Dr Great Art Episode 20: Mongrel Art and Democratic Art

Mongrel Art! Democratic Art! This Dr Great Art Artecdote Podcast is a description of and plaidoyer for a (Post-Postmodernist) art that is anti-purist, syncretistic, and creolized, unifying a variety of artforms, disciplines, tendencies and philosophies. Artworks involving popular or democratic and street artforms outside the "standard" fine art ones, yet also not eschewing either so-called time-honored, nor technologically "new" disciplines, as it seeks to revitalize and transform them all, while opening the art system and deliberately involving people outside the field of art in artistic processes.
http://drgreatart.libsyn.com/episode-20-mongrel-and-democratic-art

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This is the script (not a transcript, as I change elements when recording).

Dr Great Art Episode 20: Mongrel Art and Democratic Art

Hi this is Mark Staff Brandl, with the 20th "Dr Great Art" brief podcast. I hope you enjoy it and come back for each and every one.

Today my Artecdote concerns something most near and dear to my artistic heart: Mongrel and Democratic Art.

I have made passing comments in my Dr Great Art podcasts about my conception of this potential antidote to or better-said resolution for and expansion beyond Postmodernism. Mongrel Art. Here I finally give the basic definition of what I mean.

I will occasionally shorten this to simply 'Mongrel Art.' That is the key phrase, but I find the other term 'Democratic Art' to be a significant and complementary branch of Mongrel Art.

What is this? Mongrel artists are against purism in all forms, finding it to be morally and politically questionable, a trope of oppression and racism. Much art since Late Formalism is too purist --- too much inbreeding. I find what Formalism became to be a result of a misreading of Greenberg, but that is a thorny subject for another podcast.

Mongrel Art is a syncretistic unifying of a variety of artforms, disciplines, tendencies and philosophies. It often involves popular or democratic and street artforms outside the "standard" fine art ones, yet also does eschews neither so-called traditional, that is time-honored, nor technologically "new" disciplines, as it seeks to revitalize and transform them all. This is not appropriation, fusion or cross-over, but a personal and disjunctive dialogue of arbitration. 'Syncretism' refers to such a practice of truly uniting different doctrines or practices with each other. Mongrel artworks are syncretistic, not eclectic at their best. I discussed this differentiation between eclecticism and syncretism back in the Dr Great Art podcast Nr. 11 on Easter, please go back and listen to that is you haven't already.

The term "mongrel" in English means a dog of mixed or indeterminate breed, often one found on the street. My wife and I always have two dogs and two cats, rescued or from the shelter, thus usually mongrels. The term DOES have distinctly derogative overtones, I am aware. Yet ones that I assert are actually complimentary. For example, I used the equivalent term "Mischling" in several interviews about my art in German, whereupon the writers immediately leapt into the alternate form in that language, "Bastard." While not containing the same meaning as our English word bastard, I still don't appreciate that much, or then maybe I DO! I could use the term 'hybrid,' which is somewhat similar. However, it means the offspring of two animals or plants of different breeds or varieties especially as produced through human manipulation for specific genetic characteristics. Thus, it suggests a mixture usually of only two, while 'Mongrel' suggests something more of a free-for-all. Also, 'hybrid' has that disturbing association with profit-based human manipulation, which we are all suspicious of due to the questionable genetic manipulation of seeds and so on by Monsanto and the like. Mongrel, once again, seems much more natural. Dogs choosing each other in multiple combinations, not corporate manoeuvring.

A related and beautiful term is 'creolization,' in addition to Creole culture itself, this now anthropologically describes any coming together of diverse cultural traits or elements to form new ones, a complex process of cultural borrowing and lending in an area with many different influences. Having lived in the Caribbean, I have personally experienced the richness of creole culture and the promise for the world of creolization as an idea.This bears directly on our recent waves of immigration in Europe from war zones, as well as the political fear mongering against immigrants in the US, and the new re-visibility of racist groups in the US and around the world, including our clearly racist US president Trump. However, due to that term having too many meanings, I refer to such tendencies in art as 'mongrel,' affirmatively refunctioning an old insult, in the tried-and-true method called 'reappropriation.'

Certainly, there is a definite socio-political aspect to Mongrel Art. It's a Blues, Jazz, Rock n Roll, Hip-Hop, even Comics, archaeological "thing" and more. It struck me once that many of my favorite entities, such as those just listed, are mergers of African American, Jewish, and immigrant cultures with the "mainstream" white Euro culture. To my mind improving that later culture immensely. English in fact, viewed linguistically, is a creole language, but due to its powerful position, we seldom want to mention that!

Mongrel Artworks likewise are inherently impure entities; I would amplify this, claiming they offer a positively anti-purist emancipation from narrow formalist reductivism, Neo-Conceptual ironic inbreeding, the malaise of Crapstraction and other Feeble Art --- in short, liberation from academicist confinement. This impurity is a trait to applaud and encourage in order to construct a new road out of the cul-de-sac of Postmodernism. Indeed, objections to such Mongrel works are usually objections to the forms' impurity, if you analyze the hostility closely. "Breaking down seemingly essential boundaries is often thought to be unnatural, and so morally pernicious," wrote philosopher David Carrier. Mongrel Art is radically technically, contextually, metaphorically, and content-wise, non-exclusive, even expansive. For full disclosure, my own art is part of this, as it unites painting, drawing, installation, sign-painting, sequential art (comics), and even performance-teaching in painting-installations in my Dr Great Art project. It is, though, an approach many artists are working toward now.

Democratic Art:

Democratic Art is to me a subcategory of Mongrel Art, the application of its principles to conceptualist-based Social Practice Art. As 'Mongrel Art' was originally a term I created to describe my own art, likewise, 'Democratic Art' is a term created by artists Alex Meszmer and Reto Müller to describe their art. But it was quickly clear that both terms were allied and had application to much other art in addition to ours.

Democratic Art generally uses public space, yet goes beyond the traditional understanding of Art in Public Spaces, here called 'Kunst am Bau.' It opens the art system and deliberately involves people outside the field of art in artistic processes. It assumes that art can also be carried by a public that is not part of an experienced art audience but shows interest in it. Democratic Art aims for discussion, wherein artists understand themselves as participating active members of society, as citizens actively taking part in democracy, seeking integration instead of exclusion, interacting between art and society. It tries to incorporate democratic processes into the creation, exhibition, and interpretation of art. A mongrelization of SoPra.

Who are some Mongrel and Democratic artists? Off the top of my head, in no particular order I would say:

Tom Sanford, Christa Donner, Charles Michael Reid, Maddy Rosenberg, Ashley Bickerton, Gaëlle Villedary, Stefan Rohner, David Reed, Gene Colan, Mira Schor, Damiano Curchellas, Chiara Fiorini, Stefano Pasquini, Tilt, Raoul Deal, Interpixel, Tim Rollins and KOS, Pau Delgado, William Powhida, Guy Richards Smit, Aaron Johnston, Peter Daverington, as well as myself and Meszmer/Mueller.

The inbetweenness of Mongrel and Democratic Art has important social, psychological, even ethical implications — as well as historical-philosophical ones. Mongrel Art interbreeds various established art disciplines and approaches, --- all in order to energize and criticize fine art, vernacular arts, and their publics. This is inherently democratic, closing of the various gaps between educated and mass culture, elite and niche culture and others. Cross the border, lose that gap, get out of our ever-shrinking, self-imposed gated-community artworld. Interbreed.

That was "Mongrel and Democratic Art"

Today we have Listener post! : Lucille Younger is a greatly appreciated listener, who is an ex-journalist --- back from the days when they really WERE journalists! She wrote in concerning Dr Great Art Podcast 18, "Meaning is in Artworks Themselves": Lucille writes, "This podcast was Informative, entertaining, and reassuring for those of us who (with a little trepidation) try to understand a piece of art. You say (in part) the meaning is in the artwork itself, and can be found (or, at least understood) by asking: "What does the act of interacting with this help me understand about life, about art, about thinking about feeling?" That's comforting, and puts appreciating art into a context that we can all understand. Thanks, Mark Staff Brandl!"

Thank you Lucille! That was a part of my intention. I think good discussion can really open doors to art and artworks, thus my Dr Great Art project. Nevertheless, it should not replace direct experience and open-minded, visual interpretation.

Thanks for listening. Podcast number 20. If you wish to hear more cool, exciting and hopefully inspiring stuff about art history and art, come back for more. Andy you, like Lucille, can write to me! Also I, Dr Mark Staff Brandl, artist and art historian, am available for live custom Performance-Lectures. In English und auf Deutsch.

I take viewers inside visual art and art history. Entertainingly, yet educationally and aesthetically, I analyze, underline, and discuss the reasons why a work of art is remarkable, or I go through entire eras, or indeed through the entirety of art history, or look at your desired theme through the lens of art history. The lectures often take place with painted background screens and even in my painting-installations.

Some recent ones were on the entire history of Postmodernist Art from 1979 through today, on Metaphor(m) in Art History, and on Mongrel Art. Once again, I'd like to thank Chloe Orwell, Brad Elvis, and the rock band the Handcuffs for composing, performing and recording my theme song, "Shut Up and Paint," a tiny portion of which begins and ends every Dr Great Art Podcast.

You can find or contact me at

www.drgreatart.com/ (spell)

book me at www.mirjamhadorn.com (spell)

or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all as Dr Great Art.

Dr Great Art Episode 19: (No) Rules in Art

My newest Dr Great Art podcast! Episode 19: "(No) Rules in Art." This Artecdote concerns supposed rules in art, especially painting. It describes how there are really no rules in art, and it decries the obsequiousness of those who believe there are rules and who seek to follow them.
http://drgreatart.libsyn.com/episode-19-no-rules-in-art #arthistory #art

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This is the script (not a transcript, as I change elements when recording).

 Dr Great Art Podcast 19: (No) Rules in Art

Hi this is Mark Staff Brandl, with the 19th "Dr Great Art" brief podcast. I hope you enjoy it and come back for each and every one.

Today my Artecdote concerns supposed Rules in Art, especially painting.

"I've seen most creative minds of my generation destroyed by obsequiousness." Toadying to those who espouse rules for art.

One and all seem to want to rewrite the beginning section of Alan Ginsberg's wonderful first line of his poem Howl. The original: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, ...." Yet I could not resist, for in art, culture and politics, as well as elsewhere, I find my version to be true.

Recriminations run rampant in the artworld. What's wrong with curators? What's wrong with critics? What's wrong with galleries? I would like to add "What is wrong with us?" By that I mean primarily artists, but perhaps beyond that, all of us in all the mentioned categories.

Tessa Laird wrote of researching the artworld, that she "felt like [she] had stumbled into an anthill, where thousands of industrious (anty) intellectuals were going about their business of empire-building and ankle-biting." When exactly did we turn from manifesto screaming, naive-yet-hopeful creators-with-attitudes into fawning, trendy Sophists?

This podcast is the beginning of a rant I will likely return to in various fashions in the future in my podcasts. This one, however, was motivated by two particular discussions I recently remembered, although I had them years ago. It, and my complaint, concern painting, but thereby synecdochically all art.

I, as most Americans do, make paintings with somewhat deep stretcher frames, with the canvas or linen stretched around the side, stapled to the back, with an unpainted edge. Europeans tend to use very flat, rather flimsy-looking stretched canvas, often purchased pre-primed or at least appearing so.

I have done this for years, although now I also do paintings on top of wall paintings in large installations, even involving performance-lectures, which inspired these podcasts.

Anyway, a Swiss painter I know was very bothered by my, and other thicker, stretchers. This at first seemed to me to be rather unimportant, a simple visual preference one way or the other. They find ours (and us) too self-assertive; I find theirs too shabby and amateurish. Second, I heard from a curator, that while he really liked my work, he did not know "what to think," as this Mongrel approach of mine was something he "had never seen."

This can't be really important, just taste. Or is it?

I thought more intensely about this question after the conversations, and realized that it is very pertinent to my metaphor(m) theory, strangely enough, and to all art.

First --- if the second person mentioned had REALLY never seen anything like my art, that would make me one of the greatest living innovators! It would be something to delight, not befuddle you! It is of course not true, there are always other artists working similarly to anyone, earlier, later and especially at one's own time.

Second, and most importantly, EVERY aspect of a work of art is important. Tropaically, desperately important. And they must be worked out for the artwork AT HAND, not by following rules. The idea that this artist had, that paintings must have a narrow stretcher, "to express its flatness," has been learned by rote. It is part of a vast litany of prescriptions for painting, which although a supposedly "dead" entity, still raises the hackles of fear on the necks of many an academicist.

Therefore any painting-survivors must be administered the medication of ordinance, until they become well-behaved casualties. These zombie-paintings are required to have a relatively featureless, enervated surface facture; consist of indifferent, unmodulated paint, preferably apathetically diluted with excessive turpentine; be painted lackadaisically; have either drab, mundane forms as motifs or be based on dull photographs. All these admonitions serve to enervate and debilitate painting. Keep it in its place. Other art forms such as video and installation are encouraged to engage in dialogue with outside forces (albeit also only in decreed fashions), however paintings — that is, painters — are only allowed to solipsistically iterate and dissect their rudimentary, elemental components. And do so with the proper air of listlessness. As painter the late Charles Boetschi described such work, "those indifferent little bits and pieces made with a wearied sigh while cell-phoning an 'art facilitator' for the more important activity of doing lunch." Rules for imaginativeness cannot be memorized, but those for sycophancy and conformity can.

These directives resemble an enforced Munchausen Syndrome by proxy. It is time for all art, but especially painting to stop being enfeebled, flabby, a victim. To cease assisting with its maltreatment and vitiation. We can do it, one aspect at a time, by rebuffing such "understood" edicts and creating our own, vigorous and vital metaphor(m)s.

Stop being sycophantic, stop bootlicking. You canNOT memorize your way to greatness.

Goya in his ADDRESS TO THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF SAN FERNANDO REGARDING THE METHOD OF TEACHING THE VISUAL ARTS of 1792, one of the first speeches ever made to an art academy, made several points that are STILL problems for us. In fact I think I will read his whole speech as a future podcast. But back to my theme now:

He said, "there are no rules in Painting, and ...the oppression, or servile obligation of making ALL study or follow the SAME path, is a great impediment for the young who profess this very difficult art."

Study, learn, work, critique, argue, make make make --- but there are NO hard-and-fast-rules in art.

That was "(No) Rules in Art."

Thanks for listening. Podcast number 19. If you wish to hear more cool, exciting and hopefully inspiring stuff about art history and art, come back for more. Also I, Dr Mark Staff Brandl, artist and art historian, am available for live custom Performance-Lectures. In English und auf Deutsch.

I take viewers inside visual art and art history. Entertainingly, yet educationally and aesthetically, I analyze, underline, and discuss the reasons why a work of art is remarkable, or I go through entire eras, or indeed through the entirety of art history, or look at your desired theme through the lens of art history. The lectures often take place with painted background screens and even in my entire painting-installations.

Some recent ones were on the entire history of Postmodernist Art from 1979 through today, on Metaphor(m) in Art History, and on Mongrel Art. Once again, I'd like to thank Chloe Orwell, Brad Elvis, and the rock band the Handcuffs for composing, performing and recording my theme song, "Shut Up and Paint," a tiny portion of which begins and ends every Dr Great Art Podcast.

You can find or contact me at

www.drgreatart.com/

book me at www.mirjamhadorn.com

or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all as Dr Great Art.

 

Dr Great Art Episode 18: "Meaning is in Artworks Themselves"

My newest Dr Great Art podcast! Episode 18: "Meaning is in Artworks Themselves." The meaning of every artwork lies in the object itself, not in any commentary concerning it. Embodiment!
http://drgreatart.libsyn.com/episode-18-meaning-is-in-artworks-themselves

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This is the script (not a transcript, as I change elements when recording).


Dr Great Art podcast Episode 18: "Meaning is in Artworks Themselves"

Hi this is Mark Staff Brandl, with the 18th "Dr Great Art" brief podcast. I hope you enjoy it and come back for each and every one.

Today my Artecdote concerns Finding Meaning in Artworks.

My podcasts, articles and my dissertation all assert the preeminence of the search for meaning, through metaphoric creativity, in art. I want to make clear, however, that this is not an attempt to restore some imagined, missing hint of a purport preceding the created text or object. It is an affirmation of the quest for meaning as the central struggle in creativity. It is no longer viable to seek to discover some imagined intention of meaning --- the artwork IS the achieved meaning.

Each artwork is a complex of multiple meanings performatively, actively, physically embodied. As everyone who listens to me knows, I am a lover of art history, as well as being an art historian. it is more than a profession. Historical fact is a necessary and enlightening frame of reference to anchor finer associations; nevertheless what a creator principally intended is always for THAT specific object to exist. The meaning lies in the OBJECT, not even in what the artists herself says about it! And not in outside commentary! Art does not exist to serve as illustrations for critical theory. What all artists try to do can likewise be plainly described. They try to show truths — with emphasis placed on the verb and the plural noun ending. Yet these simple-sounding essentials are the bases for immeasurably rich creations.

There is no objectivity beyond this. In the same way, a purely subjective response is of little pragmatic value, only perhaps inadvertently as a direction for a viewer's own thought or as a guide to the thoroughly perplexed. A theory of creative thought cannot be wholly "objectivist," "subjectivist," intentional, structural, paralinguistic, deconstructive, biographical, or even formalistic. I repeat, NOT WHOLLY. Certainly all these can be true of, and thus eye-opening, about specific artworks --- but only IN PART! People who rely on any one of these to give the whole meaning of a work of art, are mistaken --- overuse of each of these methods of interpretation places the weight of the meanings in a text or artwork in some imagined, abstracted camp far from home, or in some cul-de-sac of unrecognized catachresis.

The greatest danger of theorists is that they tend to create situations wherein works of art are arbitrarily expurgated from any living process and from all contexts, (be they cognitive, historical, economic, formal or various others). As a practicing artist and art historian with strong analytic proclivities and the penchant to cerebrate, I have constructed my own theory in resistance to this, an anti-theory of sorts, if you will: one which emphasizes living process, personal struggle, cognition, agency and historical context. I call it Metaphor(m).

I will do a podcast in the future specifically on that, but suffice it to say for the present that my theory of Metaphor(m) is that the formal, technical and stylistic aspects of artists' approaches concretely manifest content in culturally and historically antithetical ways through a particular trope, metaphor. An artist's metaphoric vehicle is based in construction, ON MAKING, yet is also a trope; hence, it is meta-form but also metaphor, thus my neologism, metaphor(m), (spell).

However, that is not the important point now. As I said, I will go into that at another time. The point is that EMBODIMENT is everything. The meaning of the work is in the work, IS the work. Artworks are creations wherein the form and the content are inextricably interwoven, each mirroring the other in its own terms.

If this or any other hypothetical analysis of the arts is worthy of any serious consideration, it is in its usefulness for fuller understanding and criticism of the works before us: as creators, as perceivers and as creative perceivers. Interpretation should seek the transformative through important questions. What does the act of interacting with this work allow me to discover in life, about art, about seeing, about thinking or feeling? How does this change and improve experience, i.e. "reality"? What is it WITHIN this object that does these things?

In short: Look at the artworks. the meanings are before your eyes.

That was "Meaning is in Artworks Themselves."

Thanks for listening. Podcast number 18. If you wish to hear more cool, exciting and hopefully inspiring stuff about art history and art, come back for more. Also I, Dr Mark Staff Brandl, artist and art historian, am available for live custom Performance-Lectures. In English und auf Deutsch.

I take viewers inside visual art and art history. Entertainingly, yet educationally and aesthetically, I analyze, underline, and discuss the reasons why a work of art is remarkable, or I go through entire eras, or indeed through the entirety of art history, or look at your desired theme through the lens of art history. The lectures often take place with painted background screens and even in my painting-installations.

Some recent ones were on the entire history of Postmodernist Art from 1979 through today, on Metaphor(m) in Art History, and on Mongrel Art. Once again, I'd like to thank Chloe Orwell, Brad Elvis, and the rock band the Handcuffs for composing, performing and recording my theme song, "Shut Up and Paint," a tiny portion of which begins and ends every Dr Great Art Podcast.

You can find or contact me at

www.drgreatart.com/
book me at www.mirjamhadorn.com
or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all as Dr Great Art.

Dr Great Art Episode 17: Provinciality in Art

The newest "Dr Great Art" podcast. "Episode 17: Provinciality in Art." Times have changed drastically. Now, what provinciality is has been turned completely around. It is a state of mind, not geography.
http://drgreatart.libsyn.com/episode-17-provinciality-in-art

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This is the script (not a transcript, as I change elements when recording).

 Dr Great Art Podcast 17: Provinciality in Art

Hi this is Mark Staff Brandl, with the 17th "Dr Great Art" brief podcast. I hope you enjoy it and come back for each and every one.

Today my Artecdote concerns Provinciality in Art and the Artworld.

Yes Provinciality. A word that commands fear in the artworld.

The standard definition of 'provinciality' in our context is the character of artists or art(sub-) worlds to lack the sophistication of some urban center deemed better, or of having the styles, viewpoints, etc., considered characteristic of unsophisticated inhabitants of a province; rustic; insular. Not knowing or following what is considered currently by the consensus "in" or au courant. Say, painting in an Impressionist style in Russia a 100 years after its halcyon days in Paris.

Times have changed drastically. In our time, the situation has been upturned.

Provinciality is now best construed as a state of mind, rather than one of geography.

Once upon a time, provinciality consisted of knowing nothing of the world-at-large, only looking at local art and culture. Now that has inverted. The new provinciality is a form of consensus globalism, where you are always looking elsewhere, copying New York or the Biennale or documenta and never really looking at the great art occurring around your own corner.

Before I left Chicago, I saw such an attitude kill much of the creativity of the local art scene, driving the city into spot 3 after New York and Los Angeles in the US. LA did the opposite. Looked at and appreciated itself and rose to spot 2 in the US. London finally did it with the YBAs as well, and rose to spot 2 in the world. Berlin is closing in now by being itself! And New York City has ALWAYS looked at itself, its local artists, it has had curators who show those artists, critics who write about them SERIOUSLY and so on. So do not blame THEM, I have also heard such complaint, for doing it right!

In Chicago, I saw that NOT looking at your LOCAL art, produced copyist work, and I saw that the clique behind this thereby actually shrank, not widened, the horizon of a then burgeoning Chicago scene. Under them, the city was firmly provincialized into a receptor fiefdom under a small oligarchy, soon proven fact when LA vastly overtook it. Believe me. I was there, showing with a gallerist, now long gone, who actually told me about the whole "arrangement" going on to achieve this reprehensible goal. This happens regularly in many if not most other places, in our current art situation. Simple minds like simple situations they can lazily understand and which they hope to pigeonhole and control.

I have seen it elsewhere as well, particularly in Switzerland where I now live, with its love/hate relationships to Germany and the US. The new self-induced form of provincialism is a result of NOT being aware of the art creativity around you, of always looking with longing eyes to some distant "center." One should look at artists, curators, critics and art historians involved in the international artworld, of course, yet also primarily interact with ones own (supposedly) peripheral communities. Artist Alex Meszmer has opined (opEIned) that behind this lies the attempt to achieve "a little piece of Documenta, or New York, finally in every backyard." While ignoring your own neighbors.

First, there is no real single artWORLD. As Paul Klein has said, it is a conglomeration of artVILLAGES. Making one or two of those villages unnecessarily sovereign is the new provincialism --- and in your head.

Second, Simon Deakin has written that you can still manage to avoid knowing anything of the world-at-large regardless of where you go or what art you look at. Even in the centers.

Third, an ex-curator of a Kunsthalle told me in discussion when I brought up this idea, that I had forgotten that it is the duty of curators in provincial areas to educate the local artists through confrontation with influences from outside. This is completely idiotic. Such "instruction" is totally unnecessary in our globally networked society. WE HAVE THE INTERNET, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND TRAVEL! Times and information-flow have changed. In much of the 20th century and earlier, one needed to live in Paris, or Florence, or New York City or wherever in order to quickly keep abreast of stimulating arguments and activities. That is no longer true!

Most of the people who live and work outside the few urban centers for culture immediately know everything that occurs in them. Normally, I have seen what is happening in New York City, Berlin, London, Zurich, Chicago, LA, and other centers, directly THERE. And then 8 years later I am "instructed" about it in St. Gallen, near where I live?! This teaching consists mainly in telling us which curatorially-correct and momentarily accepted tendencies we should kow-tow before — something of a "Top o' the Pops" for the artworld, or even more banal, an "Art World Star Search."

There is indeed a small residue of the old-fashioned form of provinciality in the cliqueyness of some insecure artists. Something Switzerland, where I live, is unfortunately world famous for. (Other than THAT it is a wonderful art scene.) Critic Peter Schjeldahl is correct in saying that artists operate best in small packs, like wild dogs, but packs of artists, curators, critics and art historians who have clumped together because they share highly similar world views, art interests, artistic goals. Not just because they want power or to brownnose those with power and to serve as ersatz Fisherman clubs for the semi-artsy.

I recently was doing a Dr Great Art performance-lecture on Community-Based Art, Social-Practice. One artist said to me, "well, we are community-based because we have a tight little clique!" That is NOT SoPra, not what I mean, not really even a community, but rather an in-group, usually one of copyists, as I have already bemoaned.

What is the answer? I gave some pointers in Dr Great Art Podcast Number Seven Titled "What Can We Do? Art Beyond Complaint." Please go back and listen to that.

A few pointers in short: ignore these uninformed ideas of provincialism. Offer and create constructive alternatives, construct your own local artworlds, venues and so on. Encourage others who do the same. Help build up critics, curators, students and especially other artists who pay attention to what is around them, who have independent minds. Network in a POSITIVE sense --- and WELL BEYOND just artists! With your whole local community, as best as you can. The artworld drastically needs expansion, stronger artvillages linked to the rest of the community will be an important part of this!

Provinciality is now a state of mind, not geography. The new provinciality is a form of consensus globalism, where you are always looking elsewhere, copying. Look at yourself, at those creating great art around you, discuss it seriously and critically. Be tough and open. Expand art's audience. It begins at home in ones own neighborhood.

That was "Provinciality in Art."

Thanks for listening. Podcast number 17. If you wish to hear more cool, exciting and hopefully inspiring stuff about art history and art, come back for more. Also I, Dr Mark Staff Brandl, artist and art historian, am available for live custom Performance-Lectures. In English und auf Deutsch.

I take viewers inside visual art and art history. Entertainingly, yet educationally and aesthetically, I analyze, underline, and discuss the reasons why a work of art is remarkable, or I go through entire eras, or indeed through the entirety of art history, or look at your desired theme through the lens of art history. The lectures often take place with painted background screens and even in my painting-installations. Three recent ones were on the the entire history of Postmodernist Art from 1979 through today, Metaphor(m) in Art History, and Mongrel Art.

I'd like to thank Chloe Orwell, Brad Elvis, Mike Hagler, and the rock band the Handcuffs for composing, performing and recording my theme song, "Shut Up and Paint," a tiny portion of which begins and ends every Dr Great Art Podcast. More about them in a future podcast.

You can find or contact me at
www.drgreatart.com/

book me at www.mirjamhadorn.com

or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all as Dr Great Art.

My Metaphor(m), a free e-book, art documentation

Get your free e-pub version of the documentation book (called "artists' catalogues" in the jargon) of my huge painting-installation at Jedlitschka Gallery in Zurich, Switzerland based on my PhD dissertation.

I recommend NOT using Microsoft Edge to read it (which Windows computers tries to use immediately), as it eliminates the cover and puts the double page spreads wrong. MY favorite for its visual effect is the program "Cover" (also free), originally intended for comics. (http://www.frenchfrysoftware.com/cover/)

Here is the publication! (c), tm and all that 2013, 2017 Mark Staff Brandl
I hope you enjoy it! Right click, download, then read in your viewer:
http://www.markstaffbrandl.com/my_metaphorm_install/Brandl_My%20metaphorm_e-book.epub