The other day, I was visiting a local gallery, looking to see what was selling and what was not, and it struck me: the art world today is a commodity world.  Art is judged not as a byproduct of the creative process but as a consumable.  In the commodity art world, the only thing that matters about art is how saleable it will be.  Artists pick the direction of their work based entirely on how well it will sell.  

In the commodity art world, art is not made by housewives, or fathers, or lawyers, or plumbers.  In the commodity art world, art is only made by the aesthetic elite dressed in black clothes, pointy shoes, with parts of their body pierced in unusual and disturbing ways.  Even worse, in the commodity art world, the most saleable art is art that's made by suffering artists -artists with substance abuse problems, or personality disorders, or clinical depression.  In the world of commodity art, outrageous art is good, because outrageous art sells.  

And, as a result, for most people, art is something that is done by someone else - someone who is special, someone who is different, someone who is unfathomably strange - Damien Hirst, or Robert Mapplethorpe, or perhaps Jackson Pollock.  In the commodity art world, real people do not make art - real people work in real jobs, to earn the money to buy art.  If you want to be a successful artist and make Real Art, you need to be angst ridden, self destructive, unhappy, and probably at least partly unhinged.

I think that's sad, and I think that's self defeating, but worst of all I think that's ultimately going to result in a lot of bad art and a lot of unhappy artists.  Twisting your art to conform to standards of what will sell is bad, but twisting your life to conform to some standard of suffering so that your art will sell is much, much worse.

R. Buckminster Fuller wrote a poem titled No More Secondhand God, which included the line "God is a verb, not a noun".  I think that those words could be aptly applied to the art world (and especially to the photographic art world) today.  Art, I think, is better viewed as a verb than a noun - that is, as artists (and photographers are artists) we'd be better off if we viewed art as a process rather than a product.

Viewed from this process standpoint, the best art is not the art that you buy, it's the art that you participated in making.  From the process perspective the photograph you made this morning is more valuable than a vintage print of Moonrise over Hernandez, NM.  And the photograph you print tomorrow is more valuable than Pepper #30.  Most importantly, the photograph you are making right now is the most important photograph of all, because it's an unfinished image; you're actually in the process.  Process is important; the print is just an artifact, a byproduct of the process.  The real goal of making art is to be making art, not the objects you create.

It's not that I'm opposed to thinking about the product - indeed, if you happen to be an art collector, it's the product that matters.  But as an artist, I think it's a mistake  to attempt to deal with art as a product, and not as a process.  I think that primarily because the vast majority of artists are not making their art so it can be sold in the commodity art world; the vast majority of artists are ordinary folks who make art as part of their life - the housewives, lawyers, plumbers, high school students.  For those artists, the important thing is the process, not the outcome.  Those artists are ordinary folks who have realized that art is not a spectator sport.

It's time to break free of the influence of the commodity art world, and start promoting art as a process and not a product.  I'd like to start a movement for all the underground artists - the mothers who make pencil sketches while their children nap, the fathers who long to paint, the teenage soccer player who yearns for solitude with a camera.  I'd like to call the movement "Art is a verb, not a noun," and I'd like to have the motto be "No more secondhand art."

It's been said that there were three questions that could be usefully applied to art:

1. What was the artist trying to do?

2. Was he/she successful?

3. Was it worth it?

Those are interesting questions but unfortunately they're posed from the point of view of the consumer of art, and not from the point of view of the creator of the art. They presuppose that the reason for making art is that the result will be valuable; they deal with the goal of creation from the perspective of product, and not from the perspective of process.  

 

I'd like to suggest a related different set of questions to be applied to a work of art:

1. Does this work open up new avenues for me to explore?

2. Do I understand more about anything as a result of making this work?

3. Now that I've made this work, what will I make next?

Repeat after me: Art is a verb, not a noun.  No more secondhand art.