The Fame Game

In our last class we were able to just flip through old magazines - it was great. Our professor had a pretty complete collection of ArtForum and Art News magazines with some dates going back into the 1990's. After spending the few classes before the last one discussing contemporary artists, or art from the 1990's and 2000's - it was kind of cool to see the names of artists we had talked about jump from the pages: Julian Schnabel, Donald Judd, Cindy Sherman, Mickalene Thomas, Walker Evans, Jeff Koons, Claude Monet, Dario Robleto ... wait a second ... Claude Monet?! Uuhhh, he is not a contemporary artist - at least not one of my contemporaries. Or is he?

Did you know that the title of one of Monet's paintings - Impression, Sunrise (1872) - was the inspiration for an art critic to use the term "impressionism"? The critic intended it in a negative way, but the artists claimed it for themselves proudly, and the impressionist movement was born.

Monet was not mentioned in an article, but there was an ad for a gallery show of some of the water lilies which made him famous. It made me really happy to see such an "old school master" in the pages of one of these magazines about contemporary art. Kind of surprised, but really happy.

Think about the implications of that. I see two major points. Number one, Monet is so awesome and so timeless and so without competition in today's art scene, that his stuff is still one of the best things a gallery can show today. Number two, the water lilies are only about a hundred years old, and still considered "contemporary".

There are kids in college today that only think of the world in comparison to their very short life on this planet. Even history majors get a little bit lost when they go past the ends of their noses. Art History majors are labeling any past movement as "old". They tend to not only clump artists together as "everyone from the past", which makes Monet a contemporary of DaVinci, but they think that the only artists that should be considered "contemporary" are the ones that are alive, or worse yet, only the ones they have heard of.

This is a problem of perspective. This is a problem of not having a grasp of the big picture. I can see that one of the main goals of all colleges is to ingrain a sense of purpose in their students. They encourage them to believe that they can make a difference in the world. They charge them with saving the planet. They convince them that they all have superpowers and that they are invincible.

Maybe there should be a required class on campus called "Perspective" so all college students can see how insignificant they really are in the big scheme of things. I'm not trying to be a pessimist, I am trying to be a realist. Are any of those lofty goals attainable? Absolutely. Do I have the next great artist of my generation sitting in my classroom? I certainly hope so. I see the spark of potential in so many of my classmates and I do everything I can to encourage them. It would be magical if I could see them reach fame and fortune and be able to say, "Yeah, Saul was in my Art History class and he always had a lot to say." (Love you Saul!)

We all have the ability to make a difference, whether it be in the art world or in giving a homeless person the coat off of your back. You need to find your spark and use it to start a fire.