On Art

This... This I would frame and hang on the wall behind my headboard.

Anyone who is enough of a pretentious bastard to have taken an art history class will tell you that during the Renaissance, art was a big industry. Young boys with rich parents and an interest in art were apprenticed to established masters of the craft, who in turn would make them into great artists themselves, provided there wasn’t a plague outbreak and nobody got punched in the face so hard that their nose was permanently fucked up. After their apprenticeship was completed, young artists could make a healthy living in cities like Florence or Rome, which were full of rich patrons who were eager to blow hella ducats to commission paintings and sculptures for their houses.

Art today is a big industry as well, but in a way that most people would agree has far less cultural merit. The good news is that unlike Renaissance art, popular artwork today is not entirely made up of pictures of some poor man nailed to a piece of wood. The bad news is that some of the most popular artwork today is manufactured by Painter of Light™ Thomas Kinkade, who many people would argue should be nailed to a piece of wood.

A lot of Thomas Kinkade’s criticism revolves around the fact that his art is mass-produced and sold on QVC or in mall galleries. Yes, it turns out that when you drop hella ducats on a Thomas Kinkade painting, what you’re actually getting is a high quality digital print on a canvas which has had some paint daubed onto it by a migrant worker in the Thomas Kinkade Artistic Sweatshop of Light. People say that this is dishonest and manipulative – that making a career out of painting sub-par artwork is fine, but that printing the sub-par artwork on sub-par materials is bad.

Thomas Kinkade makes glorified posters – but that’s kind of the new style. Posters are our art.

If you walk into a room occupied by a college student, you have about as good a chance of seeing one of the following posters as you do of smelling severe body odor:

1) John Belushi in a sweatshirt that says, “COLLEGE”
2) The poster for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
3) Bob Marley doing pretty much anything
4) Tony Montana

When I first came to school, I saw these posters so much that I honestly thought that all students at the University of Oregon only bought posters from one predetermined source so as not to create too much unwanted cultural diversity. Imagine my surprise a few weeks later when I found out that I was right – more or less every poster on campus comes from a poster vendor who sets up shop at the once-a-term University street fair.

Every time I’m at the street fair I browse through the poster guy’s selection in hopes of finding a poster for a movie I like so much that I’m willing to spend $20 to hang an advertisement for it in my room. This has yet to happen, because posters for the things that I’m interested in are definitely underrepresented at the street fair.

There are pictures of bikini clad women with big boobs, and let me say right off that I wholeheartedly support bikini clad women with big boobs. I am all about that shit. At the same time, though, I’d feel kind of awkward hanging a huge poster of a bikini clad woman with big boobs in my room, because it’s more or less saying to everyone who visits you, “Hey! Guess what I look at when I masturbate!”*

*There are also realistic drawings of fantasy-style topless elf girls with big boobs, which say, “Hey! Guess what I look at when I log out of World of Warcraft long enough to masturbate!”

There are pictures of huge disasters, like old-timey train crashes or the Hindenburg exploding, accompanied by the words “OH SHIT!” in huge block letters. Don’t get me wrong – I love laughing at the misfortunes of others, but if I died in a horrible train or zeppelin accident and found out 70 years later that some 19-year-old douchebag had a glib picture of the disaster on his wall, I’d be a little bit pissed off. I’m actually sort of worried that in 70 years there’s going to be an “OH SHIT” picture for September 11th.

And then there are the movie posters, by which I mean, the posters for 300, Scarface, Donnie Darko, and Moulin Rouge!. No other movies exist in college.

The only reason that art patronage ever happened in the first place was because people wanted to spend money to have things they liked in their homes. The primary reason that people hired artists to create their decorations was because there was no such thing as mass produced art one could buy on the street – also, 300 had not come out yet.

Now, though, people still want to adorn their houses with things that they like, but since everyone sees the same movies and posters are easy to make and cheap to buy, that’s what people wind up going with. Even a non-college student is far more likely to go with a high quality print of his favorite Rembrandt than dig up a living painter (if they even exist anymore) and spend considerably more money on an original picture that he may or may not like when it’s finished. I’m sure that if during the Renaissance patrons had a way to get cheap, high quality copies of the finest art mankind had to offer, a lot of them would have done that instead of taking this kind of risk.

So yes, mass produced art may be driving original artists out of business and limiting artistic progress. But apparently the customer is always right.

Truman Capps has a high quality print of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” hanging in his room, so he’s part of the problem. However, he has also ordered a print of a fake oil painting of humans doing battle with evil robotic Cylons, so say what you will about that.