Some good conversations have come up after the post I made just before this one and I kept thinking of the perfect Bukowski line [and subsequent book title] ‘What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.’ This is as good of a mantra as you could have, I’d imagine, and I think that it’s sort of been ringing louder and louder as I’ve been thinking about the whole art thing. And it’s not just art but it’s literature too and, most importantly, it’s about life in general and as a whole.

Everybody has their own fires to walk through and what’s hard to you might be easy for me. What’s hot to me might be breezy for you. What’s art to you might be crap to me and what’s good solid work to me might be kid scribbles to someone else. I mean, really, I can’t hardly navigate through until the end of some of Allen Ginsburg’s writings. And I know plenty of people that find Salinger more ponderous than poetic. It’s all subjective, of course. And all we can do is just do our very best work and leave it at that.

But, in the interest of being contrary and while we’re on the subject of Bukowski, I cannot understand how anyone could ever just simply dismiss Bukowski as being little more than a misogynistic drunk. Have you ever really read any of his work or is that just some point of view you learned to express is your Womyn’s Writing Workshop?

[Why does all of this stuff always get me so goddam excited anyway? Sorry. Sort of.]

Originally published at [Posted over at smartwentcrazy.com/journal.]. You can comment here or there.

So I’ve been considering the definition of the word Art a lot lately since I’ve been working on this new project. The thing is being called One Thousand Thousand and the idea is to create one million pieces of art. All original, done by hand, and without any mechanical reproduction. It’s the same exercise that we’ve been doing for years now but it’s suddenly become official and proper and it’s coming along nicely so far. [The link goes to a gallery of 35 recent pieces that were all done on the same day. I've probably done as many as 150 or so pieces in one day but I forget for sure. Either way, you have to do that many if you'll ever get close to doing a million.]

At any rate, I’m posting a portion of those finished pieces to Etsy and am having a go at selling them off for a buck or two. I’ve never really spent any time on Etsy and I didn’t know too much about it save for the things I learned from Cybele.

If you don’t know the site then I’ll leave it to you to check it out but Etsy is supposed to be a place to buy and sell only handmade products and items. The other permissible items that you can sell there are either vintage things [at least 20 years old] or supplies that are used to create art or handmade items. But whatever your art is, painting, knitting, using odd materials, collage, sculpture, photography, jewelry making, knitting or candlemaking or whatever your art is. And that’s a really cool concept for sure and there are some very, very cool things there. Very cool.

But I’m realizing pretty quickly that there are some really crummy things there too. And the art section in particular is really overrun by some just awful stuff from people that claim it’s art and call themselves artists and it just drives me crazy. And this isn’t something that is unique to Etsy at all. I’m not saying that. I’ve felt the same way about major gallery showings on down to mail art websites like the old, awesome Nervousness. [Is that thing still going?]

Bottom line is that there is just a lot of bad art out there and there are people that encourage it and even pay for it. Tremendous sums, in fact. But I think it’s just because they don’t know what art really is. It’s just some imaginary and unrealistic concept in their head and they probably never took too much time to really think about it too hard. Or maybe I’m just over thinking it myself. [Probably both, I'm sure.]

Still, all you can do if you feel the way that I feel is to just not let it get to you and remedy the perceived situation by producing what you believe is good solid work and hope that it evens out somewhere down the line. It’s kind of like Karma, I guess. The negativity and hurt and suffering is cyclical and the only way to right those things is to choose compassion and take the higher road and create lovingkindness every chance you get.

And to art again; I have always thought that anti-art is somehow closer to what True Art should be or really is. I appreciate the anti-art, anti-product, Fluxus, Futurism approaches a great deal. Those philosophies have been important to me lately and have inspired a lot of the things I’m working on as well as the outlook I have as of late and I really appreciate the definition that George Maciunas gave for what he thought the differences between art and anti-art really were.

This is basically what he said:

Art existed to “justify the artist’s professional, parasitic and elite status in society, he must demonstrate artist’s indispensability and exclusiveness, he must demonstrate the dependability of audience upon him,
he must demonstrate that no one but the artist can do art. Therefore, art must appear to be complex, pretentious, profound, serious, intellectual, inspired, skillful, significant, theatrical, It must appear to be valuable as commodity so as to provide the artist with an income. To raise its value (artist’s income and patrons profit), art is made to appear rare, limited in quantity and therefore obtainable and accessible only to the social elite and institutions.”

He also said that anti-art and the Fluxus approach was,

“To establish artist’s nonprofessional status in society, he must demonstrate artist’s dispensability and inclusiveness, he must demonstrate the self sufficiency of the audience, he must demonstrate that anything can be art and anyone can do it. Therefore, anti-art must be simple, amusing, unpretentious, concerned with insignificance’s, require no skill or countless rehearsals, have no commodity or institutional value. The value of art-amusement must be lowered by making it unlimited, massproduced, obtainable by all and eventually produced by all. Fluxus art-amusement is the rear-guard without any pretension or urge to participate in the competition of “one-upmanship” with the avant-garde. It strives for the monostructural and nontheatrical qualities of simple natural event, a game or a gag. It is the fusion of Spikes Jones Vaudeville, gag, children’s games and Duchamp.”

Again, I don’t think he covers it completely and I know he contradicts some of what I’ve said. And, most importantly, I know there’s no right answer here. But what I do agree with completely is that I think it’s so lame for people to take themselves so seriously about the things they produce and create. I think that as soon as you start worrying more about copyrights and watermarks than you do the whole process of catharsis and creation then it’s not only pretty sad but it’s also, to me at least, absolutely ridiculous. The entire point of Art and making art in the first place has been missed.

In pretty much every gallery show I’ve ever had or been a part of my work has sold out. Completely. This isn’t me being arrogant or cocky or boastful and I swear on everything that it’s not. I’m not even implying the work was good or even worth it either. But it’s more to say that the work has always been priced to sell. I’ve always been of the mindset that I’d just simply not like to take the pieces back to my place at the end of the day and I’d like to not live with them anymore after a point. For the 52 Weeks project there was a provision in the contract with the gallery that if every single piece didn’t sell then we wouldn’t sell any of them at all. It was an All Or Nothing Clause and the point was that either they would all have to go and the emotions attached would be exorcised along with the work or the whole thing would stay completely intact where you’d have to make room to keep living with it.

I guess what I mean to say is that I have always made, and I continue to make, these things [my art] to either get something out of me or to share something with whomever might come along and listen. One or the other. And by choosing prices that meet the financial abilities of the average human being is just a way to actually accomplish those two things. If I charged three grand for every little piece I made I’d be sitting in a boring museum of my own work and nobody would hear a word I was ever trying to say.

Adding some super-crazed prices to your work is just bullshit, really, and when I see some mediocre piece that has this zany-high price tag I instantly feel like it means the person that made it only equates money with value. Either that or they feel like that’s the way to really prove to everyone else that they are a ‘real artist’ and that their work is important. This is what galleries do for the most part and it’s all hype to create a profit. Or whatever. I don’t know really what I mean to say exactly. But I know what I mean for sure.

So I guess I say go ahead and make contrived pieces of crap using imagery that’s as overused as the goddam Golden Arches. Throw in words like inspire and breathe and hope. Add some fairies or angels or anything with wings and toss in some doll heads and antique typewriter keys just for good measure. Then, for the love of all that is good and true and sacred, be sure to scan it and then run off a few copies on your inkjet printer and sell them as limited prints. Give it a French name so it sounds ‘fancier’ and more high-brow. And you can call it whatever you want. It’s art. You’re an artist. Fine.

But I am too and I have a different opinion about it and I might be wrong or I might be right or I might be neither or even both. I have no idea what I’m talking about even. I guess it is what you say it is and it is what you make it out to be and it is all dependent on how it touches you or speaks to you I suppose. [And that's something different for everyone I guess, right?]

Ugh! [YAWP!]

Emerson said, “Give me health and a day and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.” I guess I’ll leave it at that. If that’s cool with you.

[Pardon me for my rut.]

Originally published at [Posted over at smartwentcrazy.com/journal.]. You can comment here or there.

Belief & Technique For Modern Prose by Jack Kerouac
List of Essentials:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time