The Gimmick of Art

Been thinking a lot lately about the next art movement, the next great wave.

Art parallels what happens in the literary world, each riding endless waves of ups and downs, new approaches and old revivals. Lots of argument could be made about the nature of art today–that Pop Surrealism, Graffiti Art, or a continuation of Abstract Expressionism is where it’s at, the next history-book-bound wave.

It could be any of them, or none of them, really (I’m leaning toward all of the aforementioned as an extension of the Pop movement, but y’know). That’s the fun part. We’ll probably all be dead before a new one is declared (hindsight is the best lens, after all), but it’s exciting to speculate. Or, maybe I’m just an art Geek.

In considering everything that’s needed for an art movement, I started thinking about art and its machinery. The gimmicks. Little quirks, ticks, and media-grabbers that contemporary artists use to get attention. The Balloon Boy and John Gosselin stuff that gets people looking, even if they hate the people they’re looking at. Stunts, wackiness, pretentiousness, craziness…

Many of the commercially successful artists this century (especially since the 1950s) have used gimmicks to get attention and to make sales. Sometimes gimmicks outweigh even the quality of the art itself, but it’s there, ever-present.

Now, I’m not putting gimmick down, per se. It’s just interesting. Andy Warhol was (possibly) the greatest commercialist artist of all, attending art openings and parties with an agent on his arm and an entourage of strange people ready to attract attention. This kind of thing is still rampant today, although with less far-reaching effects than Warhol’s age. I’ve seen the quirky artists with entourage in tow attend shows and openings, wearing desginer clothes and wacky get-ups to garner press. Hell, when we did an April Fool Around show last year, every artist who wore wacky jester clothing sold more than those who did not. Maybe the public wants to buy the whole image of art–the art from the artist, and the artist as artist. Interesting to speculate, and probably something an entrepeneuring grad student could do as a dissertation: what people buy when they buy art.

If people want to buy the idea of art, in addition to the end product, that explains at least some of what attracts us to the artists who break boundaries and are larger than life.

Pricasso, a wild Australian artist who paints with his penis, is internationally known for his wackiness (and also the fact that his paintings are incredibly good for being painted with a pecker). He’s a great example of the larger-than-life gimmick, and his tactic works to generate sales and interest. Some may degrade his approach to art–that it’s more gimmick than quality, but looking back on some of our beloved, famous artists, we find that his type of rule-breaking craziness is rampant and honored.

There are artists who paint with BBQ sauce, sand, french fries and ketchup, bottles of water on a sidewalk, or human blood. There’s a guy who pukes paint onto a canvas and another who creates compositions only with rolled-up recycled bits of trash and paper. All I might say are doing quite well, or at least enjoying some level of success which the average impasto landscape painter might only dream of. Is this good or bad? Is the fact taht gimmick makes them notable better or worse than sheer skill, because surely there’s something ground-breaking about what they do, and a level of skill necessary to pull it off…

I’m making no claim to the right answer, or even to a judgment at all, just throwing this out here for consideration. If gimmicks in marketing work to sell ordinary products like household cleaners, horror movies, and bubblegum, the cleverness of a marketing campaign, or of an artistic gimmick must surely go toward helping an artist establish an idenity.

As artists we must keep in mind that we are constantly on call to “make it new.” As art lovers and art buyers, we must constantly keep in mind that art is more than just decor for the living room–that you’re buying a piece of something bigger, something which transcends a color match and lives on. Whether or not a new style of gimmick will garner a new art movement is unknown. Just something to think about from both sides of the discussion.