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 anders nilsen 'what good is art?'
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Comic book artist Anders Nilsen gets to the point. What good is art when the world is going to hell? We’ll take for granted, for the sake of argument, that the world is in fact going to hell. It seems like a reasonable conclusion given global warming, the end of oil, water shortages, bird flu, AIDS, the Middle East, bad diets, the state of television, road rage, nuclear proliferation… the list goes on. I’ve heard it said that every culture has food and sex, but that what counts as food and sex in different places and times is not at all predictable - rotting cabbage, tarantulas, getting peed on… art is like this, too. It’s rare to find agreement on something even as fundamental as what exactly it is. I remember telling my photography teacher in college that what we were doing - trying to get perfect blacks in our prints, and perfect whites - seemed entirely beside the point of life, and that maybe I would go and be an Emergency Medical Technician in Bosnia instead (this was in the early 90s). It felt very good to say, noble and wise; it even felt plausible at that moment, which it wasn’t in the least.  Images from Monologues Of The Coming Plague. All art started with religion, that is to say with the contemplation of life, death, fate, the eternal, the unknown. It was the telling of the story - usually just one, though generally with multiple contested versions - by which the culture in question defined itself. Slowly, the artifice of the telling became the main subject of the art. The gilding around the Madonna became more important than the Madonna herself. Between college and an abortive attempt at graduate school I took a trip to Italy, Holland and France to see some of the artworks I’d studied in school. The thing that struck me most among the vast collections of that continent was the clear progression in the portrayal of the patron in art, the person paying the artist’s bill. Early on, the patron is shown in passivity, observing or interacting in a worshipful way with whatever divinity is being depicted. A couple of centuries later, the divinities, now mostly anonymous angels, are usually waiting upon the patron. These days, instead of a person waited on by angels the patron is likely to be a sandwich cookie or car, waited on by people. Measured in quantity of print space, airtime or bandwidth. This is our primary artform - how we define ourselves, how we share and idealize our experience of the world. What is art for then? For selling things. For conferring status to objects. For creating desire. So we can add the degradation of art to our list of woes from which humanity is widely expected not to recover. Divinity and the unknowable are no longer part of the equation.  Images from Monologues Of The Coming Plague (cover detail). I am vaguely interested in commercials because they are sometimes very interesting, funny and horrifying, as art should be, but they are ultimately not very satisfying as foils for experience. As for those other related questions of life and meaning, they all got refined too. Working on them for two thousand years has not, fortunately, gotten us any closer to resolving them. But we still pursue them, and it’s probably a good thing to have dogma mostly out of the way in our pursuit. A professor of mine used to belabor the point that the greatness of Modernism in general and of abstraction in particular is its very lack of utility. Being good for nothing, it offered a rare space in life that demanded nothing of you, allowing quiet contemplation - a great and rare gift. That sounds pretty good to me, although it also works as an explanation for the fact that so much of early and mid-20th-century art is so boring. It seems like the logical outgrowth of trying to create beauty while avoiding meaning. I’ve never been convinced that this thing I do has much point. The interpretation of experience, the contemplation of beauty, life, the absurd; these are probably more or less what it is, but I’m not sure that we couldn’t get along without them. Several weeks ago, though, I was doing a book signing. At one point a woman got my attention, said it was nice to meet me and that my work had helped her through a difficult time. I didn’t know exactly what to say, the conversation moved on and I lost track of her as the night progressed. I don’t know what she was referring to specifically, but the comment stayed with me.  Images from Monologues Of The Coming Plague. In November 05, the person I loved most in the world was killed after a long battle with Hodgkin’s Disease. In the months that have followed I have almost compulsively made work about her, about us and about the loss. It may or may not be worth reading. It may amount to therapy: important, valid, but not necessarily, strictly speaking, art. With this kind of loss, nothing softens the blow. Nothing anyone says can make you feel better about it. What helps is being made to feel it at all. Conversation can do this, and certain music and storytelling do it powerfully - in the same way that words particularize ideas and shape our experience of the abstractions we use them to describe. The music I was listening to didn’t help me be sad, it became my sadness. People are dying, being tortured, being sold into slavery, the world is on fire. So why does anyone think it’s worthwhile to play in a string quartet? Because after you bury your dead, after your wounds heal and you are released from your bondage you will want to hear the string quartet play. The strings will be like vocal cords wailing, allowing your grief. Art may be good for all kinds of things, and this is one thing I would not be able to live without.
Anders Nilsen
Monologues Of The Coming Plague by Anders Nilsen is out now, published by Fantagraphics.
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comment by marksolarprophet
Jan 28, 2007
Well, when I started sending my hand sketched paslels to two of the biggest visited spaca science websites; NASA's www.spaceweather.com and Astronomy Picture of the Day, the responses that I received in my email were overwhelming! That people responded that is was refreshing to see real hand sketched art again instead of just another sterile digital photograph from a space probe or a machine. Oh, Really? I was told in several randon emails from scientists, teachers, artists and students, that real human art is longed for again over digital machine produced and oversaturated-in-the-web images. > But first the info you asked for here and there is a lot because my artwork is now auto (hyper linked) to so many sites besides the NASA sites of where it started at > www.spaceweather.com < enter the archive dates in the upper right of home page > *Or just copy and paste the URL's here below> Oct 14th 2006 <this is the one that started it all- My real abstract art! http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a109/markseibold... Oct 31st 2006 <this one I did for Halloween as the images relate- Read text in site! http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a109/markseibold... Nov 8th 2006 < "Marks INFLUENCE -suggestion to Dr. Phillips, NASA Physicist, starts an Art Contest - In the site SEE right column *Mercury Transit Photo Contest homage to Mark at bottom of that page" http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a109/markseibold... Dec 14th 2006 < this one spurrs a NASA educator at Missouri State University to write and ask for my copyright permission to use it in a NASA future space travel lecture but that they cannot compensate me for its use - Instead I am honored that they want to use it. http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a109/markseibold... Jan 12th 2007 < This is the most recent Comet McNaught sketch http://www.spaceweather.com/comets/gallery_mcnaugh... Marks “Hand Drawn Mercury Transit” APOD address Nov 17th> http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap061117.html... Viturbo University – my Pastel Sketch Evokes “Servant Leadership” by Tom Jablonski > http://servantleadershipblog.com/servant-leadershi... There are other locations that my pastels have ended up in - Astronomy clubs, other blog sites - Do a search on: Mark Seibold + Pastel Sketches of the Sun -enjoy and please feel free to question, comment and criticize! I enjoy the feednback as an artist always would. -Mark Seibold Artist / Astronomer Troutdale, Oregon USA
comment by Mark
Apr 29, 2006
I think there is a problem with the idea that art has to say something (i.e. bear a profound message) but also with that notion's counterpoint (i.e. that art that doesn't bear a profound message 'says nothing'). I don't particularly need artists to be priests or nihilists - and more specifically I don't like the ones who try to fill these roles.I think we can be moved to produce art by events that move us - but the message of the work speaks to us, not others in these cases. The difference between the mawkish poems on funeral bouquets and the 'Lucy' poems is the nature of the medium not the message. Personally I am interested in art that IS reality rather than attempts to mimic the real world or attempts to universalise individual understandings of it.
comment by starmie
Apr 28, 2006
One here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/06/i...
comment by kendo, man!
Apr 28, 2006
Some one has being going in to the town around chernobyl and painting shadows of children playing on the walls.Thay are some of the most powerfull images I'v seen. They are on the bbc somewere.
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