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On Yves Klein's Work Currently up at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis
'a bit of a rant' --n.j.o.
About the time I was entering what would now be called “middle school” (hint, I'm 62 years old),
Yves Klein had 3000 people line up for entrance into an empty room painted white. This happened
in Paris and is counted a mighty aesthetic statement in some quarters… well, maybe it is or was,
but I have to think that Klein was just full of shit and his only point was that people are dumb
enough that you could sell them “anything from Diet Sprite / to one hundred thousand points of light”
(in the words of Todd Snyder)… You see, the point is that the fucking ROOM WAS EMPTY!!! Empty,
there was nothing there… so much of contemporary art seems to take off from exactly this tangent…
which is to say, if you can convince somebody that something is “ART” then they will pay you money
or if you are not after money, you get the satisfaction of proving that you are smarter than everybody else…
because you got thousands of them to line up to look at an empty room… or some object you made - like a
shark in a plexiglass cube or a blue painted square… it is all a game played by the rules of the MOMA art
world… which lives and breaths at museums of contemporary art in every city in the USA and in the Art
Departments of American universities and colleges…
This is truly art about art existing entirely in the ideological world outlined so many years ago by Tom
Wolf in The Painted Word. Amazingly, the whole business of doing art since about the 1930s (dating from
the then aesthetically revolutionary International Surrealist Exhibition which featured Salvador Dali's Rainy
Day Taxi) has not really changed much… different kinds / colors of squares of monochrome canvas, different
objects found or put together… splashy abstract “object” paintings… all that have value only because the
Art World and the Art Marketing World give them value… and if the piece is hung in the MOMA in your town or
city, it becomes a venerated object, no matter how stupid or banal as art… a celebrity item, like Elvis's shirt…
A Pollack is worth millions because it was made by the famous Jackson Pollack even though it is just a bunch
of paint dripped on cloth… and yes, the wealthy collectors who endow the museums struggle mightily to insure
that their crap does not lose value… they do this by squashing any aesthetic that does not add to the value
of their collections… and what I call “value” is only of interest to the non-insider when attached to a dollar
sign or hung in a snobby MOMA type of establishment that we outsiders go to as a sort of punishment because Culture
is supposed to be "good for us…" or our high school is on a field trip there... by controlling the university
art departments and the museums of modern art, which is to say, the non profit arts sector, the money that is
in their arts foundations and endowments is just an investment to see that the art they are collecting remains
expensive…
Back in the early 20th Century, the collectors who paid the modern equivalent of millions of dollars
for paintings by Gerome and Bougereau saw the value of their collections plummet as the new aesthetic
became accepted… Cezanne replaced Gerome… the same thing would happen today, if somebody did not work
hard to see that Yves Klein to Damien Hirst type bullshit remained the only art allowed… the juries who
give out arts grants for example are art establishment careerists who give the dough to those who toe
this party line and the money for those grants is controlled by the same kind of careerists who were
rejecting Cezanne when he brought his paintings to the Official Salon in a wheelbarrow… the aesthetic
philosophy is different but the dynamic is the same… I guess the art establishment is still protesting
against the art of the 19th Century or of their parents or of Stalin or of Rembrandt… but that
representational art is so long gone that it cannot even be seen anymore… so the revolution against
representational paintings on canvas, drawings on paper, etc… has been over since 1935… so, can
we finally FINALLY admit at these museums of “modern art” that if you call a blue square or whatever
“ART” then it is “ART” because you define the terms… the question of what is or is not ART was not
very interesting in 1935 and has zero interest today… so, with that question out of the way, does
the blue square or the empty room have anything to offer of more interest than other blue squares or
empty rooms?? Is there any reason for anybody to care that the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis is
putting on a big exhibit of Yves Klein crapola??? Well, no, frankly, not really… intellectual
drivel multiplied by 50 years is still drivel…
In fact, in the Walker Art Center's endless attempts to masturbate its collection into something exciting,
or even moderately interesting, they apparently think that blue squares or smudges from naked ladies rolling
in paint are very profound… well, it is their gallery and I guess they can indulge in whatever sort of puerile
bullshit they like, but how how how do they continue to find people to take this silliness seriously???
AFTER 50 Years!!!!!
I am no longer even advocating for the kind of art that interests me… I have long since lived through the
twentieth century (and the revolution was pretty much over before I was born) and I admit that MOMA has won…
their ART is the only ART and really, well, my only response is the bitterness of the defeated whenever my
attention is drawn in that direction and a bit of a rant… most of the time, I ignore the ART world and go
about my business happy as a fucking clam in the wilderness of Maplewood… but I would be thrilled right
down to my toes, if someday someone would actually have the nerve to say, “the room is empty… the emperor
is naked as a jay bird… there is nothing there of any intellectual or aesthetic substance”
And hey, in spite of all their money and their vast establishment, their castles and mountains of banal
conceptual art and gallery installations, they cannot stop me and thousands of artists like me from
doing what we do… we draw and paint… we never enter a museum of “modern art,” we tell them to shove
their grants up their ass… we accept that our art will not be sold at an auction for a hundred million
dollars (a la Damien Hirst) and we turn our back absolutely on anything even tangentially related to
contemporary art!!! Fuck them and the horse they rode in on!!! And if we are self deluded and our so
called “art” has no value, and our masterpieces will wind up on our nephews' walls or lining a landfill
someplace… well, at least we will live and die free… and that is more important than art anyway…
Previously publsihed in PoetryRepairs Vol.10.11:15
Norman J. Olson is a poet, artist and civil service worker.
Since publishing his first poem in 1984, after many years of submission and rejection, he has
published hundreds of poems and drawings in 15 countries and all over the USA. He worked
in a factory printing telephone books from 1968 to 1988 and since then has worked at civil service clerical jobs.
Web Site
Email: Norman J. Olson
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