I can talk about it because I don’t know anything. For some people, ignorance is bliss. For me, it’s permission.

I can give my opinion. I can re-hash bits and pieces I’ve picked up and partially digested. But I’m afraid to read the critics, and I’ll tell you why.

My body is a finely tuned instrument, a calibrated machine designed to fight infection, harmful foreign substances. The body purges intrusions. I try to watch what I eat, what I take in. Sometimes the result is constipation, packed so tight my insides clench in pain. Sometimes the result is opposite and disturbances can go on for days. Either way, it’s not a pretty picture.

Speaking of pretty pictures, and how they’re produced, here again I just don’t know. It’s beyond me.

I know for millennia there have been Masters of art who take apprentices to study at their feet, wash the brushes, and take out the trash. The apprentices study for years to draw a line on canvas. They learn technique, then master it. They have control. They can produce.

There was a time when art required technique. There was also a realization, though not commonly held, that technique is not art. The true artist was able to go beyond and judge, to say to the proficient but without soul apprentice, “You will never be an artist.” The apprentice, now with his skills intact, may answer back, “You’ve taught me all you can.” The artist says, “Alas, yes, that’s unfortunately true, you’ve learned all you can.” The apprentice upstarts and says, “I now can paint as well as you. I can paint on demand, as even you yourself have done to stay alive. I can do portraits. I can make people look better than they are. I can make more money than you. Who are you to judge me? I’ll be rich, which will verify success, status, acclaim. You, go back to your chamber, eat your gruel, struggle for years to capture the elusive. I don’t worry about what history remembers, I remember myself. I’ll make a name for myself and people will say it and flock to me in popularity.” The artist admits, “It’s lonely at the top.”

Well, that was a ramble. But peripherally relevant. It does try to make a point about art and what is and isn’t, and about people, the majority, who can’t tell the difference.

I hate to say it, but so many people, maybe most people, aren’t very smart. And they’re gullible. They swallow what you feed them. You tell them it’s art, they believe it. They’re good little parrots. Art, art, art.

But it gets more complicated. It’s always more complicated.

Art frees the spirit. Some artists are such free spirits that they don’t want restraint. They don’t go to the academies because they don’t want the spirit beaten out of them. The academies have learned the rules of art and how to enforce them. They’re the Supreme Court of Art and say how and how not, who is and who isn’t.

So many bursting with creativity avoid the Institutions, Schools, Academies, because they don’t want their edges squared off. Paul Robeson didn’t want to study singing because he already had a voice.

I, who know nothing, have nonetheless had some experience. We had a friend, sixty years ago, I won’t say his name, who manufactured a reputation. He painted the sun. Round, in burning colors, brush strokes emanating out to the edges of the canvas. He had a gimmick which he invented, or hoped he invented, to establish and guarantee that he had produced art. He framed the pictures at an angle. He made the frames himself to be unique. He was like the people who change the spelling of their names to some unclaimed configuration to patent their identity, to hold at bay the fear that there may be no other way to establish that they are who they are.

We all have insecurities.

And I don’t know what to say, because our friend with the askew suns which he sold to community leaders, enhancing his reputation as he hung on their walls, confessed to us that he was only in it for the money, and we laughed because we knew better, apparently more than he did, what was and wasn’t art. And then I looked again at his art (which, by the way, we declined to buy, even politely refusing it as an offered gift, protecting the sanctity of our walls for what we could agree as art), and I saw something there, even if he didn’t.

And all those questions I can’t answer. Does the artist always realize what he’s created? If he had intentions, does his production embody and release them? Is “art” in the thing itself, or in the eye of the beholder? What makes it art? Is it still art if we don’t respond to it? If a tree falls in the forest… Can anything be art if we think it is or decide it is? Who’s to decide? If someone studies, researches, learns the jargon, and pronounces and pontificates, gives the blessing, does that sanctify? How do we answer the questions, “What is it?” and “Who’s to say?”

We live in difficult times, dangerous times, slippery, unleashed, unhinged. We have the camera to blame for a lot of it. It’s too hard and takes too long to master representational technique, even harder to go beyond it to whatever’s beyond. There are fewer and fewer who have studied, taken the time, to rival the camera when, these days, even the camera in the right hands can become a tool to probe and release, and hang on the same walls of mastery with centuries, creation not limited by literal.

Andrew Wyeth showed us masters’ mastery is not dead and gone, and we speak of him in reverent whispers. Salvador Dali showed us careful control of consummate technique which still can exist and give service to expanding ideas and emotional response. One can be eccentric, sport a mustache, walk your lobster on the streets of New York, and still be an artist.

We’ve passed by impressionism to where impatient souls threw paint at the canvas and answered the question, “What does it mean?” with the reply, “What do you think?”

We’re still awash in relativity where “anything is art,” “everything is art.” We’ve dumbed ourselves down to where we need someone to tell us.
That’s why when I read the rhetoric of “experts,”
I get a physical reaction, revulsion. The “incandescent transparencies of hierarchical transubstative infusion…” I want to vomit. I want to stop reading. I eschew obfuscation.

If we cut through their rhetoric, steady our stomachs, see what they have to say, they can be helpful.

But I can make up my own mind.