The consumers of the fine art object tend to be involved in a vestigial society of connoiseurship that is reserved for the wealthy of any society. It is no exaggeration to implicate the art dealers, critics, and curators who decide which artists are to be promoted for the general malaise in the "art world" of the moment. This is because of the fact that large scale mechanisms set up for the production, promotion, marketing and distribution of fine art, restrict art to a recognizable commodity format. The actuality is that creativity by it's very nature is difficult to define and art that is truly innovative is for the most part unrecognizable as such when it is first created. Perhaps the most innovative artists working at this time have abandoned the industrial ideal touted by modernism and eschewed object making for the fluidity of information tranfer. If you assume, as I do, that art reflects the society from which it issues you may begin to understand how fine art is no longer about innovation but rather about reflecting the rarified tastes of it's small connoiseur base. This is most aptly reflected in the display of objects purchased.
Similarly the early promise of conceptual art, performance art and installation art to break the commodity fever of the art world did not pan out. Indeed those advanced and visionary positions were retreated from by most of the early conceptual artists when they came up against both the general indifference of the art audience in their reception to conceptual art strategies and the real market resistance to art work that questioned the notion of art as a discreet commodity. Some of the more successful conceptual artists were able to become commodities as in the case of performance and installation artists. A signature style material in the case of installation and the artists' persona in the case of performance, function in a similar way to a "brand name" product in the commercial realm. That is the conundrum of most Postmodernist art.
I will try to explain where I fit into to this universe andy how my art work functions. I am only interested in placing myself in a creative energy vortex, the primal state of consciousness during which art is created. This state of mind, of high creative energy is best when it is shared in some manner. The ultimate goal is to cause this high consciousness to be spread throughout my surrounding social group and by extension to the world at large. My definition of creativity is bringing something into existence which can not be predicted beforehand. This puts me at odds with the whole mechanism for the distribution of discreet commodities. I cannot predict or propose what material or format or scale will come from my creative endeavors before I engage in them. As a consequence I find myself and my work in the position of challenging existing mechanisms that by their very nature demand a priori recognition and identification to be deemed a work of art. Part of the content of my art is a challenge to the essentially hieratic nature of art world mechanisms.
I believe that the mythos for American society at the end of the 20th Century has become a function of the mass media that produces newspapers, magazines, television, radio, hollywood films and popular music. I see this American mass media mythos as both a subject and object in my art. Combining these two ideas; challenge to existing art world systems and mass media as both subject and object is the basis of my art work.
Working on the internet is a natural extension of my art work. It challenges the existing art world hieratical structures and dispenses with the commodity precondition for an art work to exist and be recognized as such. It offers direct distribution to an audience without the normal filters that tend to screen out that which is deemed non-commercial or troublesome. It also allows me to participate in building a "virtual community" in which my creative principals are expanded, enhanced and dignified in a way that could not come about within the existing art world paradigm. My goals in my life and in my art are to open up an entirely new way of thinking about, producing and viewing art and in creating a whole new idea of what it means to be an artist. In order to do this I must basically abandon all previous ideas attached to the notion of art and artist. This becomes incredibly problematic when one lives in a world that increasingly demands that oneีs identity be defined by one's career and where the boundaries of art are defined by commercial or fine art respectively.