THE PORTRAIT [an exhibition] : opening 10 July

@ LESLIE NOWLIN GALLERY
1202-A West Sixth Street
Austin, Tx 78703

Indeed, evaluating lithography's impact on fine art only requires identifying and following a handful of influential players along a fairly linear historical trajectory to the present. On the other hand, David Hockney is creating art with an iPhone application today at the same time millions of others are doing the same thing. While Hockney's digital output is considered valuable as soon as it's created, it will remain to history and its tastemakers, interpreters and archivists to assign value to the creations of all the rest.

In the 1950's, popular music and publications like Mad Magazine or DC Comics were controlled by an oligarchy of businessmen who exerted absolute control over the distribution of the content produced by each industries' creatives. How much content they allowed for release was predicated on how much the market would bear before supply overtook demand and profits declined. Today anyone can create and distribute their own music, their own publications (even their own films) online for next to nothing and without any intervention whatsoever. Today consumers are awash in content.

Dave Hickey has written that "Bad taste is real taste,...and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege." Surfing online galleries on the web and "brick and morter" galleries in and around my state today, one is left to wonder if a distinction can any longer be drawn between the two. Most of the work I see will have very little lasting value - either on screen or off. And yet some of it is very good. The question to ask then is where does the collector draw the line between that which is worth investing in and that which isn't — whether it is a urban vinyl toy or a self published book of poetry?

My wife and I recently visited the Menil Collection in Houston. Here some of the primitive memes that inspired modernism and postmodernism are displayed alongside their contemporary kin. While one could most likely trace in various ways the stylistic and cultural lineages binding the Menil Collection together, the one common thread running through its exhibits that immediately struck me was the attention to detail each artist had lavished on his or her work, no matter how humble the means or methods of construction. Whether a small Rauschenberg orange crate, abstractly embellished with found objects, or a carved African fetish doll covered with nails, one could sense that the makers viewed their process with a sense of sacredness and wonder.

Most art, of course, has no intrinsic value. Even the materials used to construct a piece are essentially worthless once they've been applied. A painted canvas is always going to be worth less than an empty one — unless those viewing it are willing to assign it a higher value than it's actual worth as scrap. And the primary catalyst for that transformation, from being worth nothing to becoming a moving and profound work of art, it seem to me, is craftsmanship — be it fine art or a fetish doll. In an overheated and fragmenting zeitgeist, cultural trends may come and go overnight and anarchy may reign in the art world for years to come, however, quality in craftsmanship will never go out of style.

AFTER

Featured in this post is the first image I ever scanned. It was a contact print of a plate of mangos I had shot with an old Rollieflex several years before. If I had known better, I would have started with a less complex project. "Mangos", as it turned out, would occupy me on and off for the next year.

When it was finished, my low resolution CRT screen and low resolution 8.5"x11" Apple inkjet printer provided only enough feedback for me to know that the image had promise. Shortly thereafter, with no better options, I had an small Iris print of "Mangos" struck for an exhibition at the Art Museum of South Texas. (Today that print is included in the museum's permanent collection.) A year later I acquired a higher resolution, 6-color Epson, 13 inches wide, and a couple years later an Epson printing 17 inches wide. In 2006 came the 24 inch, 8-color Epson. Finally, I could print what I wanted when I wanted at a price I could afford.

All along the way, with higher resolutions and larger image sizes, I would reprint "Mangos" and it would reveal more detail (or lack of it), and I would respond by applying more detail and polish. Today "Mangos" weighs in at 200 megabytes and 27x20 inches. It began its life on a Mac Quadra 840AV, stored on a 1 gigabyte hard drive and now resides on a 1 terabyte drive attached to my Intel iMac. Over the years, it has been manipulated with a mouse, then a trackball, and finally with a stylus and Wacom tablet. I have generated more proof prints of it than I care to estimate. As a work of art and as an artist, I can truly say that "Mangos" and I have grown up together. The print itself could serve as a map of the past ten years of my creative life, each pixel, every shift in color, charting a course into unknown territory on an expedition that I have had the very good fortune to participate in - and have yet to complete.



When Giants Roamed The Earth 24"x30" : Peter Leighton

There were giants in the earth in those days;
and also after that, when the sons of God came
in unto the daughters of men.

Genesis 6:4

The Gangster Of Love 20"20" : Peter Leighton

Some people call me the space cowboy.
Yeah! Some call me the gangster of love.
Some people call me Maurice,
Cause I speak of the Pompatus of love.

"The Joker", Steve Miller

Original digital art prints, for example, in the 17x22 inch range and once selling for $200-$300 are now being offered at below $100. Many of these images being sold by print-on-demand online galleries attempting to aggregate as much content as they can in one place to get the biggest bang for their buck. Thus feeding the notion that digital art prints, no matter their perceived quality, are disposable art objects, to be enjoyed for the moment, but not collected.

My only concern with this trend is that not all digital printmaking processes are equal. I have yet to purchase an image from a print-on-demand gallery, but one has to wonder if the image one gets from a 3rd party volume printer, with whom the artist has had little contact, is of the same quality the artist might have wished it to be.

At this point, I'm content to continue to print my own work and distribute it myself - and to charge a little more for it, rather than give up control over what the final print looks like.

In terms of price, I consider my original work to be in a sales category somewhere between offset lithographic art reproductions and traditionally printed, limited edition fine art originals. Which, I think, fits nicely within the criteria Mr. Davey has set out in his post today.

Certainly we are in the midst of a global sea change in the way art in general is valued and perceived, how it's created, who is creating it, and how it is being distributed. In the coming months, I'll be addressing some of these issues in my "The Business of Art" blog category. Stay tuned :-).