Art and Trust

I think artists are decision makers and leaders who find the political discourse of their place and time to be outrageous and infantile. They aren't retreating from political life so much as collaborating with others and the world more communally. They are offering rather than imposing. 

It's a real question for me whether a "commercial artist" can exist. Artist is not the right word in that context. Money changing hands changes the nature and the message of the artwork itself, even as performance. Ownership has been exchanged, not art or even artistic experience (aesthetic experience is possible, yes). An artistic experience has been expressed in the creation, perhaps, but not in the exchange. The receipt is the ownership of a privatized (rather than personal) aesthetic experience. 

Nothing personal has changed hands because nothing personal is contained in the exchange of the work or performance. It's only when art is given or "left" as placements or performances in public or communal spaces -- no other exchanges being made between the artist and the communal audience -- that the exchange can be personal and the art received as an offering rather than an acquisition (in terms of object-based or time-based ownership. This even applies to architecture viewable from the commons, but that's another story).

Viewing a Monet in a gallery is not the same as in a museum or public display. The setting makes a difference. A gallery is a private space, even during open viewings. A museum is public, ostensibly, depending on whether they accept donations or force visitors to pay for the experience of improving the quality of their visual lives as well as their internal orientation (which, in practice, raises the experiences of each person coming into contact with such a person). 

A museum visitor, a person who wants to experience the art of another, in this case let's say Van Gogh, is a nomad seeking visual sustenance in the areas of the urban and agricultural environments where certain types of visual nutrients exist. They're roaming the lands looking to immerse themselves in a painting, but it might as well be a sculpture, an installation, architecture, a concert in a park. 

It's the same with any interaction. If I pay you to listen to me as a counselor or therapist, I speak differently than I would to a friend who is personally invested in my life to some extent. Trust is leased only so far when money changes hands. Releasing that which binds trust is the only way out of the local, regional, national, and global mess. Saying "corporations can't be trusted" need not be dramatic or a radical position, but one can hear the emotional inflection from the voice of any actor in a movie (I want the truth! You can't handle the truth!) when reading that quote. It smacks of Occupy Wall Street on the surface.

That emotional content masks the factual content of the underlying structural foundations for the thought: If money changes hands, the transaction represents a lack of trust between the two parties. It is not about compensation or self-interest; it is about distrust of the other, the impersonal nature of the relationship.

That distrust of others is the foundation of all political discourse throughout "civilized" history. It still persists even though biology has been telling us humans are a social species for how long now? Each of our self-interests are dependent on the well-being of others. We ignore one another at our own peril. Art and science have answers that contemporary politics can't fathom. They are locked into gazes deep into one another's eyes, distrusting, conniving, trying to outwit each other for the opportunity to impose their will and dominate. Nothing achieved politically is ever a gift or an offering. It is always transactional and, thus, impersonal and distrusting.