SwiftVets.com

[GenrXr]

About 30 years ago my family was traversing the great western portion of our country and happened upon a winter carnival. The sky was a dark grayish color with the sun hidden from view by the winter haze. I was only 5 at the time, but remember vividly the carnival lights and the bright display of colors set upon the surrounding dark grey landscape, giving light to the white snow where there had been no light for many days. A dark world come to light full of all the accompanied joy a young child would feel. About 12 years later a friend’s mother asked my opinion of some new paintings recently purchased and my earlier thoughts of the carnival during winter came to me. The paintings landscape was too bright and full of colors for a serious adult collector of fine art to possess was my original thought. On second thought my childhood remembrance of dear ole dad’s paint by number more closely resembled the supposed art before me. Being polite, I told her how pretty the painting was. Some years later watching a 60 minutes special the segment focused on an artist and his gallery. Is he an artist? Is the NY gallery representing him and himself perpetrating a fraud upon a naïve public? Well the ‘artist’ being profiled was the one who had painted my friend’s mother new paintings I viewed years earlier. His name was Thomas Kinkade. The 60 minutes special explained how Kinkade hired starving artists at $10.00 an hour and mass produced his art through an assembly line. It also explained how a prominent gallery in New York held great sway over what was viewed as art to the public. Their word and the art is art. I couldn’t help but chuckle as the report explained their paint by number method of mass production. Kinkade does a sketch and the artists fill in the lines. To me Kinkade's art will always be reminiscent of a winter carnival and the joys of a naive child and the paint by number canvas evident to an adult, hardly sophisticated art.

Many people would and do view Kinkade’s $10.00 per hour employees paintings as art. To them it is ‘pretty’, but to me it lacks original style and the authenticity of coming from the artist, a terrible hack fooling a gullible and naïve public.

Something very similar has been happening for roughly the same period of time within another segment of the arts. The music industry and how the record companies shove their product onto the public. Although the irony in the music industry is they have no problems admitting their musicians are not musicians rather they are ‘artists’. How a sexy teen girl shaking her rear and exhibiting minimal dancing ability is declared an artist is beyond me, yet this is what they declare. He or she is indeed an artist so let us pay off the radio stations to play this garbage and convince your mom and pop its art, bringing to a full circle the cash exchange for our trash. At one time though the music industry actually put out records by musicians who wrote their own music or collaborated amongst themselves to produce the music. Roy Orbison writing for Elvis comes to mind, yet how can today’s Lincoln Park or Jessica Simpson be compared to ELO or Led Zepplen of yesterday. They cannot, because they are part of the fraud of 'artists' making 'music' for the masses. To be fair there are some good bands to be heard and product to be had, but for the most part it is a wasteland of inferior product being mass produced for a naïve and gullible public.

Some might argue that the public sees that carnival in the winter and the joys of their childhood in the music or art being produced today, yet I would argue Freud has left the building and he’s never coming back. So rather then try to explain why we behave the way we do, view the situation as it is and stop spending money on an inferior product when we can demand better.



Sorry for all the edits.
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"An activist is the person who cleans up the water, not the one claiming its dirty."
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing." Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Founder of Conservative Philosophy