Simple Selfishness

Raise your hand if you have a major department store nearby or that you visit which sells items for the home, like Pillows, Clocks, Furniture, Blinds or Curtains, Clothes, etc. The odds would stand to reason in today's world that you do, and if you are in a larger American city you might have five, ten, or fifty such stores all within easy driving distance. Have you ever looked at the art sold en masse that they have available?

The other day I was waiting for my appointment to get my hair cut. I was wandering around the department store nears the lamps and pillows looking to play with the lamps that turn on with a touch and finding the softest pillows. I happened to stop in the art section to look over the works of others. The post modern meaningless visual expressions with title like "Ascension of Pluto" and "Horses on Water" are often not that bad to look at. I plot out the original movements of brushstrokes and masked out sections in my mind wondering if I should remember enough to make my own version.

But I also pay attention to the much smaller and simpler items who's name is often a redundant description of what we already know, "Pressed Violet", "Fabric Swatch #14", "Dried Clovers". These little pieces can cost up around 50 dollars. That's 89.01 Australian Dollars, 391.70 Danish Krones, 6,226.71 Japanese Yen, or 11,918.03 Slovenian tolar. In other words, not exactly cheap. You pay this much for a few meals, or a really good computer game, or several good books.

I often wonder how many of these items that they sells when the aspiring artist can pick any small bunch of violets or the local flower, drop it in some painting paste or goo and flatten it themselves. The frames should cost a significant amount less. Or industrious artist may make their own frames which give them the opportunity to hang a piece of personal art on their wall that more than mimics the 50 dollar masterpiece available to the general public.

Even more infuriating to me is the one of hundreds of prints of "Geese Flying Backwards" or "Water Lily Flattened" that is selling for prices the original probably couldn't net itself. I'm not bitter from rejection but angry at the audacity that is granted an artist in the position to sell their art. Perhaps that's part of the reason I do art, to defy the money makers of our day and their "Print 679 of 2500" priced at 1450 dollars (figure your own conversion on that one.) I'd rather do my own research for a half hour to get the Chinese or Japanese Character that I want to put in a blank frame. After all what we are seeing for the most part is just a print. In some instances, some large format plotter somewhere was spitting out a colorful fish worth 475 dollars a sheet, 15 sheets an hour.

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