Funny and Awesome vs. Interesting and Pretty

Two weeks ago I headed out to the C-Note art show at Junctionview Studios. The evening was great and Jacqui, Karl, Jessie and I got to see lots of great art, each entry for sale at $100.00. As we perused the different pieces: color filled canvases the dotting the walls, sculptures arranged just so, mixed media projects, something soon became apparent. When you're looking at art that you might BUY, art you might actually OWN, conversations about art can become a lot more practical.

If you were to visit the Louvre, or the MOMA, the art there (for the average person at least) is definitely not for sale. In those instances you can have a healthy sense of distance from the pieces you're looking at. You can sit back on your intellectual haunches and evaluate art on a much more theoretical level. You can gazed deeply into the Mona Lisa's eyebrow-less face and talk about the angles, the lines and the history behind the piece in a very abstract way. All a conversation like that costs you is the time it takes you to think. Relatively cheap depending on how fast your brain works.

How different would it be if you could take Mona home and hang her in your bathroom?

On some level, that night, for the four of us gallery hoppers, it boiled down to the simple question: "Do I like this art enough to buy it?" Or maybe even more simply "Do I like this art?" Once you start asking those questions it's soon becomes apparent that on a gut level people look at art in very different ways and want to own art for different reasons.

For example, Karl loved certain pieces almost entirely because of what they communicated. What did the art say to people? Is that something he wanted to say as well? Some of examples of pieces he liked, aside from his very favorite, included: 1) a funky painting featuring a post apocalyptic scene with tiny, bug-like man shouting into a megaphone at a chimpanzee silhouette made of stars floating in the heavens and 2) an an impressive painting done in airbrushed spray paint featuring a skull about to blow out the candle on a birthday-esque cupcake. As he's said to us before Karl would describe his taste in art as "Funny and Awesome" with an optional level of "Does it rock?" and the pieces he enjoyed most highlighted those descriptors perfectly.

Across the spectrum Jacqui and I were looking at things on a much more aesthetic level. If Karl's personal taste is "Funny and Awesome" we might be more "Interesting and Pretty". What was the design of the pieces? Looking at the colors, shapes and lines how did they make us feel? Would a certain painting match the colors in our living room? Some of our favorites pieces included: 1) A four panel photography piece featuring close ups of vibrant green grass and 2) a large, mottled brown canvas with descending rust red numbers (9,8,7,6....) painted from top to bottom along one side and in in center a blood red heart, detailed and anatomically precise.

(Jessie was probably somewhere in between Karl and Jacqui and I loving many of pieces that Karl was fond up but also appreciating the aesthetics and careful craft of others.)

Later Jacqui and I were confounded to hear Karl say "I don't really think about what color something is." and in the same way I'm sure he was mystified as we said things like "I love the different shades of brown, it looks like they used tea to dye the canvas." or "Is the design of this human heart too life like to hang above our couch?"

Totally different approaches to art. Neither one wrong, or better, just different. And all because we had to ask ourselves the practical question: "Do I like this enough to buy it?"

I don't know exactly what that says about the cross over between art and consumerism, or the world of ideas vs. brass tacks reality but it was interesting moment of realization and brought into focus how subjective art can be. It also makes me think about how living in community with people especially with people who enjoy art can really open you up to being influenced by people's personal tastes, and artistic bents.

For example, I'll be honest, while memories of many pieces I liked from C-Note are fading, the images of Karl's star spangled chimpanzee or Rancid Yack Butter Tea Party are proving hard to shake.