Impossible to Buy or Sell

Hard times might be hard on us all. Especially the marginal ones and I'm nothing if not marginal. On the other hand, hard times might equal great art. I mean hard times might not be so great for individual artists, but maybe a society on the edge, a society breaking apart and re-forming in new ways opens the door to new avenues of expression. And maybe people seeing their old pictures of "the way things are supposed to be" shattered into a million tiny pieces can experience art in new ways.

Think the Futurists, the Surrealists, the Dadaists. Think the dirty streets of Britain in the 70's spawning Punk - Sex Pistols/Clash. Think the dirty, bankrupt city of New York spawning, Basquiat, Keith Haring, Television, Patti Smith, Talking Heads. Think Pollack and De Kooning and Rothko in dirty, beat-down studios creating new ways of seeing the world.

Or how about Berlin in late 20s, or Paris after the "great" wars.

Maybe our bubble years of greed and indulgence are coming to an end. And maybe that's a good fucking thing. Or as Holland Cotter puts it: "The Boom is Over. Long Live Art!"

"I’m not talking about creating ’60s-style utopias; all those notions are dead and gone and weren’t so great to begin with. I’m talking about carving out a place in the larger culture where a condition of abnormality can be sustained, where imagining the unknown and the unknowable — impossible to buy or sell — is the primary enterprise. Crazy! says anyone with an ounce of business sense. Right. Exactly. Crazy." - Holland Cotter