Posters are the surrender. And I say this because many people of excellent taste and sensibility primarily decorate their walls with them (or similar printed materials. Sometimes bearing nominal personal significance—as maybe tour posters acquired in-person at a concert, or depicting the special-to-us teams or events or concepts which constitute our thought-lives—these posters can also describe a kind of beauty in design that is possible and worthy of our attention and appreciation in short bursts, but this is also a distinct and relatively layerless experience compared to genuine Artwork viewership, since most posters are still advertisements of some sort. On a sliding scale of looking-at merit, but all fundamentally slick visual comfort. Also, there are some art posters, on which are reproduced famous art images, doubtless worthy and canonical. But this is to me a greater and greater insult still that we separate the icon of the art from its aura’d body and prefer this somehow to witnessing and revering those genuine articles that are bodily and economically accessible to us as renters and as humanities failures.
Because of course I can imagine one reason for the state of our walls is that many of us are fairly young and have urgent priorities that laugh at art collecting, but why are many of us also, at the same time, artists of greater and lesser skill with wall-hangable artworks that we just stack up in closets and on desks and in binders. These are devotions to the terrible belief that art is most of the time for its creators and that it can even exist without inciting a reaction from another. Most art that is especially worthwhile is available at prices even its makers and their friends and family could not imagine paying. Yes, there is printmaking, and doodling, and zine-type collage illustration and other such anti-art art, which makes its wide distribution and broad accessibility a primary issue, but the aesthetics of this also typically therefore guffaw at the convention of good taste and the notion of beauty as an end. To be perfectly level, that sort of taste can stand the ribbing, and it’s not that the DIYists haven’t even a point. Rather, the issue with those aesthetic traditions of good taste and beauty is that they proliferate in despicable bourgeois places. And the specifics of those tastes certainly inherit a fair deal of grossness in all intersections of oppression, but this does not have to require a stance of pure-oppositional anti-taste, especially when this stance still relies on and refers to the bourgeois taste for its own existence. There were, discovered in the academies and galleries and museums, true and beautiful thoughts about art, and there is stoked inside us a desire for these beauties, which the posters crassly refer to.
So then, why don’t we start getting together the poor whose walls are barren of art with the poor whose closets are full of it? At the start, there was a bit of anger at the poster-havers themselves, but more often it is serious artists whose failure the posters describe; serious artists are the ones captured in the paralysis of institutional legitimation. Above all else, the art world, and therefore artists, tend to value the recognition of discursive potential, which is rewarded in its crystallization on the white wall. Of course, this is a separate pursuit to actually realizing such potential, perhaps by placing this work into the context of human life rather than containing it in a pressurized room where people perform their interest in the work’s radicalizing ethic.
Instead, celebrate the noble life of an artwork. I want an end to the veneration of a gallery wall as better and holier than my good friend’s wall. Those are institutions married to a death-spiraling global ideology, and their only power is in the subconscious sense that their buildings strike against art to burst into social relevance, but of course the most invigorating conversations I have are never in front of the art in loud rooms of clicks and footsteps and echoes; that is always forged among people in comfort of their/our own spaces. Therefore, do not surrender your power to make everyday life an aesthetic experience.
The most heartbreaking discordance in an artwork is when its content proffers some political idea that is countered by the object’s literal function as a commodity and a means of ingratiating the artist as a licensed decorator of a new monarch’s castles. And the artists of first-wave feudalism served this purpose too. However, Fra Angelico’s paintings are redeemed by his genuine belief in the sacrifice of Jesus, rendered in tearful brushstrokes, pressed with exacting solemnity. The secular museum artist reveres and protects what such perfect feeling? Even when a baroque Venetian merchant has his portrait moved into the MFA Boston, a spell is broken that once bound the painter’s genius in private domination. Yes, that merchant’s visage is still fixed there, the ghost of capital, but its expulsion into a significantly more public area, where the artist’s name is recognized first, is a step toward balance and a reinscription of the work as primarily art.
In this process, the power to extract art from objects is established: a power shared in small part with the galleries, auction houses, and collectors that museums source from. And so, a secular artist’s work at MoMA PS1 undergoes a reverse process, where it might begin as untethered and unpatroned (besides in abstract ways) and, by that way, absolutely art. But through its integration, resulting in a museum show, the work is now indebted to its legitimizing patron institutions, whose toll is the authority to decide what art is shaping what discussions and how. And I don’t say this to denigrate the work that such inculcated artists are making, quite the opposite. Because the greater the Real Art quotient in one’s work, the greater interest may be taken in you because of what can be extracted. To be clear, there is too art that fakes this appearance adeptly to sneak into the institutions and gratify its soulless maker, and there is as well art too fibrously Real for the institutions to yet absorb or at least to properly swallow without a resulting tummy ache and perhaps undigested bits left in the excrement.
So I want to suggest the distribution and integration of art into everyday life as a primary concern for the politics of all our work.
Deeply ingrained in us is the expectation that our time with singular and beautiful art has to be a special occasion. This goes both for the audience and the artist. Because wouldn’t my art look that way on a white wall more than a cluttered cream-gray one, chunked carelessly over with and thoroughly dented by the lineage of tenants? And seen in procession by tiring art ghouls rather than daily and truly by a blooded creature . . .
For the worse, more of us are artists than ever. For the better, traditional, singular artworks are some of the most gratifying and exceptional things to spend time making and looking at. Don’t labor under the delusion that this can’t be the texture of daily life. Unequivocally, it is cool to look at things made by a person with their hands and to appreciate and empathize with that distillation of labor and thought and care. As we and our surroundings become increasingly composed of listless, unfelt objects, corrupting our periphery in static and driving us out of the environment and into ourselves, we can remember to dig out sites of humanity all around so that we don’t fall out of love with expectation. Our decorations are valorous if they’re ours since we’re cool.
Proper Left 
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