Being an Artist:
It's a real challenge to
pursue a career in any kind of art, not to mention a living (meaning you
actually pay the rent from income as an artist); by artist I mean not just
painting or sculpting, but music, acting, writing and other similar endeavors
as well…all those "occupations" you don't want to put on an
application to rent an apartment in Hollywood because the manager is still
going to ask, "But what do you do for an income?"
I have three sons who seem to
have made some effort to pursue a career in art…in their fashion. They are talented--I know that for a fact,
being a good judge of such things (especially my youngest). One, the oldest, after twelve years in the
Air Force, learned scientific glass blowing; that's the very demanding skill of
making such as lab equipment.
Eventually, however, he switched to art glass, is really quite good at
it, could be extraordinary if he were to get a real show together and then find
a dealer (although I have few kind words for art dealers); but at present it
seems to be a sideline, being otherwise employed with a "real job,"
as the necessities of life demand.
Another son has a master's degree in art. I'm not sure what that means.
Since then he acquired a PhD in linguistics, and is now a professor of
the subject at a university. My
youngest has a university degree in graphic arts (I'm not sure what that means
either), and after a year of sending out his resume, he finally landed a steady
job (in the field, I presume), which began at entry level. Although I have every reason to be proud of
my kids, and indeed I am, I still can't help but wonder where they are hiding
the volume of work they should have produced by now, considering their ages run
from thirty to forty-five. (Keep in
mind there are some very famous artists who weren't even lucky enough to have
lived that long but, nevertheless, produced a great deal.)
I'm an art
school dropout myself. I dropped out
after six months of what would have been a two-year degree because I figured I
could get paid to practice what I was, as a student, paying to practice. I was right. The first thing I did was to paint a backdrop for a community
theatre as a volunteer (nowadays, working for nothing is called
"showcasing," which is essentially what I did). Within a month I was working as a paid
professional scenic artist, which within a year progressed to set designer,
technical director, lighting designer, and another seasonal job (to become year
around later on) as art director for the State Fairgrounds. I was about twenty-one at that point. (This was in the late fifties…and times were
about to change dynamically very soon.
I'll get to that shortly.) I'm
not sure what my point is, but looking back (and around too), college would
have been a waste of time for me as an artist.
Although it probably never seemed like it at the time, looking back, I
never missed a beat.
The sixties were mostly
devoted to making a name (like being a big frog in a small pond) as a set
designer and scenic artist, but including technical direction, which meant I
could also build and light those sets (carpentry and a lot of electrical
expertise, which helped make me in demand and employable). My work at the fairgrounds also led to a
sideline business in commercial display, which has a lot in common with theatre
but pays better.
I had actually studied fine
art and was not interested in commercial art as it is usually defined…although
I've done my share of that too. I
never considered scenic art and set design to be particularly commercial, but I
suppose commercial display would be. I
loved the theatre, and still do (although my latest endeavors have been as
playwright, not scenic artist), but the fact remained that it had been my intention
to be a fine artist. Fine art, if one
is not familiar with the distinction, means a struggling artist who paints what
he feels like painting, and then attempts to find or otherwise create a market
for that art (not that I didn't enjoy the challenge of being commissioned to
paint four or five backdrops measuring up to 22' X 56' in a couple of weeks or
less). The great difference being that
in commercial art, even scenic art, the market comes to you and tells you what
it wants. Mostly, I think, I was not
only being content with scenic art, but I really didn't know, at that time,
exactly what subject matter I wanted to pursue as a fine artist. That came later and was motivated by certain
current events.
Censorship and Art:
A wondrous thing happen in
1961: The Supreme Court pondered the
question of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and decided it was
not obscene, contrary to previous considerations, most of which dated back to a
guy named Comstock and the Comstock Act (look it up online). That decision, followed by another regarding
the Eighteenth Century novel Fanny Hill, ultimately opened a floodgate
of erotica, including porn, which probably would have offended even Lawrence
himself. In the late sixties the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled that people could read and look at whatever they wished
in the privacy of their own homes. That ruling really upset most of
Congress who, in their most righteous consideration of how they believed
themselves to be the makers of laws to protect Americans from themselves (which
has what to do with life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness?),
decided it was their duty to do something about this damned promiscuous Constitution
of ours. Later, President Johnson
commissioned research by eighteen experts into the effect of pornography and
obscenity, which was actually a congressional effort, or intent (Congress
having appropriated two million bucks to prove pornography was a threat to
American values), so they could retain control of the individual's life through
their many laws of enforced morality.
Unfortunately for Nixon the report didn't come out until he was
President. (It was actually published
as a book, dirty pictures and all, and became a bestseller during the
seventies. I suspect today it may not
even be legal to look at it…which is yet another story.) Essentially it said erotica and even
pornography and obscenity didn't present a major social problem. One study, for instance, concluded that
young college men had a great interest in pornography if they had never seen
any, but it didn't take them long to become bored with it and lose interest,
especially if it were readily available to them. That wasn't what the Congress or Nixon wanted to hear, so they
blamed is all on Johnson.
In 1985 Reagan appointed
another commission, run by Attorney General Edwin Meese, to come to another
conclusion. The Meese Commission, made
up of eleven carefully selected anti pornography crusaders, came out with such
statements as, "Regardless of what the findings are, common sense tells us
otherwise," or words to that effect, which, of course, is not particularly
scientific in nature. It's a long
story, one I am tempted to go into in great length (which seems to be my nature
on writing on just about anything), but the rest, as they say, is
history…although history is changing, as it always tends to do, more often than
not to extremes at either end.
One terribly sarcastic comment
made by Kurt Vonnegut in a commentary on the Meese Commission, released before
the Commission's findings, and as a member of a group calling themselves the
National Coalition Against Censorship, put is all pretty well, at least in my
opinion: "It is not enough that
sex crimes of every sort are already against the law and are punished with
admirable severity. It is up to our leaders…to persuade a large part of our
citizenry that even the most awful sex crimes are made legal, and even
celebrated in some godless quarters, because of the permissiveness of our
Constitution." Yes, indeed, our Constitution is permissive, its
permissiveness otherwise being referred to as rights retained by the people and
not be infringed upon by the government.
Continued