\tThree exhibits haunt me \u2014 Keith Haring: The Political Line at The De Young Museum in San Francisco<\/em>, @Large: Ai Wei Wei on Alcatraz<\/em> also in San Francisco, and Gordon Parks: Segregation Story<\/em> at The High Art Museum in Atlanta. I will write about these exhibits in my next blog post: Art as Political Act.<\/p>\n \tEvery artist has a reason for creating their work. Karl Benjamin, the mid-20th century California artist whose work was showing at Louis Stern Gallery, says, \u201cI think all of us are confronted with the problem of feeling whole. When you make a painting, you\u2019re so closely identified with it that it is you, and when it\u2019s done and it feels whole, then you feel whole as well. Otherwise, why would artists spend their entire lives painting?\u201d His art is about his own experience, not the viewer\u2019s. There is joy in his expression; his delight in vibrant colors and shapes was passed on to me as I viewed his work.<\/p>\n \tAndrew Wyeth is more interested in the relationship between artist and audience. \u201cI think most people get to my work through the backdoor,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re attracted by the realism and sense the emotion and the abstraction \u2014 and eventually, I hope, they get their own powerful emotion.\u201d As I studied his paintings, I was in awe of how his watercolors dissolved into abstract brushstrokes as I drew near and then, as I stepped back, returned to interior or exterior images of windows. I felt sad, yet entranced by the austere beauty of Wyeth\u2019s loneliness.<\/p>\n \tRen\u00e9 Magritte denies any meaning to his art: \u201cMy painting is visible images which conceal nothing… when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question ‘What does that mean’? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either.\u201d He is challenging the viewer to experience a dreamscape without analysis or interpretation, to see seeing in a new way. However, he is still investigating the relationship between artist and audience. It was an interesting, fun exhibit of trompe l\u2019oeil paintings, surprising, sometimes disturbing, all meticulously painted with a graphic designer\u2019s skill. The installation itself was the masterpiece; as I wandered through the velvety black rooms with light pinpointed only on the paintings, it seemed as if the images were arising from my own dream world.<\/p>\n \tAndy Warhol and Jeff Koons are more cynical about their reasons for making art. Warhol said, \u201cBeing good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.\u201d Koons builds on this with, \u201cI love the gallery, the arena of representation. It’s a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics, and that’s taking place in the art gallery.\u201d<\/p>\n \tHowever, Warhol\u2019s exhibit Shadows<\/em> at MOCA in Los Angeles is more than a commentary on pop commercialism. This installation, made up of one hundred and two paintings, is unique in his body of work because it isn\u2019t marketable. It had never been shown in its entirety before. His repetition of a large silk screened calligraphic image under-painted and overlaid with vibrant colors was oddly moving. One curator referred to it as \u201cvisual music.\u201d I lingered in the galleries overwhelmed by the scale, mesmerized by the rhythm and seduced by the individual panels.<\/p>\n \tThe Jeff Koons’ retrospective at the Whitney was more difficult to become involved in. I felt like I was looking at the work of trickster whose success depended on the craftspeople in his factory. I questioned his insistence, heard over the recorded tour, that his intention is to get people to see everyday objects in a new way. As art critic Jed Perl wrote in the September 25, 2014 issue of The New York Review of Books<\/em>, \u201cThe Whitney’s overwhelmingly middle-class audience is being told that Koons presents a sly critique of middle-class values. Of course everybody can also see that he is having his way with commercial culture \u2014 and with us.\u201d Yet, good for him. This exhibit provoked some necessary questions: \u201cIs this art?\u201d \u201cWhy is this art?\u201d and most importantly, \u201cWhat IS art?\u201d<\/p>\n![\"750x422](\"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/750x422-2.jpg\")
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