I probably should have said High Art and Low, to cover the range, but I think I’ll be saying more about the Low, so leaving the title as High above announces my proclivity and keeps it floating there in aspiration.

So, Low Art. A good place to begin answers to the question “What is Art, anyway?” We kinda sorta know it’s something out of the ordinary. It’s something that makes us respond to it. We’ve come to think, or at least art experts and critics have come to think, that art is the response itself, and anything that provokes it, triggers it, qualifies as art. They say “I oughta know, I have a degree and a self proclaimed exaltedness in quaquaquaqua.” I ask, “What did you study to become an expert?” They say, “quaquaqua.” I say, “Only three quas? So you didn’t or couldn’t go all the way?”

They say, “……”

That’s why we’ve gone through so many fazes, da da, minimalist art, accidental art…There seems to be an unmet need. I’ve written about this over and over because I’ve thought about it a lot, too much, enough to know its treachery, that once it gets its hooks into you it won’t let go and you have to escape to get to the rest of life. That’s why people know, some people know, that it’s not just a joke in a comedy routine to say, “Don’t get me started!” Because we know, or might know, or ought to know where that can lead.

Examples are good, always when you’re trying to explain something or trying to understand it.

The Twentieth Century did us in. It started with realizations. We know now in retrospect that some of them are wrong, even dangerous. We went through the smugness of self-satisfaction as the 19th turned into the 20th and “we” proclaimed “We’ve made it, we’ve arrived, science (we’re thinking physics) has reached its limit, we know everything there is to know and can describe it too…” But then we lost our balance when things became unstable and everything was relative and relativity became the current trend of thought. Ouch! Help! Where am I?

Those helpful explainers seduced us with a range of sloganized approaches: Everything means nothing, nothing means everything, it doesn’t matter because even matter is and isn’t…
The same with art: It isn’t art, it’s all art, it’s all a point of view, it all ends up the same any way you slice it, just go with the flow.

The man on the stage comes out and drops a watermelon. The watermelon goes splat. He bows. The audience applauds, sometimes even cheers. Sometimes, as an encore, he drops another watermelon. More applause. He bows, leaves the stage. Announcer comes out, says “Next show at eleven.” The audience buys another ticket.

The Printing Company prints out one word novels. Sales skyrocket. Publishing whets the appetite for “Our next great venture, novels of all blank pages, comes in several sizes, buy now while they’re still available.” They sell out, people line their shelves, happy they don’t have to read.

Guy on stage comes out carrying a chair. He sets the chair down. He sits on it and looks at the audience for ten minutes. He gets up, bows, takes the chair and walks off the stage. Audience applauds. They’re at a be-in and they’re done in.

I did it too. Wrote a poem about it. You should read it. I stopped at nothing. Didn’t go that far. Because I always wanted or needed a little bit of money and why would anybody pay me for nothing. I read the phone book to people at a party. They were reduced to tears. They said, “It’s so beautiful!” I said, “It’s the phone book.” I was trying to tell them something, teach them something. I’m always trying to teach somebody something because none of us knows enough, including me. They said, “It’s so moving, all those people, all those lives…” I said, “It’s the phone book.”

They say, “Art is in the eye of the beholder.” Cliches make it easy for us to say things. They can get us started. We hear the one-note symphony. Critics argue: “It’s too short.” “It’s too long.” “Where is it, where did it go, who am I, what are you?”
Some people like to play those games, get degrees in AP, Advanced Prognostication, get money for getting good at playing, making it seem real, as if it matters. We’re in the age that matters, anything matters, everything matters, nothing matters.

We saw it world-class. Cristo’s Umbrellas. He gerrymandered a reputation so people would give him money to make another Installation. This is not to say they’re bad. This is not to say they’re good. This is not to answer the question “Why?” with “Why not?”

The famous/infamous Umbrellas, yellow, planted along the freeway we traveled so much we thought of it as ours, and suddenly the hundreds of yellow umbrellas springing up out of the hills as you drove through this altered ambiance, with places where you could stop and park and picnic under an umbrella, and we did, and the news, the scandal, the “incident” where one woman sitting under an umbrella, and the umbrella, apparently not latched enough, collapsed folded inward killed her it was in all the papers and more people came to see which umbrella was it, the killer umbrella, and lawsuits dismissed because, you know, it’s art, and people gave more money so Cristo could do something even bigger in the ocean.

And I was there to see it.

And, as I said, I did my own. I put a rock on a table. I said, “Look at it.” If they hadn’t read Blake who saw “a world in a grain of sand,” I encouraged them to pick up a book and open it. I said, “Look at the rock.” They did. They said, “It’s a rock.” I said, “Keep looking.” They started opening out. “Wow! Look at that! Colors. I hadn’t noticed, look at the little patterns, I never knew, it makes you think…”

Chalk up one for UCR Freshman English and the borrowed technique from Reed College, “Look at the blade of grass…” And you’re in it with Whitman and you’ve opened out to thought and response, and you’re ready for art which is there and waiting.

So thank you again, UCR, for making me be myself, and sometimes allowing me. For opening me up to know.

And speaking of art, the perception is in the response, it’s art when you feel it is. And that gives us levels of art, higher/lower, judged by what triggers the response and how strong it is. But that’s muddy waters and a sticky wicket because anything can lead to anything and all responses register in the brain exactly the same, and here I am so much wanting to make distinctions, and I find one that satisfies sufficiently: High Art gives us more to work with, more starting points of complexity that allow us to feel many things at once.

That’s better. I’m making progress. So I think of the rock again, and my own experiences. I remember we were witness to the Great Rock controversy, where the Director of LACMA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, decided on a project to establish for himself a needed credibility, found a Big Rock in the quarry just to the east of us maybe not as far as Ontario or maybe all the way out to Rubidoux and the little mountain being mined into non-existence, and had it slowly trucked along surface streets to Wilshire Boulevard and the Museum grounds, and masterminded the media so there was daily coverage of the progress in the newspapers and on tv as camera crews kept reporting updates and showing how many feet and yards it had moved along nearer, and posted the mapped route chosen for widest street and fewest needs for alteration, widening, trees removed, structures moved back a little, crowds gathering to watch and cheer the one- float parade coming soon to your neighborhood almost exactly like the same process to parade the space shuttle along the streets to the cheers of the same crowds, and then finally the Big Truck brought the Big Rock to the place prepared, outside art and outsider art, above a waiting trench in the ground yard where you could go and look and point and bring field trip school children who could say, “I saw the Rock,” and the trench under it so you walk down and feel the fear hovering just above and walk up and out the other side and say, “I’ve experienced art.”

And I went and looked at it, and I saw the Rock and it was just a rock and I didn’t walk under it because there was no need. And I’m able to say, “If this is art, it doesn’t go far enough.” Because I’ve seen more. I’ve experienced more.

I think of the rhythmic repetitions that go on too long and pretend to be music. I think of the milder drugs like alcohol and pot that allow people to endure, and I absolutely shy away from those stronger drugs that may dull you longer but may damage and you might not be able to come back and there are famous examples, and I remember my wife to whom I was addicted by choice and she would say, “When you’re high on life you don’t need drugs,” and she knew it from experience.

And what kind of art is it if you need drugs to appreciate it, should they have little drug dispensers by the museum entry doors, like holy water as you enter church?

And the art of approximately right now is such a range it’s like a smorgasbord and you can choose and sample from so many choices, and some artists you can even talk to, but some are after last chances, like Jackson Pollock, I can’t say anything to him now, like “OK, OK, you spill the paint and hope for something, like throwing dice; and yes, it is better than the elephant who backs up to the canvas and brushes on paint with his tail, but couldn’t keep enough paint on the brush to make the patterns stronger, but you, Jackson, you have enough paint to splash and dribble, but then you take the canvas up and hang it on the wall of acclaim, too late now to leave it on the floor so we can walk on it and become a part of it, dance on it and make an extended participatory art, too late for you but not for us.”

And so I go to the Norton Simon Museum, miraculously close enough to where I live, more carefully curated than its near-by rivals LACMA and the Getty. I can take the time I need to overwhelm myself, the past the present together holding the hoped-for future. And I stop and look with those who stop and look and share the unbounded moment, and sometimes, when people dressed trendy for museum going pass by the paintings, I might say, docent-like, stop and look.

So there I am, teaching again. Not just teaching words, it’s life itself, and I want to share it.

Maybe I should go out on the street and grab someone at the corner before they pass by and say, “Look! See! You actually can read the signs after all! And think! And realize we’re all in this together!”

But I would get in trouble, they’d call the thought police to put me away.

So I look around to see who I can reach and teach (I know it should be whom.).