Vocation For Life
making the choice of the Fine Arts as a vocation for life, I was not fully aware how the European art world works, especially the commercial business of the Fine Arts.
Every year thousands of would-be artists, leave art schools with high hopes and ambitions to achieve. Yet very few can make a living from what they do.
Luckily or unlucky, soon after beginning, I found myself in the streams of the Public Arts. Many, many years, after countless experiences, some artists of African descent I knew who continued, are now all in academia as professors, curators and administrators in the public arts.
Now matured, I am still in the studio, or out doors creating and making work with intentions of meanings, and hopefully offering enjoyment for all viewers.
Social Living
Creativity, cultural communities and the fine arts are vast fields of activities. At times it all appears too diverse and difficult, especially when making attempts to arrive at common agreed terms, with fixed concrete meanings. Right now, so much is abstract and conceptual.
For this blog, the essential meaning of the word culture, is to cultivate. Formalised techniques and methods to shape attitudes and behaviour of people. This cultivated behaviour, moves individuals and nations towards the higher self and away from the lower animal instincts in human beings.
The living systems or sets of shared values, which are natural and common to all in a society, becomes their unique national identity and collective virtues of that nation.
In Europe, popular culture (consumed by the masses) as opposed to high culture (usually the maintained values of the ruling elites) is where inspired creative intelligence, engaged within the higher virtues, push specific activities towards innovations, originality, progressive acceleration and economic growth.
Apart from the complex oppositions of high and popular art, the language of art is also another barrier to navigate. The true values of the fine arts are still not fully transparent and easy to understand, and the question is, why is it so?
Culture & Creativity
One aspect of culture that I enjoy, are the things considered to be excellent in the Creative Arts.
In order to validate the fine arts with a sense of purpose, as something beneficial to individuals, communities, societies and nations, use words like enrichment, legacy and popular heritage, are generally used as reinforcements.
However, the current model in use worldwide for the management, administration and business of the Fine Arts is European. Adopted and practiced by all major participants, this nearly three-hundred-year-old model dominate the art worlds and global art markets.
This model operates in two specific areas:
Public Arts as archival posterity for the nation, heritage in the form of intellectual and cultural legacy. The importance of public art is the serious process of sharing good practice, knowledge, data and information. Being open to collaboration with the arts community worldwide.
Through generous patrons and philanthropy, systems of grants and commissions, artists are supported in the process of making work, free from commercial considerations.
Private Business in fine art, with its unspoken rules for insiders only, the high-end commercial galleries tend to place particular works of art within important public and private collections, major museums, blue-chip companies and institutions. They function in cliques of closed communities, generally for investments, income generation, and wealth accumulation.
Promoting, selling and sharing the wealth generated by a specific group of artists, whose works are acquired through particular dealers and galleries only. The elite art business groups, control where works of art go, and who can buy it.
Unlike the corporate business world, the true value of art and its end game, is not all about generating and accumulating money and more money. The mission of fine art is much more than maths, accounts, facts and figures. Finance, however, has a major role in the arts, it is the vehicle or mechanism to make things happen or not.
Regardless, Creative Arts makes important connections to our cultural heritage. In the right context, social responses to fine art can be achieved when artists engage with and make work in relation to contemporary social, cultural and political events. Observing the scenarios of the new perspectives in the one world agenda, the fine arts are viewed as a global universal human experience, rather than a tradition related to a particular people, time, and place.
Global Art
Fortunately, we are at the stage of affairs, where it is possible to see the world through the unique visions and lens of creative original artist from an African origin.
Yet still, I question, can the current centuries old European model for the fine arts, really work with the new agenda for the new African Millennium Renaissance, with its missions, civilising agendas, and programs for healing and enrichments. Especially for all African people scattered and isolated around the world?
I can say this, right now there are major needs to design and make alternative foundations, structures, systems and frameworks, in which artists of African origin can function from within the being of their psyche, naturally.
They must be able to Utilise working models that can be collectively owned, and recognised as coming from within intuitively, in spirit, body, soul and mind.
Not Sacred – Open Secret Art
Currently, some of the best artists of African origin and descent, are commissioned and contracted deeply into the European Art systems.
Again, many questions are directed to me, of which I am unable to answer or offer an opinion. Examples are, is it all about fighting to be accepted? Personally, I am happy when anyone show interest in my work.
Who are the people really benefitting from the best of African artists’ creativity? Whatever your answers could be, in the world of the arts, one size will not fit or suit all! The best of artists of African descent, in contemporary creativity, are for now hidden away, behind closed doors.
The questions are asked, is it all about money, and survival. What are the true values in collecting art? Where are the African collectors in the game. Why are they not participating in the valuable monetary, and legacy systems of the visual arts? Isn’t it all about heritage? Where are the African Institutions to secure it all ?