Why Do We Stop? (Cont.)

As we progress through life, we drop things that we used to do, even though we might not fully know why we stopped doing them, even though we might have liked doing them. 

Recently, I read a book about the avant-garde, How To Be Avant-Garde, particularly a passage about Marcel Duchamp. The author was curious why he stopped making art. 

Essentially, it was a shift to “conceptual interventions”. After the Fountain scandal (the "Richard Mutt case"), critics often noted his "inactivity" and his commitment to "doing nothing" after the war. This was a deliberate shift, engaging instead in activities like playing chess. He stated there could be "no more question of my life as an artist’s life: I gave that up ten years ago.”

I sometimes wonder why I stopped making art, even though I like to make it and I have lots of ideas. I realized  I don't like to make lots of objects, and I’d rather be the conceptualist or the art director, which can loop in lots of different mediums. 

I have also been wondering why certain ideas won't fly in our current cultural/political environment. It’s a different territory now for a conceptual artist than it was in the 1960s or 1970s, when just about any idea would fly with the general public. Now there's more contempt for contemporary art, probably for the past 10 or 15 years, where people are resorting to traditional art, even art that's generated by AI. So people will generate landscapes, portraits, flowers, sunsets, pets, and so on. If you were a Claes Oldenburg these days, you wouldn't be able to make sculptures of clothespins, baseball bats, and other utilitarian objects. Even if Christo were still alive, he would have a hard time finding funding to construct his large conceptual installations like wrapping islands. I sometimes wonder what's happening with Roden Crater, if younger generations will even understand why someone would spend decades excavating a dormant volcano in Arizona to show how beams of light shine through so as to make us think more cosmically. 

Every art period has its own explanations built into it, but once the artists and periods die off, the explanations are harder to find: it's not in the news, unless you read Art Forum or Flash Art or other art magazines or follow such things on social media. I think it's probably going to come back, but the public just isn't ready for it now. There couldn't really be a Warhol now, at least not one that's not anonymous. Anonymity is the only way that you can get away with eccentric ideas by wearing a mask. It's riskier to be an activist artist now and to move forward with eccentric ideas. But perhaps I’m being cynical and sour grapes. I have at least 10 sculptures I’d like to fabricate, but do I want the objects? Perhaps I’d rather go with “conceptual intervention” and maybe a “large glass”.

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