authenticity

this past week, working between a young emerging artist and an older established artist, a major theme keeps emerging in various conversations with people and observations. authenticity.

i first made the observation that in both cases the art i am working with doesn't suck. it is done with such sincerity and skill. next i began to have several conversations about art with people that somehow or another landed on the topic of authenticity in art and how contemporary art is so full of concepts that the aesthetic falls by the way side and it becomes too self conscious. pretentious. anything but authentic.

what inspired me to write about this, after several false starts, was a comment made tonight by a museum director regarding his own post undergraduate down period.

with no encouragement from me, he began reminiscing how he began his undergrad painting landscapes. once in school for a while the brow beating to abandon landscapes and make a cohesive body of more 'interesting' work set in and then once he graduated he didn't paint for a long time. then one day he started painting landscapes again.

interesting.

earlier in the week a museum curator was also chatting about art with me. she spoke of how academic art has been for so long and how we are so consumed with what art is and isn't that we aren't making authentic art anymore.

i agree completely.

over the weekend a friend and i shared some tea and she told me how she recently decided to go back to painting after a year of trying other mediums. she came to this after having a professor at her grad school lectured her about how distant her art had become after trying to be more ambiguous with her subject. she realized that all that time she was making the artwork everyone told her she should rather than what she knew really wanted to.

sometimes you have to create distance to see what it is you really want or where you want to be.

the issue of authenticity comes up in most conversations about art. my husband has grappled with it many times over. i bitch about it constantly upon returning from some art openings and then rave about it when returning from others.

i think the bottom line is that i don't want to go back to making art until i feel that it is authentic again. at this point i am still detoxing and processing all of that bull shit you face in school. i know this space is necessary. to breath again. then reconnect. to figure out what i want.

i still can't help but wonder though...did i ever make art that was authentic?

remember the pet pine cones...
pretty damn authentic.