Floating Confusion, Please
So which is it? In my recent piece about the classical atelier at Gage Academy ("Art School Confidential," April 26), was I trying to say that mainstream art education is a highly organized fraud, or that the classical approach is a form of cultural fascism? By coincidence last week, I ran across two students arguing this point in a digital-art class at Cornish. (I was wandering the halls and sitting in on group critiques.) Other people had asked me, too, and it was in my mind right then because I'd come downstairs to the digital class from a painting critique upstairs.
The painter had studied at Gage, and now she was struggling to understand why the other students liked a dashed-off, intense painting of her face in the mirror better than a meticulous portrait of a nude holding a bird. When someone complimented her on the thermostat on the wall next to the nude and wondered whether it was a gesture toward warmth in the cool picture, she answered, "It was there; that's why I put it in."
Well, that's certainly literal. Workmanlike. This is the devoted laborer, not the romantic genius. That's Gage through and through, and it can be refreshing. Yet the painting of the face, the quick one, was better. And where would contemporary art be without the marvelously sustaining contradictions of romanticism?
This is why I love art dogma of all kinds. Each theory is wrong in some important and fascinating way. My own opinion is closest to what Peter Schjeldahl said in an interview for the story: "Art is a zone of permanent floating confusion amid the petty certainties of life, and people who can't handle it should really go into the family business and leave the rest of us alone." His words are perfect not only for their surface meaning, but also for the slight defensiveness of his tone, for the way he links conventionalities in art and family and business, and for his charisma, which takes its rightful place in the history of egotism that has made art such a good damn story to tell.
That's as clear as I get. Did you think I had an answer?
Department of Nearly Firm
1. "Nothing is firm yet," a Seattle Art Museum spokeswoman says, but according to the Chicago Art Institute's website, Lorenzo Ghiberti's famed gilt panels from the Florence Baptistery are headed to SAM. This is the first time the beloved Renaissance monuments have been to the U.S., stopping also at the High Museum in Atlanta and the Metropolitan in New York. Look for them here in '08.
2. Dirk Park and Jaq Chartier, Seattle artists and organizers of Aqua Art Miami (a secondary fair to Art Basel Miami Beach), are finalizing a contract to lease a warehouse in Miami's Wynwood neighborhood for three to five years. Aqua will double in size and, Park and Chartier hope, grow in stature, too. Soon Park will go on the road to find takers for the new Aqua warehouse stalls this December. 
