In addition to being a painter, David Tycho is also a writer whose articles have appeared in enRoute magazine, Conscious Choice magazine, Shared Vision magazine, the Vancouver Sun and the Vancouver Courier. He was the winner of the 2001 Canadian Literary Award for travel literature and a finalist in 1997 and 2004. In addition to his articles on art, wilderness travel, and social issues, he has penned two novels and seven feature screenplays, one of which was a finalist in two American screenplay competitions. Please contact for information or to read more.
ROLAND
By David Tycho
I walked up and down the slick, cobblestoned streets that line the canals in the Jordaan district of Amsterdam, until a warm glow spilling into the night air stopped me. It came from a cafe, and the window revealed a jovial group huddled around an Amstel tap. I’d been holding off having a beer all day, but the light and the laughter incinerated any traces of resistance I had left in me.
I pushed on the door, but it wouldn’t open. I pushed again, and then pulled, but it remained steadfast. The folk in the bar all turned and stared at me. I thought for a moment that I’d made a terrible mistake--that this was someone’s living room, or a private party, or a club--but a greying, long-haired man got up from his bench seat and gave the door a hard two-handed pull, and it opened.
Everyone in the cafe seemed perplexed by my presence, and by my inability to open the door. I stepped gingerly across the creaking floorboards and sat down at the end of the bench. It was nailed to the floor about half a yard from the bar, making leaning forward to rest my elbows awkward and uncomfortable. Next to me sat a man dressed in dust covered work clothes, and whose arms had been tatooed by Satan. His girlfriend looked satisfied. I ordered a beer in my very best Dutch.
“Een bier alstublieft.”
The man who’d opened the door began barking at me in French, and despite my telling him that I didn’t speak more than a few words, he continued.
“Pourquoi pas?” he asked repeatedly. Why not?
After a few minutes of his futile efforts to communicate with me in mixed French and Dutch, he finally asked me in English where I was from.
“Vancouver,” I replied. “Canada.”
“Why don’t you speak French then?”
“I didn’t pay attention in class,” I answered.
“Me too,” he said. Then he threw back his chin, downed a shot of something clear, and let out a low, raspy groan.
I raised my beer and motioned for him to clink glasses. He responded, as did the other half dozen people sitting at the bar, all seemingly appeased for the moment. The other patrons made no attempts to conceal their eavesdropping.
“Why are you here?” he asked.
“I’m having an exhibition in Geneva, and I wanted to stop in Amsterdam on my way.”
“You’re an artist?”
“Yes,” I said.
The grey-haired man’s mouth slowly curled into a smile, and with him, as if someone had waved a conductors baton, the other patrons followed.
“Roland is also an artist,” the tatooed man’s girlfriend said to me, motioning towards my grey-haired neighbor.
And did he look the part. He wore a long, wrinkled khaki coat, frayed along the fold of the collar and draped loosely over his pear shaped body. He smelled of vinegar and salt. He was bald on top, and the remains of his oily hair were combed straight back on the sides, and behind his ears it hung down to his shoulders. When he spoke, one of his eyes stared past me while the other locked on one of mine. His breath punished me for making his acquaintance.
“I am Roland. You want to see some paintings?” he asked.
“Of course,” I answered.
“Some real paintings?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s go.”
“Can I finish my beer first?”
“No. Let’s go.”
There were words between Roland and the barmaid as we stood up, but he dismissed her, and pushed me out the door.
“She’s worried about your bill,” he said, “but she knows where I live.”
We walked down a couple of streets and turned left off the canal and went a couple more short blocks until we came to a square, gray, cinderblock building pinched between older and more ornate stone apartments. Roland struggled with his keys for a couple of minutes and I could see, away from the forgiving cafe ambience and reverent audience, that he was very drunk.
He led me up a wide flight of stairs, cluttered with wooden slats, stretcher frames and virgin canvases. Posters heralding Roland’s numerous exhibitions covered the walls of the stairwell. He huffed his way to the top of the stairs, and went through his extensive collection of keys twice, holding each one up close to his eye before making his final selection. He turned the key, first clockwise, then counter-clockwise, then clockwise again, until he heard the anticipated click.
He grunted as he shouldered the large door open. He entered and walked slowly around the large L-shaped room turning on lights, each one revealing a different task in progress.
Paintings on wooden easels, cast iron lithography and etching presses, storage racks, drafting tables, desks, chrome and vinyl stools, and everywhere stacks of paper, cigar boxes stuffed with tubes of paint, and juice cans filled with brushes--all competing for Roland’s attention. Shards of dry paint, sticks of charcoal and paint rags littered the worn and splintering hardwood floor. On the walls hung his favourite paintings and a collection of guitars and mandolins in various states of repair. Next to his easel, a table with twenty years of paint gobbed, swished and splattered on it stood: the focal point of the studio, and the arena where Roland wrestled his pigments.
“You like it?” he asked coyly.
“It’s unbelievable. I’d kill for something like this.”
“The government pays,” he said, winking.
“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing that rents in Jordaan were no longer cheap.
“I and my friends were...squatting...in another building,” he explained. “When we were finally kicked out, the government gave me this.”
He could see that I didn’t understand.
“Dutch Socialism,” he said. “Don’t think about it.”
He pressed a beer against my chest, and we flipped through stacks of paintings and piles of prints. He was clearly a Romantic, in the style of Derain, or Vlaminck, or the Dutchman van Dongen: brightly coloured cityscapes--the streets, boats and canals of Jordaan--all painted with well-mannered spontaneity. The colours spoke of the Mediterranean--not of wet and grey Amsterdam.
The room looked like something I’d seen in art history books: the Paris studios of Picasso, or Soutine, or Modigliani. Roland’s eyes and his paintings told me he was born in the wrong city, a hundred years too late.
He knocked a guitar off the wall, sat down on a low stool, and drunkenly laboured through a Flamenco piece. I could see that he could play well, but that last ounce of something clear was sabotaging his efforts. Frustrated, he tossed the guitar to me. I played him Blue Rodeo`s ‘Five Days in May’.
“That’s very good,” he said. It wasn’t, but I was pleased that I’d remembered all the words.
We sat in silence for a while, Roland’s head bobbing in figure eights on a sea of alcohol. The smile on his face remained, but it had lost its lustre, and his eyes rolled as if the optic nerves had been severed. I suggested we return to the cafe.
Roland went through his locking up ritual. It was automatic and he could do it drunk, in the dark. At the bottom of the stairwell I realized that I’d forgotten my cigarettes in his studio, but Roland blasted air out his nostrils at my suggestion that we climb back up to the studio.
“Get more at the cafe,” he said as he stutter-stepped out into the dank, evening air.
We walked back along the canal and Roland tried to continue our conversation, but like his legs, his speech was failing him, and every half-sentence ended in a shrug or a sigh of frustration.
Roland rammed the cafe door open, and we sat down in front of the stem-glasses of beer we had left--now warm and lifeless. Our return to the empty bar brought a smile of relief to the lips of the stoic and muscular barmaid. Roland immediately put his head on the bar and passed out, his arms dangling at his sides. The barmaid rolled her eyes, and tugged on his collar. He jerked himself upright, stepped down off his stool, pulled a scarf out of his pocket and threw it around his neck.
“I’m drunk,” he said, and tipping an imaginary hat, he shuffled out the door and into the night. I flew to Geneva the next day.
END
A Desert Romance
By David Tycho
Published in enRoute Magazine
“This is my spiritual center,” came a whisper from behind me at a gas station in Fields, Oregon.
I released the gas pump lever to see a bearded ascetic with an eclectic sense of fashion standing a few feet from my car.
“I beg your pardon?”
“This is my spiritual center,” he repeated.
His declaration of faith seemed premature in our seconds-old relationship, and his glazed expression suggested extended stints in the desert sun. Years later, however, the only differences between us are our wardrobes, and our expressions--mine being the unglazed one.
In the days following our meeting, after I’d ventured out into the Alvord Desert near the Oregon-Nevada border, the gas station guru’s abstract confession began to take form. It wasn’t that I’d doubted his sanity--it was very simply that I hadn’t seen what he had seen.
Now I know. There are places to which we must return to soothe and restore ourselves. I’d always believed that peace of mind was not contingent on place, but the sensations I experienced on my first and subsequent trips to the steppes and deserts in the rain shadow of the Cascades and Sierra Nevada have planted a new idea in my mind: place is important. And I go.
I often wonder how this arid landscape seduced me, with its callused and weathered hands. It has successfully repelled most visitors with an arsenal of insects, reptiles and weather. The locals aren’t exactly bent on claiming their share of the tourist market either. There are strong arguments for avoiding this quintessential nowhere, but as Paul Theroux mused, nowhere is a place--and to this place I must go.
My courtship of this ugly step-sister of the more colourful deserts of Arizona and New Mexico began quite innocently, through a period of correspondence of sorts. One sopping wet Vancouver evening in November, I was leafing through my dog-eared Rand McNally, running my hands over maps of dry places hoping for illusory relief from the rain. My finger followed a highway into an area not yet defaced by the graffiti of geographers. I was David Thompson looking at an early fur trader’s map: one on which the lines fade and disappear into expanses of yellowed paper. To Rand McNally the area possessed nothing worthy of mention. This struck me as either an embarrassing cartographic blunder, or a grave reality.
Flipping to a larger and more detailed map revealed little more than a sparse sprinkling of rather intimidating names: Crack-in-the-Ground, Devil’s Garden, Carson Sink, Stinkwater, Rattlesnake Creek and Coyote Dry Lake to name a few. The larger scale only magnified and emphasized the expanses of uninhabited space, increasing both my interest and apprehension. A trip to the library turned up brief entries in otherwise thick guidebooks, and geological and meteorological data guaranteed to put even the most enthusiastic armchair traveler into a coma. The less I found, however, the more I wanted. So into the yellowed paper I went.
Rather than drive the hypnotically uneventful and congested Interstate 5 south from Vancouver, I plotted a course east over the Cascades and into the Similkameen and Okanagan Valleys, from where I would head south through the parched coulees of central Washington, before finally penetrating the unloved expanses of my ultimate goal: the Great Basin. I would ease myself into the void.
Coming over the Cascades into B.C.`s Okanagan Valley is to leave a virtual rainforest and enter a region that gets as little rain as Phoenix, Arizona, and often tops 100 degrees. But alas, technology has replaced the region’s desert benchlands with viticulture and water slides. Although charmed by this desert Cinderella, I still desired her nasty step-sister.
Leaving the orchards and vineyards behind, the valleys spill out onto the Columbia-Snake River Basin, a desert like environment in its own right. Sadly, however, damming the Columbia for power and irrigation has taken the desert out of the desert, and wheat farms, hydro lines, roads and reservoirs now compete with sagebrush and prickly pear cactus for domination of the landscape. The odds are stacked against the sagebrush.
Exiting the damned Columbia Basin and heading further south to the northern reaches of the Great Basin is to sail onto a sagebrush ocean bereft of development. The counties hugging the Oregon-Nevada-Idaho borders boast the fewest residents and visitors in the lower 48 states. I go for hours on paved roads, and days on dirt ones, without seeing another vehicle.
Saturated with the country and western twangs that monopolize the airwaves, I turn off the radio and sing my old favorite blues tunes until my throat is dry and my repertoire exhausted. Farther along, I resort to songs I make up as I go, a trick my four-year-old son taught me, but I stop when I catch a glimpse of myself in the rear view mirror. A glazed expression tells me it’s time to pull over and set up camp amongst the greasewood.
Note to self: bring a warmer sleeping bag next time.
The extremes in temperature (the record being a 100 degree difference on the same date in different years) keep the retirees and tourists in California and Arizona, and scant rainfall makes farming virtually impossible. So, except for the occasional rancher, hunter, recluse, new-age mystic or Bureau of Lands Management lackey, the area rebuffs humankind. But it’s the very lack of conversational opportunities that keeps me coming back year after year.
A sign at he base of Steens Mountain warns, “Storm area ahead. Weather may change from clear to blizzard in a few minutes. No shelter available.” No kidding.
In August I’ve awoken to frozen water while camped on the fault block mountain, followed by daytime highs in the basin of over a hundred. In mid-June, I climbed up to 8,000 feet on Steens to escape the Alvord Desert blast furnaces 4,000 feet below. A snowstorm sent me scampering back down towards the desert floor.
On another spring trip, punishing winds and hail storms snapped poles and ropes and tore my heavy tarps to shreds, forcing me to spend the night in the safety of my car. The next morning I awoke to the first of a seemingly endless number of successive days of blue skies, cute little puffy white clouds, and mollifying breezes.
When fear fades to respect, and respect to complacency, the desert often administers a meteorological spanking. I humbly heed these warnings, reminding myself that outstanding opportunities for solitude are also outstanding opportunities for death.
But it is out on the dry lakebeds, or ‘playas’ to the initiated, that the Great Basin is distilled into its purest form. From the Great Salt Lake Desert of Utah, to the Black Rock in Nevada, to the Alvord in Oregon--these, the flattest places on earth, are where a profound silence permeated my marrow, a sensation I’ve been seeking ever since. Walking towards the center of a playa is to enter a still and reticent environment where not a single protrusion provides enough resistance for the wind to sound its presence.
Stepping out onto these vast, lifeless flats has been likened to stepping onto a stage. There is a feeling of vulnerability, and after walking a hundred yards out towards the center, the tendency is to want to retreat backstage--to return to the safety of ‘shore’, although the lakes that once filled these basins dried up thousands of years ago. The total lack of things familiar is intimidating at first, although an hour later the void becomes almost comforting in its predictability. I’m tempted to remove a bone that mars the uniformity--a thought so absurd I break the silence with a laugh.
Miles out from the last stands of greasewood and iodine bush, the playa appears so vast it equals the sky in the visual equation of the landscape. I sense the expanses of cracked clay ever so slightly sloping away from me on all sides. For the first time in my life, the spherical form of the planet is no longer represented by a basketball-sized globe in a school classroom, or by television images taken from space--I can actually see it. And far away from the material accouterments I use back home to make a statement about who I am and what I represent, this world frames and accents my insignificance in massive and silent space, and it deeply humbles me.
I decide to eat lunch, but with no rock or tree to tie up to, my legs have to be told three times to stop before they obey. My luncheon on a five-hundred-square-mile billiard table is an image far more fantastic than any painted by Salvador Dali. But while Dali painted Surrealism, the ancient peoples of this land lived it.
Sagebrush sandals found in a cave near an immense castle-like caldera aptly named Fort Rock date human habitation of the area at almost 10,000 years. Today, a tiny reservation contains the Paiutes near the town of Burns. Here, last ditch efforts to salvage their dignity and culture provide them with challenges far greater than surviving in the desert, which they did successfully for millenia. Remarkably the Paiutes haven’t disappeared as the early homesteaders had hoped, whereas broken down irrigation flumes and abandoned farmhouses mark the legacy of naively optimistic settlers. Roads meander out into the desert, only to fade and disappear like the men who built them. Respect came too late.
I cannot help but marvel at the courage of the early explorers and settlers (despite their catastrophic effects on native populations) whose will alone could not cajole a living from unsympathetic soil and weather. Burns, a town commemorating the Scottish poet (Robert), expresses an expatriot’s homesickness--his attempt to put a familiar and comforting mark on a land so unlike the misty moors and highlands of his beloved Scotland. In spite of enormous differences, however, a pervasive melancholy connects the two places, and perhaps Burns is a fitting name after all.
The current residents of the Great Basin are as varied as the spring temperatures. They range from Basque shepherds with dirty fingernails and manure stuck to the soles of their boots, to transplanted, manicured Portlanders with pressed white shirts and the latest edition of GQ under their arms. The general store in the hamlet of Frenchglen had served as a watering hole for local ranch hands for decades. The owner had to build an adjoining shack to sequester the cowpokes and their drinking habits from the occasional tourist making a pit stop en route to larger centers east or west. The store was sold, and the shack transformed into a restaurant serving sauvignon blanc and coq au vin. The cowboys have been banished. Time will tell if the restaurant is an omen, or just another case of foolhardy optimism in the desert.
Down in Fields again, I stopped to blow off some dust and retreat from the mid-day sun, feeling neither like a mad dog nor an Englishman. Within minutes of sitting down on a chrome and cracked burgundy vinyl stool in a sun bleached and smoke stained cafe, an ex-rancher gone truck driver with sunglasses that pinched his large head informed me he`d done time in a state prison. Years before he`d brought his sweetheart to a bar, and some drunk buckeroo grabbed and rubbed her crotch.
“I kicked the bastard in the head until he stopped moving, and if some guys hadn’t pulled me off, I’d have kicked the life right out of him,” he explained. “I don’t regret it, and I’d sure as hell do it again, too.”
Then he invited me to stay with him at his trailer on the east side of the desert. He didn’t litter, he said, and the place was pretty clean.
On the west side of the desert, my next stop, I came across a pair of motionless legs sticking out from under a 1947 Willys 4 x 4. I stopped to investigate and, after a minute of heel-gouging and squirming, a lanky red-bearded desert rat and two golden retrievers emerged. The rat had purple skin and a silver tooth that sparkled in the sunlight, and he had on the dirtiest clothes I’d ever seen, or likely ever will. I’d woken this family from their daily siesta (and they were cranky), but after shaking off the dust and cobwebs, the rodent offered me a slug of warm tequila and a cold beer. A few hours and slugs later, my resurrected friend was driving his Willys back and forth past a beer can set on a rock, taking shots at it with an immaculately polished silver pistol. In a moment of tenderness and trust, he offered me a few cracks at it.
The next morning, I spotted a rattlesnake in a pile of rocks and called my purple friend over to have a look. I watched him tease it for a few seconds, and then catch it with his bare hands. Too small for a meal, the serpent narrowly missed the frying pan. Instead the snake charmer carefully prepared a terrarium in an abandoned cooler and placed the rattler inside, a present for his young nephew.
“But before I give it to him, I got an idea,” he said. “I’m gonna take this here cooler home, and invite my buddy over for a beer.” He put the tequila bottle to his lips and tipped the bottom high in the air. “There’s a couple of cold ones in there,” he giggled, pointing at the occupied cooler. “Help yourself!” His bloodshot eyes opened wide and stared into mine. Then he spat, laughed, and coughed uncontrollably for minutes while kicking up a cloud of dust all around him. And after three weeks in the desert, I laughed right along with him. The bizarre had become familiar, and chardonnays a distant, other-life experience.
Driving out of the Great Basin and up into the cool embrace of fir forests, I always wonder how and why these slightly masochistic adventures sustain my interest. Is it a romantic Hollywood or Nashville sketch of the Wild West I crave--a macho world of hard-drinking cowpokes who work backbreaking hours out on the range and eat beans and fresh venison cooked over an open fire? That might be part of the attraction, but given a choice, I’d be hard-pressed to give up hours at a word processor followed by scallops and pinot blanc.
Is it the potential for spiritual growth that can be gleaned from the stoicism of desert solitude? There are numerous stories of the faithful having revelatory experiences in the silence of barren wastelands. But for me to pretend I’m a mystic or a Paiute shaman is silly, and insulting to those on real spiritual quests.
Could I simply be attempting to find a peaceful place out of the rain? There are too many more hospitable places to blow some rust off for this to be the answer.
Rational thinking eliminates all arguments in favor of setting off for this void, and once there, common sense screams to leave it.
Some of my family and many of my friends can’t understand why I go. They act as if I’m betraying my west coast roots--as if I’m snubbing them and what they hold so dear for something far less worthy. They think I’m odd, and they worry about me.
“Why do you bother? It can’t be fun,” they frequently say, and I have no satisfactory response.
I feel like a man who has made a bad choice for a wife. She abuses, threatens, punishes and bullies me, yet I can’t leave her. She is rude, abrasive and inflexible to all who meet her, but I always defend her. My loyalty to her is constantly being tested and challenged by smug, head-shaking skeptics.
“You don’t know her like I do,” is all the faithful man of a nasty wife can say. And everyone snickers.
Except men who have loved this siren. They know that she possesses an alter ego seen only by those with faith, patience and resolve. Scoffers have never seen her kiss my eyes in the morning with pink, luminescent light. They will never see her disrobe and reveal her sublime night skies, nor will they ever witness her caress my blistered flesh with tender evening breezes. They will never hear the wind of her soul, nor breathe the scent of her profound whispers. During these fleeting moments she shows her grace, and enraptures me.
As my old Dodge chugs out of the Great Basin and climbs back over the Cascades and onto increasingly congested and wet highways towards my home in Vancouver, I remember the words of the enlightened gas station guru. I clearly remember his unabashed statement of faith to me, a complete stranger, and how his glazed eyes told me they had seen things. It wasn’t that I doubted his sanity--it was simply that I hadn’t seen what he’d seen. But now I have.
END
Whose Art is it Anyway?
By David Tycho
Published in the Vancouver Sun
The power and influence held by art critics and curators disturbs most artists. Artists feel that art has been relegated to the position of providing examples that support or refute academic art theories--that the intellectuals have stolen the spotlight from the art. Artists also claim that examples used to support arguments are often forced, and fail to consider the artists’ intentions, motivations and sources of inspiration. Academics seem far more interested in art as it pertains to a particular theory or agenda than in the art itself. They have lost the ability to see and experience art in aesthetic terms, but view it, rather, through a haze of intellectual theory.
No more is this exemplified than by a letter I received from an apparent academic, who took exception to a “Letter to the Editor” I had written questioning an art critic’s review. The letter writer made a case against both me and the critic. Ironically, after a lengthy dissertation, he admitted to not having seen the exhibition in question, but was basing his entire argument on the descriptions presented in the review. His faith in the printed word was extraordinary, especially when the subject in question was visual art.
The above experience illustrates that there is a fundamental problem with the way art is perceived by critics and theorists. They fail to acknowledge an element so many artists assert is basic to their creative process: that the creative process is often a mystical act. Because of the inherent problems of describing or debating the assertion, the critics do the only thing they can: they ignore it. Our critics and theorists are in the process of killing art. They have anthropologized it by removing it from the artistic realm and placing it in the academic. Unable to experience art intuitively, they dissect it intellectually.
A Kwagiutl chief said that her people were probably the most anthropologized people on earth. But what the anthropologists fail to realize is that the Kwagiutl are still here, and their culture and art are thriving. They are being studied as if they were extinct, a practice that spawns dry and lifeless descriptions of a vibrant culture. The Kwagiutl don’t study themselves in such a way--the very concept is absurd. A parallel can be drawn between how the anthropologists study the Kwagiutl, and how contemporary critics and theorists study art: as if it were dead. They attempt to remove themselves from art--to stand back in order to be objective--but by doing so they miss the “Art” in the art.
So why are the mystical elements of art so often ignored? Because they are difficult to get a handle on. They provide no ally or adverary. They sit quietly, passively waiting to be discovered by those with the required patience or resolve. Once discovered, they cannot be described or explained--only intuited. They elude or confound those with a rational or academic bent, and critics prefer the more concrete but often extraneous elements, such as the socio-historic contextualization of the artwork.
A problem has risen from the critic’s active participation in the fine arts: so many artists have come on side. They produce work ready-made for critics to incorporate into arguments. These artists are serving the critics, instead of both serving art. To see one’s name in print is seductive indeed.
Far too many critics and far too much of the public see art as a secular and/or pragmatic activity, dismissing any notions of mysticism as being naive, romantic, cultish, or even smug. And yet so many artists continue to focus on the spiritual potential of art. Spiritual insights via the creative process are as real as orgasms, and can’t be willed away by any amount of logic.
Deconstuctionism and Post-modernism seem to be preoccupations of a great number of art critics these days, partly because they allow for endless discussion and debate about every artwork ever produced. All is open to re-interpretation and re-evaluation, since context and meaning are in a state of flux. This is paydirt for a critic, but means little to an artist who has glimpsed the sublime while creating a work. To an artist preoccupied with the mystical in art, a spiritual revelation can no more be put into a socio-historical context than an idea can be put in a jar.
Most academic reviews I have read do little to reveal more about a given show, and more often than not cloud our perceptions with jargon and theory. Too much interpretation is distracting, and takes away from direct experience. The habit of giving a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” is self-indulgent, and serves no real purpose other than to stroke or shatter egos. Jack Tworkov, the American abstract painter, put it this way:
“The critic favours and understands best the artist whose work implies a manifesto. He coaxes the artist onto polemical ground. For on this ground the critic believes himself to play a creative role.”
Tworkov felt that the critics were asking the wrong questions. Unable to answer the big questions, they focused on superfluous little ones. Tworkov was interested in the mystical in art, and was frustrated by his contemporaneous critics’ criteria for interpretation or evaluation. Their proof was not in the pudding: the art--it was in their minds.
Issue based art provides critics with adversaries with whom they can tangle or support. The debate spills over into a host of issues and problems. Mystical art doesn’t engage the critic in the same way. It repels any attempts to use it as ammunition for a cause. Try using a Barnett Newman, a Mark Rothko or a David Tycho as a protest banner and see if anyone gets excited.
So how does contemporary art criticism benefit art, artists or the public? A popular explanation is that the critic is a moderator who throws out provocative bait to stimulate discussion about the art in question. These days, this means expanding and even projecting art into a socio-political arena, and in the process, exorcising the mystical aspects of art and sweeping them under the carpet. Art criticism has come to view art in almost behavioural terms, in the sense that the critic examines the implications of the product, and ignores the process. By ignoring the process, the critic ignores the very essence of art: the creative and mystical act.
END