The Crisis of Photography gave us countless innovations within the visual arts; some might argue that Modern painting is the oft-forgotten twin born from the pressures created by photography.  There was a time, way back in the 1970’s & 80’s when photography was a hard won skill. It took a great deal of time, effort and practice to learn the craft.  Now cameras are everywhere and in everything, photography is literally child’s play.  A child can take a pic, and a grandparent can order an oil painting online made from it, take a series of photographs and get a 3-D ‘sculpture’ in the mail.  Heck, buy the hardware and sculpture is as easy as the click of a button.  Being a painter or sculptor will soon be as minor an accomplishment as being a photographer has become, unless we as artists act now to change it.

 I am not advocating the outlaw of technology. And for clarity I am no more impressed by Neo-Neo-Neo-Classicism as I am by Neo-Neo-Neo-Dada. What I am proposing is something far more radical, something that is anathema to most of art history for the last 50 years.  I propose that we embrace a term that’s been avoided among fine artists for decades (though still embraced by some illustrators and the Neo-Neo-Impressionist “en Plein Air” painters).  That term, the anathema, and dare I say it, oh yes I think I do, that term, that mindset, that paradigm, is skill.  Yes!  I said it, oh horror of thrilling horrors! I said the dread word, skill! Skill, Skill!!!  YeeHA!!! No not the superficial skill of faithful rendering, of slick photorealism (with the aid of technology photorealism is advanced paint by numbers for grownups).  The skill to condense, to interpret, to sift, to refine, to directly speak with the tools of the arts is what is required. The celebration of the tracks left by the individual artists hand as it works are what makes an artists work unique and lastingly powerful.

We as artists must raise our expectations of each other, of art criticism, and of art historians.  Over the last 40 years or so we have allowed the adolescent delight for sticking a thumb in the public's eye to become an aesthetic.  The mantra of the recognizable brand-like style writ as large as humanly possible is the mark of the Art World Serf, the captured, the co-opted, it has become a constant cliché. We as artists have collectively sacrificed the creative craft of making, cut it's throat at the Altar of Novelty in the church of Fame, let it bleed out into the media’s Rhyton, watch as the gallery Shamans mix in the wine, then happily or unhappily we all drink the blood.  Then we wait and hope, or pay for the High Priest-Critic’s blessing.  Once is kinda’ funny under the right circumstances (DADA), twice can be humorous (POP), the third time is just plain stupid.

Contemporary Art, the YBA's, their country cousins here in the US, Serrano, Koons et. al. have been reading from the DADA/POP script trying to give it a new edge.  They revel in their shallowness, their lack of talent, their lack of imagination, their lack of skill.  They pose as chess players when everyone with any actual depth of experience and intellect sees the truth, for them a decent game of checkers would be a challenge.

The re-modernist chord struck by the Stuckists is a good start.  If the Fine Arts are to survive we need more artists who actually have some talent and a compelling need to make.  We need artists who have persevered in the effort to refine their ability and vision despite a lack of recognition, or fiscal success.  We need gray headed true believers, not comedians who claim that sarcasm is the equivalent of irony.  We need artists who have some level of real intellectual ability, who actually continue to study, to read, to think into their middle and later years.  Those who have proven they are willing to walk without a path, alone, rather than to compromise. The constant crop of young MFA’s in their tens of thousands all striving to make their mark is just one beginning of a harsh, decades long winnowing process, not the end.  We need artists who aren't afraid to visually think out loud, with skill and thoughtfulness, not artists who have just thought of a ‘new’ way to scream.  If the visual arts are to survive this century we need artists who are willing to fail, who even when they fail, the failure is not a grandiose gesture, a spectacle, but rather a humble attempt to try, to learn, to keep at it despite all evidence to the contrary.  We need painters who can actually paint, sculptors who can actually sculpt.  Without Artist/Alchemists who use the incredible array of new tools given us by the innovations of the last 150 years, who blend those tools into the mix with the left us by the Old Masters, and then learn to play their own riffs with the result, we are doomed.  We have been given a fabulous array of instruments; the time for smashing them into smithereens or making the instrument itself the message is over.  The time for actually being able to play the darn thing has begun.

Floyd Alsbach