as either deludedly unrealistic, unforgivably self-serving or sometimes even morally wrong. It can begin at home and in school with elders who at best hope to turn you away from a path of economic insecurity, and are at worst envious of the freedom that path implies. From there, it extends out into a surrounding culture that does not typically share your interests or aspirations and therefore cannot understand, and may even be contemptuous of them. The earlier in life that these kinds of cultural antagonism are identified as meriting rejection, the sooner one can begin to erect an internal bulwark of resistance to them.

So, what does any of this have to do with the currently anxiety-producing state of our world, of its economy, its politics, or of the parlous state of the environment in which we live and upon whose stability our lives depend?

To me — everything.

Art may seem a small and sometimes even a laughably pretentious realm in the grand scheme of human affairs, but it can also offer us a blueprint for a pretty radically uncooperative way of living within social systems that would otherwise limit and define the conditions of our lives. Furthermore, it generally does this without doing any particular harm to anybody else, save perhaps for the family members and loved ones who are sometimes abandoned in pursuit of its siren songs. It is also a lifestyle and a community that argues strongly for the potential functionality of a collective of fully free and independently-thinking individuals, as opposed to a herd of obedient followers of some paradigmatic order. The institutions of art can sometimes embody ideologies that feel oppressive or discouraging to one practitioner or another but the older I get, the more I find the actual company of my fellow artists to be wildly diverse while also essentially nourishing, encouraging and supportive.

Throughout history, our societies have been held together largely through the architecture of prohibition. Alongside all the positive things they offer, the supposedly civilizing institutions of religion, politics, education and economics all project unambiguous messages about what we may not individually have, what we may not do, who we may not be, and what — in a broader social context — is simply not possible. This has never been truer for the United States than in this currently fraught political moment, when the whole store of our collective commons seems to have been wrested away from the people by the titans of finance, tech and corporate capitalism on the strength of that minority’s assertions that this is just as it should be. Alongside that plunder, a panoply of regressive ideological and political restrictions are being used to dismantle our social safety nets and remove the levers of democratic governance that originally enabled us to put them in place.

For all its many failures, this country of ours did attempt from its beginning to offer an alternative to all of that. The attraction of the so-called “American Dream” of individual freedom, self-determination and advancement has been enticing people from other, supposedly more constrained, places to emigrate here since even before the country’s founding. That dream has always been based in a theoretical refutation of all manner of prohibitive limitations, however much the realities on the ground may have thrown up obstacles to their circumnavigation. As new as they may appear against the backdrop of our traditional “Land of the Free” posture, the DNA of the specific obstacles we face today can be traced all the way back to the two original English colonies from which our republic was eventually built — Massachusetts’ Protestant Christian theocracy in the north, and Jamestown’s corporate investment venture in the south. The same can be said of the French and Spanish colonizers who came to Canada and to the West Indies, Central and South America. Right from the word go, all of Europe viewed the “new world” as a resource for the extraction of material wealth, aided by its military might and the imposition of its Christian religions on the local peoples from whom those resources needed to be taken. Seen in that light, the wistful Enlightenment project of founding a secular nation on principles of liberty, religious freedom and the equality of all its peoples, can appear rather quaint. And yet, a sincere effort to realize those egalitarian ideals has continued right alongside the least admirable of our original colonial motives, so that — at least here in the United States — we can fairly be said to have historically embodied both sides of the ideological divide that has finally and so cartoonishly boiled down to the pitched battles between Republicans and Democrats, socialism and capitalism and the conservative Right versus the liberal Left.

Something better than this must surely be attainable, but not until we stop listening to the voices telling us what it cannot be, and start envisioning for ourselves what it might be. This is where the mindset of the artist is needed. We are all being told a great many things right now about the limits of our world; about the “realistic” political and economic conditions within which we have no choice but to live. But it is only the people who benefit from keeping those conditions in place, and who will profit most from maintaining them into the future, who insist upon their inevitability, and this is typically a relatively small crowd. It is they who are forcing things we may not actually want upon us — from the digital media now so pervasively embedded in our daily lives, to the supposed coming revolution of Artificial Intelligence and the massive wealth gap between the oligarchs who are peddling all of this dystopian technological gimcrack to us and the far greater majority of people whose lives have been negatively impacted by their inventions. Look at the loss of our manufacturing to other countries, at the disastrously depleting and extractive technologies of industrialized agriculture (one of the few viable industries still operating here at home). Look at the death grip that the fossil fuel industry still maintains on our economy, even as the alternative technologies of renewable energy have finally proven to be more efficient and sustainable on the large scales that we were told for so long were unattainable. Look at the degree to which the speculative parasitic capitalism of hedge funds and private equity firms — which profit a minority of operators and “shareholders” while too frequently dismantling formerly useful businesses and services for the majority — has replaced the material logic of a dispersed manufacturing economy which actually produces things while also creating opportunities for all its contributors, from the producers of raw materials at one end to the users of its products at the other.

All these essentially destructive processes are sold to us by their purveyors with assurances that there could be no other way to do things, that this is just how things are, and that nothing can ever can go back to how it was (or in the case of tech and AI, that the proverbial “genie can never be put back in the bottle”). We accept these pronouncements as if they were founded in some scientifically immutable truth, even as we grow more resentful with each diminished return on the investment of that misguided faith in a system that takes the fruits of our economy away from us, pillages and destroys the environment while leaving us ordinary citizens further and further behind.

It is true that there are limits in life and in the material world. Much as I’d like to, I cannot sprout wings and fly, or live free of the vicissitudes of illness and old age. But the structures and economies of human societies, being products of the nebulous workings of our thought processes, are not limited by anything so fixed as the organic chemistry of a single mind. They are only bounded by our ability to think up different principles and then persuade a large enough group of our fellow citizens to agree to them. If we can imagine something better than what we presently have, the only impediments to its realization are the ability to articulate that vision to others and then summon the collective will to put it into action. The same applies to those visions we might decide to reject. The dominance of AI is only as inevitable as our own willingness to be dominated by it. The “broligarchs” and would-be authoritarians who insist on its inevitability are in fact a microscopic and intellectually puny minority. The whole combined cabal of their ring-leaders could probably fit within a rural minor league baseball park. So why exactly is a population of over 340 million allowing them to decide for us what we can and cannot be? Maybe it is because we have been so effectively trained, for so long, to believe that somebody else always knows better than we do what is actually possible.

This principle of imaginative self-determination lies right at the heart of the artistic life, and it doesn’t only involve a refusal to accept the conventions of society as a whole, but also often of the culture of art itself. Mainstream society can be discouraging enough of that life, but early in my career as a painter some strongly disdainful messages also began to issue from the world of art — i.e., that there were kinds of work which it was not acceptable to make, and ways of thinking about it that must perforce be seen as backward or unintelligent. We were even told for quite a while that painting was dead and would no longer be accepted by the art world as a valid pursuit. It was also clear, especially in the art schools that train young makers to participate in the market, that the sort of recognition on which an artistic livelihood so often depends could only be respectably achieved by accepting these disparaging ideas and embracing the “importance” of a range of supposedly more culturally valid ways of working. Yet despite all its pretenses at social relevance, much of the art that was getting attention in my thirties and forties devolved through those decades into a venture ever more fixated on the commodities of fashionable novelty and a level of superstar celebrity that was critically lavished on the artists who most cannily played those games. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the art market revealed itself as an engine of speculative commodification no less crass or parasitic than the mechanisms of high finance that had made its patrons wealthy enough to afford the preposterously inflated prices being regularly ginned up in the “top” galleries, art fairs and auction houses of the time.

Many of us who were turned off by these developments ended up by ignoring them altogether and forging viable lives and livelihoods for ourselves outside the boundaries of the “artworld”. For myself (as I know to be true for all my artist friends) I have tried throughout to make the best and most meaningful work that I possibly could, failing and falling short of my own high standards far more often than not, but nonetheless managing somehow to live this life and to support myself and my family in the process.

As in practically every other sphere of American culture today, the needs and logic of the market have dominated our arts ever since the end of the Second World War, and the trend began far earlier than that. But the life of the artist was never only about making and selling products or investment vehicles. Neither is it only about talent, genius, novelty, fame, or any of the other ego-inflating expressions of its practice which can be readily commodified by a market that trades so much on celebrity and fashion. Those things are of course all part of what happens with art and can create the filagree of variety that attracts our attention. But its deepest meanings and value do not reside there. The life of the artist is about refusing to be told who we may not be, and what is not possible. As Philip Guston once said, it is “. . . about freedom — about being free”, and thereby reflecting the kinds of truth that only genuine freedom from the manufactured prohibitions, limitations and tastes of any culture can allow. It doesn’t actually matter then what kind of art one chooses to make; it can be abstract or realistic, aesthetic or conceptual, political, spiritual or agnostic. None of that determines its quality. Its quality is determined by how well (artfully and skillfully) it does whatever kind of thing it sets out to do, and by how effectively it grasps and reflects the truths that exist outside the boundaries of every kind of constraining rule or prohibition. The true artist is the original, and in a sense the most functional of anarchists.

Our world is in a tough spot right now and needs badly to change. But a people so blindly habituated to believing what is not possible (because some supposed authority told them to) will never get there. We all need to be artists in spirit who can imagine, insist on and then create the better world that will only become possible when we are finally ready to question the limitations handed down by those most directly invested in maintaining them. A better world is attainable, but only if we can find it in ourselves to believe it so and then insist on its realization.