Art Collecting: Food for Thought

A year or two ago I was in a Target looking for a frame to put around an old flier promoting a 1968 Merce Cunningham performace at Lisner. While I was there looking for something simple, a couple - about my age - stood near me trying to figure out if the... (sigh) "art" they were looking at would work with their living room decor.

I have no qualms about people buying work to match the couch. It was what these people called "art" that bugged me. What they quibbled over was a product that required little more than an inactive imagination, a high school student with cursory knowledge of how to apply a Photoshop filter to a digital image, a large commercial printer, some strips of 1"x2" pine, and a gullible audience living beyond the Target HQ in Minnesota.

Some people do not purchase art because they have a specific perception of what art is, and there are not a plethora of 15th C Italian fresco paintings on the market. Some people don't purchase art because of the presumed cost – we've all entered galleries where the work sits on the wall waiting for a suitor in possession of a four or five figure dowry. However, inexpensive art is out there.

As I strolled through my crummy basement apartment the other night, I reflected on the art work my wife and I possess. Some of it is dreck I painted in grad school, hung for the utilitarian purpose of obstructing a white wall from incandescent light. Some is the work of friends given to me in exchange for labor. Also, in the past couple of years, my wife and I have purchased some art.

Five pieces, in particular, were purchased in 2009:
In January we purchased one of Mark Cameron Boyd's Theory Note Cards and one of Christian Benefiel's Staple/Commodities (a bread roll), both from an exhibition at The Hamiltonian.  Before the end of the summer, we picked up a print by Johanna Mueller from Reyes+Davis. I also e-mailed artist Jeremy Drummond, last summer, about his 65-Point Plan for Sustainable Living (postcard set) - a work I saw during a trip to Michigan in March - and bought the work from him directly. Before the end of December we acquired a work of pottery by Sarah Allison, an MFA candidate at GW, whose work caught my eye from Classroom 102 on the GW campus, as I was walking in to teach one morning.  

Admittedly we have little hurdles when it comes to buying work; we have a toddler, limited wall and shelf space, and an abundance of concrete walls. But they never trump the motivations to buy a work. Some are aestheticaly pleasing. Some have technical virtuosity. Some are intellectually compelling. Some have a great concept. Some make me giggle like a pig-tailed school-girl. Nothing unifies the collection of works, in terms of any particular art-world adjective, other than their size and their cost - small and inexpensive. Of course, there is also the joy that ownership affords... like the ability to contemplate a work over a bowl of frosted mini-wheats at 7:15 am on a Tuesday. It's food for thought.