Chicago Artists Month October 2008 is Coming...

As a member of several organizations here in Chicago, the ARC Gallery, the Ravenswood Art Walk and FOTA, I will be participating in Chicago Artists Month.

Every year the organizers announce and promote a theme; this year's theme is "Artists and Issues that Matter." Their quote runs: "These issues could be those of most concern/interest to the participating artists/organizations, including political, environmental, moral, social, global or personal issues."

As I have said before in a previous post Art for Moral Purposes, I am very uncomfortable with efforts to relate art and art objects to so-called higher purposes. As far as I am concerned, art is its own purpose, it is its own means to its own end. In fact I think it debases the art by attempting to squeeze it into categories that are intended to prove that art is useful.

The question of whether or not art is useful to society is not about whether or not art solves our moral dilemmas, or whether or not art helps us cure AIDS. It doesn't and it can't.

It is perfectly possible to view the work of the great impressionists, listen to great classical music and then get up in the morning and exterminate Jews and commit other atrocities. It is perfectly possible to be a monstrous human being and still make great art. Leni Riefenstahl went to her grave convinced that she did nothing wrong in using slave labor in her movies. And yet to this day, every sports program in television or in the movies owes a debt to her ground-breaking vision in Olympiad, very little sports photography since has been new. It can be argued that Leni invented and defined almost the entire genre of images and viewpoints.

In the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer describes massacres and betrayals in limitless mind numbing detail. Woman captives are raped and enslaved. Babies have their heads smashed in. The causes of all the bronze age woe, Helen and Menelaus, end up living out their lives back again together. Does any of this stop us from reading and re-reading this story?

Let art be art without having to assign so-called higher moral values to it. As an aside, Rupert Brooke imagined what Helen and Menelaus' life was after Troy.