In my post, Blogging for Profit, I lamented on the clamour for publicity in the desire for money and profit. I emphasized the nefarious ways websites and magazines generate reader clicks and subscriptions.
There are also legitimate ways to get noticed. If the quality of the product is excellent, and the service is required, a business should succeed. The same is true in art.
Paying to Survive
The business of art requires profits. Professional artists need to sell their work to earn a living. Art galleries need to earn a commission on sales to keep operating. Museums and public galleries need customers to pay for their infrastructure. Publicity is required to induce patrons and customers to view art and make purchases.
How do artists become known? Let’s look at some famous artists.
Provocation in Art
One way to become famous is to be provocative. Over the centuries artists achieved prominence by provoking society to see art and culture in new ways.
Classical painting previously painted the ruling and upper classes, mythic gods and religious narratives. Gustave Courbet and Eduoard Manet painted ordinary people (even prostitutes) as legitimate subject matter, shocking public sensibilities.
Manet’s Olympia
The Impressionist and the Expressionist painters broke convention by painting in unrealistic colours and distorting perspective. This shocked and upset many art patrons and public sensibilities.
Picasso broke the picture into cubes, and the Fauves used garish colours in their compositions. Picasso created disturbing, ugly paintings to convey the horrors of warfare.
Pablo Picasso
Rene Magritte, Marcel Duchamp and Philip Guston disrupted the conventions of what constitutes art.
Ren Magritte?Marcel Duchamp : UrinalPhilip Guston
These paintings provoked the viewer into uncomfortable emotions and outrage. They upset cultural sensibilities. They created art which did not evoke skill, inspiration, or beauty.
Getting Attention
Thus urge to provoke and upset continues today. Some artists are at the forefront of social change, confronting racism, women’s rights, injustice, and any and every social norm.
As we become more inured to what is shocking, each generation of artists finds more outrageous ways to provoke. We have human portraits sculpted from frozen blood, huge sharks preserved in glass tanks of formaldehyde, canned human excrement, or a banana taped to a gallery wall.
Do we have to go to further extremes to get publicity? Hopefully we can look elsewhere for the answer.
Finding Provocation
As artists and creators how can we be provocative? Being provocative means pushing ourselves to be more expressive, more introspective, more sensitive to our discourse while keeping true to ourselves and our values.
The essence of art making is to create a reaction in ourselves and the viewer that goes way beyond ‘meh’.
Learning to Provoke
In art school our art projects stimulated creativity and pushed us to find our visual voice. The studio creations showed how unique each student could be. Critiques and evaluations provided valuable feedback on what was effective and what was deficient.
Art school helped me to be provocative and expressive. An example is a portrait of Marcel Duchamp I painted (below). My objective was to provoke the provoker by mocking his urinal sculpture (note the little turds and urinal).
I realize this was just an art school joke about my belief that a urinal is not art.
Art should be more than a contrived ‘Look at me!” or “See how clever I am”.
Taboos
Provocation can also be accidental. For example nudity is a topic with the potential to be misinterpreted. For some audiences it is a taboo and can be mistaken for pornography.
Figure Drawings
I enjoy drawing the human figure. I want to show its grace and beauty. Is my drawing provocative and titillating to the viewer for purient reasons?
Am I using nudity for shock? Certainly with society’s sensitivity to equality and gender issues, a male artist drawing a female may be considered inappropriate and his art no longer legitimate. Should I only draw male nudes? Or unattractive nudes? I don’t know the answer.
Other taboo subjects that can be provocative include portraying religious and political beliefs or deeply held social conventions. Using Nazi symbols, mocking God, or Buddha, showing sexual acts, or vivid scenes of carnage are all provocative and socially taboo. An artist who invokes these topics should expect or welcome controversy and ostracism.
Banksy showing an iconic image from Vietnam war with Mickey and Ronald MacDonald
As an activist, Banksy uses art as a way to raise awareness and protest against current issues such as climate change, military conflicts, and poverty.
The word ‘provoke’ is itself provoking. Other words may better describe what our incentive should be. We want to ‘instill’ or ‘inspire’ or ‘evoke’ or ‘reveal’ or ‘awaken’ something in the viewer. When we have created something special or meaningful, we want to offer it to an audience.
We want our creation to be authentic to who we are, what we see, what we feel, what we believe, what really moves us. If publicity has any value we want the publicity to further our reputation. We want our name aligned with the art we create.
In my last year of art school each graduate created a body of work for public viewing. The artists’ statements offer insight into the motivations, intentions and framework behind the shows. This is what provokes the artist.
Here is part of my artist statement for my graduate show: “Public Place, Private Space”
“My cityscape paintings portray settings which create ambivalent and contradictory feelings, such as inspiration and intimidation, freedom and confinement. Does the city offer beauty or brutality, utility or complexity, ease or anxiety? These paintings look at the confusions and contradictions created within people and places by modern technology.”
Ron Kuwahara
The paintings below convey the effect of cityscapes on its citizens.
These painting align with my intentions and helps me to build the reputation that I want. I want to be known as an artist who cares about the well-being of the ordinary citizen.
Summary
Art needs to create a reaction in the viewer, some works are provocative, some are subtle, some are subliminal. When an artist finds that ‘buzz’, the work and the resultant publicity is successful. It assists the artist in building a reputation and a viewership.
When I’m at my best, I’m trying to destabilize myself and figure out new ways of approaching art as a provocation. I think I am at my best when I push myself into a place where I don’t have all the answers.
Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life. One can do that by telling a story or writing about a fresco by Giotto or studying how a snail climbs up a wall.
In this post I review Vienna as a tourist, and then delve into Vienna’s history.
I traveled to Vienna as a tourist with little prior knowledge of Austria, its history or its culture. I met my son in Vienna as he was completing a multi- month tour of Eastern Europe. We stayed in a modest AirBnB apartment 2 km from the city centre (Innere Stadt).
Tram to Beethoven HOuse J4
Google and the Internet provided the maps, guides, and translations we required to plan and organize our excursions. We used the public transportation network of subways, trams, and buses for our travels. It was efficient, low cost and easy to use. We walked extensively throughout the city
Cafe Central
We ate street food and fancier meals at iconic Viennese restaurants. We indulged in the art, music and museum scene as discussed in the previous post.
Personal Encounters
I have only praise for Vienna and its citizens. Our main interactions with the Viennese were with our AirBnB host, the numerous waiters, shopkeepers and tour guides. They were all helpful and respectful. We mingled with regular citizens of various ethnicities while shopping in markets, sitting on trams or relaxing in parks. We enjoyed the musicians and dancers.
The city felt efficient, clean, safe and welcoming. I would highly recommend a visit to this beautiful city.
Vienna Beyond Tourism
Of course Vienna is far more than a beautiful tourist attraction.A city as old as Vienna contains innumerable layers of politics, history and culture. Vienna experienced centuries of immigration, conquest, assimilation, expansion, exploitation, victories and defeats, creating the city that exists today. While I am an avid reader of European history, I don’t know enough to offer a meaningful perspective on Vienna’s history. A moral and ethical assessment depends on who evaluates the outcomes.
Anschluss
A period of history often lost to the tourist is the role that Austria played prior to World War II.
On March 11–13, 1938, Nazi Germany annexed the neighboring country of Austria (Österreich). This event is known as the Anschluss. “Anschluss” is a German word that means “connection” or “joining.”
A visitor to … the curved colonnaded Neue Burg wing of Vienna’s imperial Hofburg Palace, can walk right up to doors that lead to one of the most infamous balconies in Austrian history: the site of Adolf Hitler’s speech on March 15, 1938, in which he announced to cheering Austrians that his birth country had been incorporated into the Third Reich, an event known as the Anschluss. Yet the doors stay closed, making it impossible for a visitor to step out onto what is sometimes called the “Hitler balcony.”
Was Austria complicit in sustaining the atrocities of Nazi Germany? Should Vienna be condemned for its role? While I unequivocally condemn Nazism and Fascism, my judgment of Vienna is less clear.
I cannot condemn Vienna for its darker history, unless I am willing to offer a similar judgment on my own behaviour. I have certainly ignored or harmed others (perhaps inadvertently) in the pursuit of my own goals. Some victories have meant defeat for my rivals. I have applauded leaders who supported my beliefs, and I have formed alliances that I have later regretted. I have turned a blind eye to suffering, and I have ignored pleas for aid. I have avoided conflict where righteous action was needed. Is a city history any different my personal history?
Indeed the reasons I love Vienna and reasons I dislike Vienna are the very values that I love and hate about myself.
“Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,”
Bible. John 8:7.
Accepting Responsibility
Monument Against War and Fascism
The opinions of today’s Viennese citizens are far more legitimate than mine. It is important that Vienna’s role in the Anschluss is being acknowledged and not denied. Vienna has built the Monument Against War and Fascism on Albertinaplatz, behind Vienna’s Opera House to acknowledge victims of war and violence, and the 65000 Viennese Jews who died in concentration camps.
Conquest and Exploitation
Vienna played a key role in many world-changing events. The whole history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire must hold some dark chapters. Consider the Napoleonic Wars, World War I and colonization. Do the Vienna museums and galleries display the spoils of war and political conquest?
Welt Museum
A partial answer was provided in a notice at the entrance to the Welt Museum (World Ethnographic Museum)
Aztec Headdress
“Most of the world’s population was dominated by foreign powers in the years between 1500 and 1920. This foreign rule was defined by conflicts and exploitation. Against this backdrop, ethnographic museums flourished in the 19th and 20th centuries and shaped stereotypical beliefs of lost or colonised cultures. As our Museum was one of those benefitting from Europe’s colonial expansion, the stories behind many objects and how they were acquired deal with appropriation and colonial violence.
Although the colonies gradually fought for and were granted their independence after World War Il, it was as if time stood still in ethnographic museums. The cherished and seemingly timeless conceptions of “us” and “them” were only hesitantly challenged as late as in the 1980s.
Today we face our colonial past not only to raise awareness but also to learn from it. After all, how we deal with our collections and the people related to them in the present will shape the image of ethnographic collections in the future.”
Vienna Welt Museum
Notorious Artist
In his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler described how, in his youth, he wanted to become a professional artist, but his dreams were ruined because he failed the entrance exam of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Hitler was rejected twice by the institute, once in 1907 and again in 1908.
A tour guide told us that Adolf Hitler hated Vienna after he was rejected by the art academy. The guide suggested World War II may have been drastically different had Hitler been accepted into art school and became an artist.
Should we blame Vienna for Hitler’s conversion to politics? Should we applaud Vienna for maintaining high artistic standards? Here is a painting by Adolf Hitler. Judge for yourself.
Each of us is a mixture of good qualities, and some not so good qualities. In considering our fellow man we should remember his good qualities, and realize his faults only prove that he is, after all a human being. We should refrain from making harsh judgment of a person just because he happens to be A Dirty Rotten No Good Son of a Bitch!
(Anonymous)
and a ruthless, evil, mass murderer and war criminal
My secret ambition when I started this blog was to reach a large audience. I had visions of blogging to hundreds or thousands of readers. People around the world would ask “what did Ron write about today?” A Google search of a topic in art or aging would quickly lead to this blog. Fame and fortune would soon follow.
This desire was very naive and troubling.
Publicize or Languish
This vision of having a large readership can be ethically dangerous. The quest for fame is akin to the quest for higher profit: more readers, more subscriptions, more clicks, and more money!
To be famous and rich on the web, creating publicity is far more important than writing posts. It is tempting to find ways to ‘go viral’ to get readers.
Tempting Headlines
Here are some ways newspapers and websites create publicity and attention.
Fake News, False Facts
False information and fake news proliferate on the internet. People write almost anything to get noticed.
Provoke Controversy
If fake news doesn’t work, news channels use outrageous provocation to press our hot buttons to get us upset. The tabloids and their prominent columnists peddle sensational and controversial opinions. Their rhetoric instills curiosity and outrage.
News and information are becoming so biased and opinionated that we are wary of any information provided by the web. Facts and truth get lost to emotional reactions. Websites that provide factual information in a unbiased and rational manner are often overlooked and hard to find.
Stupidity and Misfortune
Writers provoke our curiosity by revealing the stupidity or misfortune of others.
Free Stuff or Easy Cheats
Other headlines tell us how to get more from less, to get more clicks on a webpage.
Catastrophizing Life
Headlines tell us what’s wrong with people, society or the world to get our attention.
“… it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Macbeth, William Shakespeare
My Headlines
Based on these tried and true techniques to grab attention, I should create provocative headlines to attract readers.
Ron’s headlines as clickbait.
He shared what he had with poor peasants
Make 10,000 paintings and sell them for $100
Don’t eat arsenic oil paint
Food for Thought
It’s not surprising that many industries are putting profits ahead of the quality of products they produce. If people can be persuaded to pay more money for a fancier product than why not? Give them what they think they want. It’s usually short term pleasure over long term value.
Much of the food industry tempts people to buy products with promises of more flavour, sweeter taste, easy preparation, quicker cooking, or lower prices.
We can’t be sustained by fancy packaging and instant gratification. It’s no wonder we have an ongoing worldwide health crisis.
We require nutrition that promotes health and well-being. Wholesome food may not be so profitable to the manufacturer, but it will have far more benefit to the consumer.
No! No! No!
Similarly a blog needs to omit the bombast of outrageousness and shock. It needs to offer sustenance with a deeper level of satisfaction.
I am unwilling to provoke publicity just to entice more readers. I would rather have a small faithful readership who selects substance over frivolity. This blog will provide sincere and engaging content without sensationalizing the information.
Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom. Reading – even browsing – an old book can yield sustenance denied by a database search. Patience is a virtue, gluttony a sin.”
I feel guilty that I have not produced a new post. Last year I committed to regularly write this blog, possibly every two weeks. Here are reasons why I have not kept this commitment.
Conflict of Interest
Life has offered other tempting activities. Winter came late to Nova Scotia, so I skied the final sunny cold days. Travel planning, drawing and painting occupied my attention. By the end of the day, I felt too tired to work on the blog. I feel guilty that other parts of my life are more important than blogging.
No Value
The blog is not a newspaper that reports events (no matter how mundane) to a paid readership. It’s a waste of effort to create trivial posts just to meet a schedule.
Not all trivial things stay trivial. Seinfeld, one of the most sitcoms, was a show about ‘nothing’. The humour was in the mundane aspects of daily life.
“There’s more to life than making shallow, fairly obvious observations.”
I won’t publish what I had for breakfast or where I went for my walk. Those may be good topics for Facebook.
Rejected Headlines
Here are a few headlines that I won’t be writing.
Failed Expectations
Other Priorities
Some posts haven’t worked out. I was hoping to present the ideas and works of other artists. I was hoping to discuss the influence of artificial intelligence and radical technologies on art.
These ideas require more research, effort, and insight than I am willing to devote. They may become feasible in the future.
Solution: Quality Over Quantity
A rejected painting
I should only write posts that offer value. I need to reject weak proposals.
The content has to be organized and well written. I should only write and publish articles that meet a high standard.
Half Way Isn’t Far Enough
I have several posts waiting in the queue. They need refinement, revision, editing and imagery to complete the narrative.
Half-done posts should not be published. Like the paintings below they are not ready for viewing, I need to be fully satisfied before I reveal the final product.
Half Done Paintings
Completion
My commitment is to produce fewer but better posts. I need to convert incomplete ideas into finalized works.
Be patient. Keep plugging. Keep working slowly but steadily. The final product should be worth waiting for!
Some beautiful chapters in this book called life, always remain incomplete.”
Last week I got up early to ski, and marveled at the sunrise. What a beautiful start to the day! What will the time ahead bring?
I had fun cruising the ski runs. The day passed quickly and before long the sun was setting over Martock
I was reminded of the lyrics of from the musical, Fiddler on the Roof:
… sunrise, sunset sunrise, sunset, swiftly flow the days. seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers, blossoming even as we gaze.
sunrise, sunset sunrise, sunset swiftly fly the years, one season following another, laiden with happiness and tears…
I can feel the days pass by with each sunset. I wish I could slow down time.
With each sunrise the world slowly changes . I wonder how this slow change will transform as the future unfolds. How far into the future could I look?
1 Day Ahead
Personally not much changes over one day. My heart beats an extra 72,000 times, and I walk another 8000 steps. My calendar contains events similar to today. There is laughter and conversation and joy and sorrow all mixed together. Life seems comfortable and predictable.
1 Year Ahead
In one year my life would not change too much, I can expect some aging to occur. I will have problems maintaining my health and my possessions. World politics will remain turbulent. There will be unforeseen personal and societal events events that could drastically change my life. I should have the resources to handle most of these situations. The days will be full of memorable or meaningful moments. I will witness many sunsets.
Salutation to the Dawn
Listen to the salutation to the dawn, Look to this day for it is life, the very life of life, In its brief course lie all the verities and realities of our existence.
The bliss of growth, the splendor of beauty, For yesterday is but a dream and tomorrow is only a vision,
But today well spent makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well therefore to this day. Such is the salutation to the dawn.
~Sanskrit, attributed to Kālidāsa
10 Years Ahead
My life will be different a decade from now. My health and family situation will change. My son will establish a career and start a family. My wife and I may be downsizing and living a quieter life. We may be watching the sunset from a seniors’ apartment. The possibility of death and illness loom large.
Life continues normally for almost everyone day by day. The planet has not changed significantly but has provided humankind with the usual chaos of hurricanes, blizzards, droughts and deluges.
100 Years Ahead
I will definitely be dead and gone. I have left a small legacy based on a few paintings that may still exist. A Google search of my name may turn up a few scientific or artistic references. My DNA may live on through my son’s children. I possibly may be someone’s great great grandfather.
We therefore commit this body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; ….’.
Book of Common Prayer
New people will be living in our house, which will be unrecognizable. The neighbourhood may have become dilapidated or torn down and rebuilt. Everything else I own and value will be dispersed or destroyed.
Memories of a long-lost era
The memories and experiences of billions of people will be forgotten with each generation. Most photographs, emails, DVD’s and other media will be lost over the century.
Global warming will have flooded the old shoreline, drastically altering Halifax. The population of Canada will have doubled. Society and technology will be unrecognizable.
The earth’s geography will be altered by climate change and human consumption. Politics and war will have drastically changed the prosperity and hierarchy of nations. The colours of sunrises and sunsets will be affected by the change in climate.
1000 Years ahead
There will be numerous terrible wars (possibly nuclear). The survivors will be trying to rebuild civilization. Will we have learned to cooperate or will we continue with conflict and competition? Will intellect or emotion influence the outcome?
History will say the 20th century was the beginning of the end with the invention of nuclear weapons and the start of climate change. Only the most outrageous and most brilliant people of today will be remembered by history, much like Genghis Khan or Aristotle.
Countries like Canada and USA will no longer exist and new political entities will dominate. The climate will be different, extremely hot or cold and massively influenced by human activity. Wilderness will no longer exist and most wild animals will be extinct. Maybe humankind will be exploring other planets and nearby stars systems.
Almost all material products (cars, electronics, crafts, furniture) from 2023 will be trashed or preserved in museums. All the 21st century buildings and infrastructure will have decayed or been replaced. Cities will have been abandoned or underwater or rebuilt on higher ground.
Alternatively humankind may have developed a profound responsibility to be the earth’s custodian; we may have transformed the planet into a place of peace, enlightenment and harmony, a true heaven on earth.
Although the earth remains geographically similar to 2023, humankind will have endured massive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, creating spectacular sunsets lasting decades.
Sunrise in 3023?
10,000 Years into the Future
The earth still has a 24 hour day and the sun and moon move in similar orbits. The climate is much hotter than today. Some regions near the equator are uninhabitable by humans and life has moved to the polar regions. The human genome has been altered so humans look and think differently. People will be more diverse and specialized. Humans from 2023 are considered an ancient branch of the modern humanoids of 12023.
Nothing social or cultural we recognize today will exist. Countries, societies and civilizations will be long lost. Fragments from 2023 may still be washed up on beaches or lost underwater.
100,000 Years in the Future
In geological and evolutionary terms 100,000 years is very short. The cycle of day and night continues. The continents have moved a few kilometers. Species have evolved but not too drastically.
The climate will be different. Volcanoes and earthquakes have shattered the continents. The Yellowstone supervolcano has erupted and the San Andreas Fault has ripped California from the continent. Sea levels have changed.
The ability of humans to build or destroy has multiplied by orders of magnitude over the millenia. Human civilization will either be amazing or extinct. If we survive, we will have learned painful lessons on extinction or revival. Sentient beings of some form will exist to witness the sunrise in 102023.
1,000,000 Years in the Future
Over a million years, evolution changes the living world. Every animal and plant species will have changed. New species will thrive while others have perished. Perhaps insects are ascendent over mammals. Humans may have disappeared from the earth’s ecosystem (moving to another planetary system?). Will the world hark back to the time of dinosaurs where life was brutal, dangerous and deadly?
The sun continues to shine offering beautiful sunrises and sunsets every day for whatever creatures roam the planet. There have been over 365,000,000 sunsets since I went skiing.
Planet earth will continue to exist with oceans and continents that have moved to different places. New mountain ranges will rise up and other regions will sink beneath the sea. Who knows what animals and plants will prosper in an atmosphere of vastly different gases. Surely new life forms will dominate the planet. Fortunately living organisms continue to evolve and exist. They will inhabit the earth for another 100 million years.
1,000,000,000 Years in the Future
In a billion years the sun may transform into a red giant, dramatically increasing in size. The oceans and atmosphere will boil and burn away leaving only a rocky crust.
Red sun rising over a dessicated earth
This might be the end of life on earth, but there is something comforting about the immensely long cycle of life in which I have played a minor but real part.
3,000,000,000 Years from Now
In a few billion years, the sun expands massively and explodes as a dying star, ending the cycle of sunrises on earth forever. The earth disappears in the supernova. The end has finally come.
The many sides of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. Located 10,000 light-years away in the northern constellation Cassiopeia, Cassiopeia A is the remnant of a once massive star that died in a violent supernova explosion 325 years ago. Hubble Space Telescope (HST), Spitzer Space Telescope. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Epilogue
At the edge of All the Ages A Knight sate on his steed, His armour red and thin with rust, His soul from sorrow freed; And he lifted up his visor From a face of skin and bone, And his horse turned head and whinnied As the twain stood there alone.
No bird above that steep of time Sang of a livelong quest; No wind breathed, Rest: ‘Lone for an end!’ cried Knight to steed, Loosed an eager rein– Charged with his challenge into Space: And quiet did quiet remain.
by Walter De la Mare (1873 – 1956), “The Song of Fini
