Robert Boorstin, a senior executive at Google, notes that
there are now 1.4 billion Internet users, and the number is growing by 250
million a year. Over 10 hours of video are uploaded to You Tube every minute of
every day. There are 3 billion mobile devices in use world wide, with another
billion coming in the next year. Boorstin described it as the largest increase
in expressive capability in history.
You can buy high-quality digital video cameras easily and
get editing and sound software cheap or even, open-source, for free. Where
years ago we had to struggle for months to get enough money for a few minutes
worth of 16mm film and processing to make a duration art piece, today you can
do hours for nothing.
With all that and broadband too, why is painting still so
healthy?
I’ve been listening to, or reading about, the death of painting
for upwards of forty years, and it’s been a topic of discussion for a lot
longer than that, going back to the early days of photography. It’s easy to
make a cogent argument that pushing bits of pigment and binder around on cloth is an archaic method
Meanwhile, good paintings, and some bad ones too, are going
at auction for outlandish prices. A Lucien Freud (good) painting went for $33
million, and even a Basquiat (not so good) painting is worth several million. A
Courbet (very good) painting recently sold for $3 million, considered a
bargain, to, of all people, Jeff Koons. A Monet water lily painting (very, very
good) went for $80 million. There are 300 galleries in Chelsea, mostly selling
paintings, and lots more in the rest of New York and around the country.
Not long ago I strolled down through the Portland galleries, getting ever more morose with each visit.
Even things that were trying to seem new felt tired and lazy. I slogged through
gallery after gallery, hoping against hope to avoid having to head home in such
a cloud of gloom. Everywhere I went iy seemed as if I were walking uphill to no
good purpose.
I found myself in front of Gleason Fine Art and went in to
re-introduce myself to the manager, whom I hadn’t seen since he was in high
school. My cloud of gloom persisted until I got to the back room and happened
across a Carl Sprinchorn painting of a lumber camp in the winter. It’s a very
odd painting, following no particular rules of balance, space or color, but the
overall effect was so convincing it restored my day.
I believe deeply in the transformative power of art, in its
ability to bridge the gap that separates one human consciousness to another. Sprinchorn
spoke to me that day, through the miasma of my mood and the across sixty years
or so that separated his making it and my looking at it. Painting persists
because it is the last bastion of deep communication that can be undertaken by
a single individual, using simple and direct means. No wires, routers or
circuit boards, no vast funding or committees, no distribution rights or city
permits are needed.
If I had $80 million to spend I would have bought that
Monet.
By Ken Greenleaf
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