Update on not much (philosophical speculations)

Body

I wrote a blog for Sammy the Administrator formerly webmaster (which always sounded like S & M with spiders hence the WEBMASTER not unlike Spiderman only more kinky) yea so the writing vanished I must have hit the wrong button on the laptop. I've been thinking about the tech gap between younger people and older people.Things that everybody knows I don't always get so easy. I've been using pcs since the late 1990's (as Sam say-Dad  had email before anyone he knew.). But I just learned to cut and paste last month after just not getting it at all. I paid Norton for my subscription for virus and spyware etc. first time I paid for anything using pc and debit card. Which may not be alot but is a big deal for someone born in 1944. That as a preface to some other thoughts , thinking about the way I see my own younger days. When I started getting my letters of inquiry regards the art departments needs or more often they were full up with artists at Montana State or Herron School of Art etc., maybe 200 schools said no thanks. You think this MFA degree is bogus! It gets you nothing but  caught up in the system of artist teaching artists how to teach and keeps the pot boiling. Sure some schools did better but everyone competes for a handful of jobs. I got a job teaching at The Minneapolis School of Art  $6000 for 18 hours a week, seemed like employers can pay low when few opening are available for young artist/professors. No tenure at art school, which means your freedom of speech et al is at the ceo's mercy. Academic Freedom was not available you took it at your own risk. The schools are really not able to prepare young artists for jobs that hardly exist. Of course genius might get you a living, or so I heard. Genius even in moderato is a burn out type proposition. Picasso was very lucky and he worked at getting more luck.

Sure  Picasso wasn't all luck but damn you need some luck in this life.  My Dad would play the horses at Arlington in Chicago he played the daily double and I remember him winning once in a while. My dad was a gambler even playing Canasta. What I was getting at and my hero MD was clear about LUCK being the key ingredient. If Artpolice had instead been LUCKPOLICE we might have been a bigger hurrah!I do believe genius is a key thing in the arts, who wants to see the mediocre ? Now and again I see the necessity of discernment, what is the best? Lately I like Henry Darger , my headline is SICKER THAN NABOKOV  - Darger is a strange cat unknown to the world, I think the outsider artist can show us alot about the basic rudiments of art. Darger had a passion for a fictive pictorial world and he made it in such abundance and with such beauty yes beauty. And his sickness for little girls pretty little girls like ponies . I remember Stu Mead getting enquiries through Man Bag (the Manozine) - Cats write Stu asking him to draw little girls in his style only have them being injured and hung etc.  So back then (1992) Stu asks me what to do after all we need the money. Henry Darger trades his sickness for immortality, which I expect for my friend Stu too as art trumps sickness. Hey if you have gone to to the depths of hell you ought to wind up with some cool pictures. And hell of course is different for each of us. But when the apple of your eye is not ripe you best become a priest. Darger too brings the church into his conspiracy of hiddeness. I watched Stu Mead get more brave over time, he's so earnest it makes you wonder if it's sincere. Years ago I thought he was sort of bi-polar lite, now I think he's a genius  and that we knew was so (it ain't a living to be a smart artist) But you only come across one Dr Mead in your life, his paintings are just such delight ) but we all die and vanish (the paintings who can say? Maybe our little worlds collapse and the bits and pieces of this explosion are pasted together by Henry Darger up in artist heaven!

 

Minneapolis