In Search of Old Fashioned Art Values

The 6.2 million dollar banana sale at Sotheby’s a few days prior to the writing of this blog piece, has got me longing for a certain old fashioned flavor in the arts.

To recap, quoting NPR (full piece linked here):

“A piece of conceptual art consisting of a simple banana, duct-taped to a wall, sold for $6.2 million at an auction in New York on Wednesday, with the winning bid coming from a prominent cryptocurrency entrepreneur.

Comedian, by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, was a phenomenon when it debuted in 2019 at Art Basel Miami Beach, as festival-goers tried to make out whether the single yellow piece of fruit affixed to a white wall with silver duct tape was a joke or cheeky commentary on questionable standards among art collectors. At one point, another artist took the banana off the wall and ate it.”

To save space and my reader’s eyes, I’m not going to launch a critique of the 6.2 banana incident — Instagram commenters have taken care of that for me already.

What I want to get into here today is seeming loss of traditional values in the arts and the elevation of performance, ego, and money above those things that have always sustained the arts: history, technique, standing on the shoulders of giants, color, shapes, drawing, light.

I’ll disclose here that I am the daughter of a classicist (stepfather) who dragged our family of seven from medieval French church to ancient archeological Sicilian ruins for several of my quite formative years. I came of age in the 90s, graduating high school in 1995. While I attended a formal western fine arts program in college, I was also immersed in DJ culture, sticker art coming out of RISD, graffiti and the like. I’m no stranger to performance art, and was a huge fan of Marina Abramovic in my coming of age years.

And yet — street culture, art and, well, people in the mid-90s — still felt grounded in ways I’m not sure I have the words to express.

Let’s take Basquiat, the soaring symbol of New York street art breaking through into the fine arts world in the 1980s for example. He was grounded in technique. Often erroneously, people look at his work and think his graphic scribbles were lucky strikes (or strokes). Nothing could be further than the truth. As every abstract artist who has a decent teacher in art school knows, abstract artists are regularly told that their path to improving their abstraction lies in improving traditional drawing skills — human anatomy, life drawing, perspective — and realism. In other words, to be abstract, to be conceptual, or to be a street artist — the truly excellent work twice as hard and do twice as much, conquering both classical realism and the methodologies of abstraction or their field.

Basquiat began drawing in New York museums at the age of 6 and studied human anatomy. His work was soaringly popular immediately because it rested in something. It was part of a tradition, a legacy, and stood in that legacy to create something new that had never been done. That’s talent. That’s art. That’s the creative life.

I do not claim to know if the creators and consumers of the 6.2 million dollar banana piece can draw. What I am worried about is the vibe of the whole thing — the elevated mockery and brash tech bro wink wink nod nod of it all. It feels like the Chinese billionaire who purchased the piece, the artist of the banana work, and Elon Musk are maybe all good friends — hanging out, flushing hundreds down the toilet, exploding their Prius’ in their driveways and mocking us. Certainly Elon Musk doesn’t seem to have the sense of dignity that an earlier tech bro version, Steve Jobs, had. Steve Jobs, for all his flaws and angry intensity, gave one the feeling that he was inventing and creating and making and really, really, really cared about it. Jobs’ had a seriousness to his technological revolution that gave the vibe that he was trying to be of service to humanity by making cool new shit. He also gave the vibe that he was truly well-versed in the way of the computer. I always loved those old school photos of him in his garage, coding or doing whatever it is that tech folks do when they are 12 years old and want to change the world.

The feeling I got from Steve Jobs was the same feeling I got at 18 and 19 in an east coast art school hanging out with my friends who sprayed graffiti (long before it was called street art) and made beats in their basements. My friends were about something. It was a fuck you to tradition — because they studied and knew tradition and therefore were actively protesting that which was known. Understood. Studied. My friends were art school dropouts who had grown up playing classical music. My friends played in punk bands in cold Pittsburgh and Philly basements and wrote zines and coded the very first feminist online blogs — because they deeply cared about philosphy, culture and history in the United States and wanted to change this place for the better.

I miss the late 90s. I miss the earnestness, the absolute dedication with which we went to punk shows and raves and danced until dawn. My crew and I ended up in a tiny dancehall outside DC once where I heard Jamiroquai play for the first time. Sure we were drugged up out of our minds — but that wasn’t the reason we feverishly discussed the band all the way home. It was a fresh new sound to us and we cracked it open, obsessed to understand its influences, origins and inventive newness. We were hungry for the new and creating culture as we went, because we were also being trained thoroughly in the traditions of the past. Mondrian painted trees that eventually became squares. Frankenthaler studied under the Mexican muralist Rufino Tamayo. Tamayo taught her to value craftsmanship and materials.

I hesitate to say this because I am not an art critic nor an art historian and don’t wish to be. I’m a poet, a painter and was once upon a time an anthropologist writing ethnographies about youth and culture. This blog is merely a collection of yearnings for what seemed to be a simpler, kinder time in art and making and culture. With that caveat, what I want to say is that in my view its harder to break with tradition when you know tradition. When you value and love tradition it’s harder to create a revolution. One becomes attached to certain eras, styles, pieces. As an artist, when you know and fall in love with tradition you can become stuck in copying what was instead of creating something new. I was never so humiliated as when I showed an early work to a gallerist in a very fancy schmancy gallery in Los Angeles, who looked at it for 2.3 seconds and pronounced the death sentence: “looks like Helen Frankenthaler.” Damn. I had failed. It did look like Frankenthaler.

And that’s the point. That is the entire work of the artist. To be grounded in tradition — and to create something new. Something interesting. Something that pushes the way we think or feel or experience beauty or see the world.

Painters who paint in the manner and style of prior masters — yes, Basquiat included — are evolving through only a stage of creative development. No one wants to be compared to Jackson Pollock or Romare Bearden, just to name 2 of the American homegrown greats. An artist wants to only be compared to herself. Copying and recreating and working in the style of is the phase that precedes originality and revolution and inventiveness. It’s a necessary stage. One is learning. One is inhabiting the mind and energy of a master before breaking free into the authenticity of oneself, like a child who learns to dress in pink dresses like her mother before donning a pair of black doc martens and shaving her head.

Because that’s the absolute madness of being a creative, being an artist. It’s to work furiously to come to a place where you are making something that is yours that is pushing humanity forward. It’s an almost impossible feat and as artists and makers we fail at it all the time. I can understand the desire of current artists to just jump in and make conceptual, political pieces. It is certainly more fun to create an installation of yarn and dried flowers and cow skulls than it is to sit in a oxygenless room on an uncomfortable stool and draw human pelvises for 3 years. But every really fantastic artist I know — from the head of an animation studio in Los Angeles, to an underground London DJ, to abstract painters in Brooklyn, to fashion design teachers at FIT — is grounded in tradition. They know how to mix color. They know the pigments Michelangelo used in the Sistine Chapel. They’ve learned something about Aboriginal artists and Japanese art of the Edo period. They spend hours and years learning to draw.

Speaking of the head of the animation studio in Los Angeles, he was one of my drawing teachers when I was coming back to painting from a long hiatus working as a researcher in academia. We met on a dating app, and were supposed to have a torrid romance, except we forgot because he found my drawing skills weak and decided to teach me what he knew. He was extremely hot, had a cool name, was a snappy dresser and had a gorgeous filmstar friend group. And yet, we went from dating to drawing lessons in under a few weeks and I traveled through LA traffic for an hour and a half during rush hour to get to his studio. He rushed home from work to set up the lessons, which he gave to me for free and unpaid. He made me draw boxes. For weeks. Boxes upon boxes. We had found artistic union and everything else fell away. I drew boxes, he taught boxes, I traveled in Los Angeles rush hour traffic, and he gave me time for free and we never touched each other. We just — made art. We had found in each other — under our aging cool kids veneer — a shared love of traditional techniques in art. I loved the rigor of foundational lessons I was receiving, and he was obsessed with making sure I held my pencil correctly. It was love of a different kind, and a glimpse of the simpler artistic traditions we had both grown up in on different sides of the United States — he on the West Coast, I on the East.

So when I read about this banana, and the wink wink nod nod of it all, I can’t help but feel like something really big has gone wrong in our core values as a community of artists and makers and creatives. Perhaps I am an overly earnest person, an overly serious person, but I value tradition. I value history. I value collectors who understand something about the movements in American Art when they purchase from an artist showing in the United States, art viewers who get that Basquiat’s paintings are an evolution — not chaotic lines that a kid could paint. I think of my hairdresser who is born and raised in real Brooklyn — not the hipster colonized Brooklyn, but the Brooklyn my African-American father and grandmother knew — who went to the Sistine Chapel for the first time this year and described in exacting detail every sensation, emotion, and reaction she had. “I cried, I couldn’t leave the chapel,” she said as she pulled my hair into sections. “I wanted to tell you because I see you here sitting and drawing all the time.” My hairdresser from Brooklyn doesn’t have a fancy art school degree, she just loves art and values tradition. I appreciate her emotions more than I understand the joke of a 6.2 million dollar banana. In fact, I’ll be clear: I don’t get it. I don’t. But I do get that I feel slightly manipulated and a little snookered by this banana incident, and from the outrage of regular people on Instagram it seems like they do too.