Gender's Captivity of Art, an Ongoing Discussion

It seems that much of the art world these days insists on pursuing a conversation at the highest intellectual levels that amounts to very little of anything, realistically, to a real world audience.

For fifty years, art has existed in a state that demands an academic rigor that is only germane to itself (note the use of the word academic, not intellectual). Much of this was driven from a post-McCarthy era obsession with gender conformity. The rest, I fear, is simply opportunism by parties who enjoy the way they look on the horse, not the way that it rides.

Prior to McCarthyism in this country, there was a vast amount of artistic "Renaissance" going about the nation's artistic circles. Modernism was in, and the 19th Century conventions were quickly being rendered obsolete, out-dated, and slightly pretentious. Personal, emotional, spiritual, sexual, and technological liberty were profoundly liberated in this period, allowing for the rise of an artistic class that truly lived out Wagner's foreshadowing of the artist as priest.

Innovation was steady with popular sentiment, with the culture and artistic class moving forward more or less simultaneously. Though the educated in any field will always have a running start on the general populace, the ideal situation where their movement was as close to each other as possible was occurring. The populace knew the names of the modern day painters and composers and authors and playwrights. Likewise, these artists knew that their work would be received by a populace who was still engaged in the artistic conversation.

McCarthyism, with its strong gender conformity, erupted a great plague onto the populace that we still to this day have not recovered from. McCarthyism introduced extremely absurd concepts into the populace, such as that women 'fussed around' with art and literature, and men undertook the 'heavy lifting' of mathematics, science, politics, and reason. The social, political, and professional punishment for flouting these strictures was severe.

In this time, Art definitively took a different turn. Men in the arts (and as professionals, they better be men) had a new responsibility foisted onto them:

make your art scientific, academic, and deserving of your gender, or look for great stigmatization on the horizon.

And what has happened in the contemporary art theory circles? Precisely this. Music is now nothing more than veiled mathematics; much of the current teaching generation in art schools push their students to further and further abstractions that haven't any commonality with any person walking around outside of their classroom doors; we have a host of awful independent films from the 70s that ridicule good taste and judgment, and demonstrate in their very existence the absurdity of the academic masturbation.

Since that time, the populace and the artistic class have become belligerents, engaged in a culture war with each other. Frankly, what did the artistic world expect? I'm not going to be the first person to say this, but Scientific and Mathematical theory is boring, especially when you've entered a concert hall to hear a piece of music.

Human complexity is not immediately apparent. I listen to a simply tonal work by Beethoven, and it speaks volumes to me in exactly what he doesn't bother to inundate me with. The simple pang of a major chord after the long haul of his sonata is enough to make me fully aware of all that was there to be said, and then some. The work of Picasso and Duchamp, though certainly forward thinking, is not pretentious, and still excites the eye and the mind in its commentary. It does not presume to place every complexity upon the viewer immediately, but tastefully invites the viewer to examine the work and become ponderous of the artistic commentary it presents.

I do believe that we are seeing an end to this era, with modern day artists by and large rejecting the blatant insecurity of their predecessors. That being said, however, I still marvel that the generation in question, the Boomers (arguably God's little Joke on the Western World), continue to hold onto those profoundly childish extremes of academic insecurity and frankly pedantic exercises in artistic creation.

Baltimore's Aesthetic

Designer notions of couture fashion and a trendy elite tend to evoke the specter of Manhattan High Society or worse, Los Angeles.

It's certainly an odd notion, to say the least, that no other area in the country is capable of pushing the conversation in the fashion arts forward; I would even go so far as to say that most of the conversation being created in the "Meccas" of the design world is actually a strong blend of the various cultural identities swirling about the American populous at any given moment. To find a truly distilled couture perspective, I suggest that we in this country must travel to areas outside of the Manhattan and LA circles where a blending of national ideas is not taking place.

To wit, I submit my own locale: Baltimore, Maryland.

To most, Baltimore is merely the eccentric home of the native son John Waters, and a vehicle for his overtly exploitive ventures of the alternative and bizarre. Or, it's simply one sprawling ghetto where people of color lurk in the shadows waiting to take your livelihood or your life. Recently, the latter tends to be more common, and though it may be an expression of the country's latent racism, I would say it also vastly ignores the fact that walking into the "ghetto" area of any big city, USA, will result in the same dangers to you and your person.

Rather, to those who live in the city, the aesthetic and the cultural impact of a distinctly Baltimore Style lies in the deep age of the city, combined with its strong ethnic communities of various extractions, and an almost 'emo' undercurrent among the artisan class. Likewise, these communities tend to feed off of each other, imbuing the resultant mix with an exceptionally esoteric point of view and reference point. Perhaps this esoteric quality is exactly what prevents the outside from seeing in.

Baltimore is primarily a city of faded glam, a shout back to an era of movie stars frequenting the Belvedere, or captains of industry commanding much of the commerce of the country from within its boundaries. The city is old, with so much of its buildings and architecture remaining constant through the centuries so that it continues to appear very, very old. Whereas almost every city has a historic neighborhood of aging homes and previous grandeur from the late 19th Century, Baltimore tends to call most of its land 'historic' as there are very few buildings that do not have this quality.

The city's aesthetic also defines a level of sophisticated camp that no other city tends to be able to pull off. Its strong artisan class (supported in no small part by the presence of numerous world renowned art institutions) tend to continually redefine their limits and perspectives, creating a dynamic quality that tends toward the eccentric, and the intellectual.

The style is casually dirty, though by no means deliberate; faded, decadent, and dark. It moves between strong clashes of hot colors such as neons and pinks and muted tones of gray, brown, and greens. It continually stands at a distance from the mainstream, with overtones of ominous antagonism that lie in the city's sometimes violent and graphic underbelly. The style begs for individuality from its recipients, demanding an incorporation, not an assimilation. As such, it tends to mutate on a case by case basis.

Raw pigment, strong textures of natural and synthetic quality -- particularly animal fur, steel, and rusted iron -- and a deep contrast between the notions of traditional and provocative, with each distinctly desiring the other.

Look to old refinement, bold splashes of lime and neon pink, unwashed hair, crumpled papers and sketch books, muted clothes, intricate linear designs, pigment, asymmetry, and dramatic make up in a Baltimore style.