Conversation with Joseph Bravo
This is a transcript of a Zoom conversation I had with American curator and art historian Joseph Bravo on September 5th 2020. We discussed the evolution of my work and the broader cultural scene.
Joseph Bravo
Let me instead of making observations, first ask you some questions. For some time you’ve had an approach to narrative based on references to environment, and environmentalism and the ecosphere. That’s been a running theme for several years in your work. But the last four years, for understandable reasons, there’s been a cacophony of things to be reacting to. With so many things to be appalled by simultaneously, sometimes it’s hard to focus on a given priority in a given moment, without being toppled yet again, by the next tweet. And the last two years in particular, 2019 and 2020, there has been sort of an exhaustion in the zeitgeist that we’re getting, you know, almost a fatigue with being persistently appalled and there’s almost a sense of fatalism in relation to the anger. How long can you sustain, you know, anger at its apogee? And there’s been this sense that, is there anything that can happen that won’t? So in the last couple of years, have you changed your focus in painting and your focus in narrative? Your fundamental priorities may remain the same, but has anything changed for you in the last two years in the way you’ve been approaching narrative in your painting?
Conor Walton
I suppose I suppose one thing I’d say is that when you talk about “maintaining the apogee of anger” and being willing to continue to be appalled by further reports, and “how much more appalled can you be?” and that sort of thing? I suppose from my own point of view, I’m not that angry. And I’m not that surprised at what’s happening. Generally speaking, it fits within a world-view that has been expecting a lot of things and doesn’t think we’re anywhere near the nadir. I think we have a long way to go to reach the nadir. I don’t think we will reach the nadir in your or my lifetime,. It’s a long way down. I see myself as just looking over the edge and trying to plumb some of the depths. A lot of my projects have also been in gestation for much longer than two years. A recent painting may have been in the planning stage for five or ten years; it may be the latest iteration of a picture that has been evolving in my head. Or it may be something that I thought up last week, and thought, “hey, let’s give this a go.” So I’m not aware of any radical break in the last two years. What I am conscious of is the possibility of engaging with a wider audience through engaging with politics and things like that. I’ve been trying things to see what works and what doesn’t and getting feedback, and making some adjustments based on that. And where a lot of my ideas came straight out of still life and Vanitas and were more or less literal examples of the Vanitas still life, I’ve been trying to strip the still life elements out and give the idea a different sort of life. I used to set up a still life, which was more or less conventional; the wine bottle and the wine glass and stuff, and then maybe in the background there’d be something crazy going on.
The ‘crazy’ was set within the context of a very formal, traditional, conventional painting. I wondered if I could dispense with some of the conventional elements, because I was getting bored with the wineglass and the bottle of wine, and all of these conventional things; they seemed to become a bit like the frame of the picture, rather than the content of the picture. And where originally, I tried to make these things in the foreground like bait that would attract you to the picture and then draw you in towards the deeper elements, I wondered if I could go down a different route, which was a little bit more connected to the sort of the cinematic experience, so the paintings would be a bit more like cinema stills, or coming from an imaginary world, a fantasy world. So those are some elements, I think, that have changed overall.
Joseph Bravo
This raises several questions. Your optic has never been necessarily particularly optimistic and in the progressive sense. Progressivism requires a certain degree of optimism that the future could be better than the present. I gather that you’re somewhat pessimistic about the course of humanity and the momentum that it has and what can be done about it, and somewhat fatalistic about it as well. You said in the past that it’s not so much that you are attempting to change the course of history as observe a civilization in decline in the context of an environment in decline. And you’re not Pollyanna-ish about the prospects. I think within the current political climate in the United States, and even in Europe, there is one reason that people are so anxious, and I would compare it to death. If you have a loved one who has been diagnosed with cancer, and they’re taking two or three years to die from cancer, and then eventually they die after a prolonged struggle with the disease, you still mourn their loss, but you’re not shocked that they die; you were emotionally prepared. It’s a little bit different to a loved one getting hit by a car on the way home from work. You’re planning on spending another 20 years with them and then suddenly, you’ve been deprived of what you anticipated as an entitlement. And I think that from your optic, the patient has been gravely ill for a long time. And so as you witness its demise, you’re somewhat more emotionally prepared than perhaps others are. So I take your point that some of these ideas you’ve been stewing on for a long time. That said, a couple of things have come up, as you’ve started to relate to. And these are tangentially related, as you start to talk to popular culture. And characters like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and others who are recognizable figures are appearing in it. In that sense, the work is taking on a little more temporalness; it’s responding to the given moment.
And while it may be happening in the context of ideas that have been stewing in your head for several years, they’re also sort of condensing and formulating in response to contemporary images, contemporary events, and they’re a little more reactive. And so that’s why I asked what’s happened in the last couple of years, because if I look at the body of your work before, I don’t, I don’t see characters like Elon Musk, or Presidents of the United States or whatnot, being regularly depicted in your oeuvre. As you said, you’ve been wrestling with the still life for a long time. I always thought it was interesting the way you placed a conventional still life in the foreground, often with a leading theatrical edge to the painting, like a stage set or the edge of a table. And then there were these metaphorical events taking place in the background. And I think about the role of Vanitas in the still life: in one sense we were looking at the still life and celebrating the sort of epicurean-ness of it. But beneath that was the notion that this too shall pass. This was going to fade away. And I thought it was sort of interesting the way you juxtapose the still life with the somewhat surreal narratives drawn from popular cultural imagery using Marvel Comics and Disney characters and dinosaurs and other things in the image, so that there was this juxtaposition of this traditional view of the still life with this contemporary imagery from popular culture that is not conventionally associated with still life and sort of reinventing the still life, but there was still this almost morbidly Vanitas thing going on in the background. We see other artists take contemporary pop cultural imagery and comic books and toy figures, action figures and whatnot. You’re not the only artist using them to create new still lifes: there are quite a few! But you’re the only artist I can think of who incorporates it into the traditional still life with a bottle of wine and fruits, and all of that. I always thought it was interesting that you did that, and what its implications were. It’s a bait and switch from either angle. You’ve also talked about the still life as a discipline of observation, in and of itself. Your bread and butter paintings, I think, where you don’t have all of this dramatic narrative going on in the background, it’s often the solitary object; the solitary piece of fruit or the solitary loaf of bread or packet biscuits or stick of butter that allows this moment of quiet contemplation in observation of the technique. They’re almost meditative in quality. And I think about what Elina Cerla has said, about form as narrative, form and technique as narrative itself. And how those paintings are sort of intimate studies, where the technique and the form, become meditative narrative. And I can see them as being a discipline for creating, they’re also good discipline for the viewer.
There’s not a cacophony to consider. And so the viewer has to get small on considering every mark. And then, because of your virtuosic technique, there’s much for them to consider in every mark. There is a discipline to that, that allows the viewer to sort of get small. And in that moment, all that cacophony is put aside as they delve into the act of creating the painting itself, and unpacking its formal narrative, it’s technical narrative. At the same time, there’s this contrast between that aspect of your oeuvre and the grand history painting, the grand statement, the omniscient statement, and standing above everything and looking, looking down on it, in a way, all almost fatalistically. I think those works are a little more grandiose. And they are doing what the grand history painting was supposed to attempt to do, right along. Although the grand history painting is generally commissioned by those power, yours are more personal, more idiosyncratic: you’re not necessarily painting the optics of power so much as painting your optic on power, which is in a grand history painting. There are other artists doing that as well, but of course, not the way you do it. And you seem to have some ambivalence. As you look down on a lot of this stuff, I look at your image of Elon Musk, holding the globe like the Salvator Mundi. And think of the notion that technology will save us and, you know, our wise men are now our technologists and it occurs to me that there were a couple other moments in history where that entered the zeitgeist. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution we were going to engineer our way to utopia and then World War One happened and we went “Oh, we engineered our way to dystopia with mechanized war.” Again, at the end of World War Two, there was the sense that technology was going to save us, we were going to have clean energy forever and all of this, and we engineered our way to the brink of nuclear holocaust and it didn’t save us yet again. And then the information technology revolution was going to come and save us, it was going to have this great democratizing effect. And now we have seen the consequence of the revolution in engineering, and information technology, and that ostensible democratization with the algorithm itself disturbing the balance of communication, information, creating information silos. And turns out that alleged democratization has been, at best, a two edged sword. And I think of your, your painting of Elon Musk and there’s this ambiguity in it: in one sense, he’s presented as a Salvator Mundi, as Saviour of the World, and you’re painting very plausibly, sympathetically in a way; you’re not demonizing and you’re not putting horns on him. You’re not very overtly mocking. Yet in a subtle way you are proffering him for ironic critique. An injunction to beware of putting your trust in technologists who would save you, seems to be almost an implied narrative of work. And there’s also this notion that technology and materialism sit in opposition to the religious and to superstition. And that painting seems to ask; do we have a superstitious optic on science itself?
Conor Walton
Well hang on Joe for a minute! Okay? I’m not sure whether you’re asking me questions or answering them!
Joseph Bravo
Well, I’m setting up a context by which I’d like you to riff on that idea.
Conor Walton
You raised about 15 things, you know, in a row. And it’s a long riff.
Joseph Bravo
I take your point.
Joseph Bravo
What I was trying to do is establish some context for your practice has been and try to determine what’s happened in the last two years. How is it consistent with what you’ve been doing right along? And how is it changing? And part of your answer was you began to address popular culture. Whereas in the past, you were less inclined to address it. But it was more than two years ago that you were putting comic book imagery and those figures and borrowing from those narratives. You’ve been doing that for six, seven years I know of. And so that’s not a very recent development. But I think that while you were borrowing some popular culture for your narrative, I don’t know that you were very cognizant of who your audience was, that you weren’t really trying to talk to popular culture, you may have been observing it, incorporating it, but I don’t think that you were necessarily considering pop culture as your audience. It seems from our discussions in the last year or two, you have been more concerned with who your audience is and trying to talk to popular culture and have some cultural resonance that perhaps you lacked before.
Conor Walton
I think cultural resonance has always been a priority for me, and I think one of the problems has been just plugging away at relatively traditional, conventional painting, and not achieving it, and finding myself pushed to taking maybe slightly more radical steps in order to connect. As a younger artist I would have been much more concerned with technique and the development of paintings primarily in terms of technique would have been more satisfying to me. At this point it’s not. I looked at a lot of my early paintings as technical exercises that I could sell. It was almost like I was a pianist that I could play my scales and sell them, and people were happy to buy my scales, I didn’t necessarily think a lot of my scales, but they pleased an audience enough to be a marketable product. And at a certain point, it’s like, “OK, I practiced my scales; now what do I do with it? What can I do with it? What do I dare do?” And there’s a process of pushing the boundaries, to see what you can do. I’m also becoming more aware that in the world that we live in the physical existence of the painting, its physical presence, is becoming less and less important, because, you know, way, way, way, way, way more people will see the digital image.
Joseph Bravo
Right.
Conor Walton
The still life as I designed it was very much designed in terms of someone standing in front of it, and experiencing it almost in 3d as a ‘tromp l’oeil’ with objects to life size scale, that were almost literally tangible, so that you felt like you could put your hand into the picture. And when the experience of a painting becomes digital and then becomes what someone’s going to look on their phone, miniaturized, and this is how the vast majority of people experience it, it’s obviously a very different experience. And the question is, then well, should I focus on the exclusive experience of standing in front of the work? Most of my pictures sell to private clients. So, they’re in the gallery for a week or two, and maybe they sell and then they go to a private home, they’re looked at by three or four people a day if the pictures are lucky. And against that there’s an experience where 10,000 people a week might be viewing the same picture online. Which experience defines the work?
Joseph Bravo
Well, you raise an important question. Forty years ago, when somebody painted realistically, they were called an illustrator. And it occurred to me that what sort of made somebody an illustrator is that they painted a painting but that nobody saw the painting, but everybody saw the reproduction. That’s kind of what made them an illustrator. And the thought of ‘fine art’ is something that you create on a canvas, and people experience in a corporeal setting where they can perceive every brushstroke; they’re affected by its scale, and that was considered intrinsic to the ‘fine art’ experience. And while there’s still a difference between seeing a painting in person and seeing an image of it, in the past, perhaps it was the exception, where a painting would be photographed, it would be published, it would be distributed, and then have a wider audience in reproduction than it had in person. It might have a relatively small audience in person, or it might have an institutional audience in person. But the vast majority of people who had experienced it – unless it was a particularly famous or iconic work – had experienced it in person, they hadn’t experienced it in reproduction. Now, with self-publishing on the internet and everything else, almost every artwork is more likely to be experienced in this new medium, to be published, rather than be experienced in the original sense. At which point one might ask about a work’s cultural resonance. Does technique matter so much? Does the virtuosity or even the scale of the work matter so much, if it’s cultural resonance is going to be determined by how many times it’s shared on Instagram? And people looking at it on their phone? And how do artists create differently for work, that’s going to be perceived in a different medium than the one in which they created it. And we’ve talked about this, a lot of people have talked about this in the market; that, you know, multi figure paintings don’t play well on a smartphone, because you can’t pick up the detail, small scale. And so people like portraits, or they like simple compositions, or still lifes, they like something that has an instantly recognizeable, vibrant narrative that you can catch in a second. Because if it takes 10 seconds to catch it, you missed it. So this goes to the question; who is your audience? And so apparently, you’re considering what are the implications of being a painter in the 21st century, when nobody’s experiencing the painting, or next to nobody is experiencing it? The vast majority are experiencing it in miniature in digital publication. What do you think that is doing to your work? How are you making differently? How is this impacting the way you view your process as a fine artist? And what is the distinction between fine art and illustration in a digital era?
Conor Walton
The thing about the unique Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is that it has it has value by virtue of its uniqueness. So the fact that the work of art is an original, and is purchasable is how I earn a living. And, you know, let’s say if the work of art were entirely electronic, you know, if it was just a digital work, the same logic doesn’t apply, because once the work is electronic, there is no original. It can be, you know, reproduced ad infinitum. So there has to be different economic model for the digital image.
Joseph Bravo
You’re not monetizing the digital image, and the original’s monetary value is almost directly proportional to the ubiquity of its digital reproduction. The greater the amount of reproduction, the greater the cultural resonance. You can think of Roger Dean’s album covers. If Roger Dean makes an album cover for a band, that band sells a million copies of the album, then the value of that painting goes through the roof. Whereas another Roger Dean painting, it may be of equivalent or better quality than that album cover is worth a fraction of what the more famous image is.
Conor Walton
I’m distributing the digital image essentially for free. Just as I tried to set up a still life with bait that would attract the person standing in front of it with pretty objects and sensual pleasures, what I’m trying to do with these other paintings is, similarly, put bait in that will attract the online viewer, and it may be a pop culture reference, it may be a familiar face. And I’m sort of Catholic enough about this, that I don’t really mind, whose face it is, or what the face is, so long as it pulls the viewer into the picture. And that is part of what I’m trying. But it’s a complex thing. Ultimately what I’m trying to do is still something fairly sophisticated. So it’s not just “let’s hit the audience with the sledgehammer.” It’s “let’s try to play a sophisticated game where you’re pulled in, and the bait serves a particular purpose.” It’s not there just as itself, it’s there to play a part in the story of the picture. And to make the picture a microcosm, you know; it’s to present a worldview.
Joseph Bravo
Well, I still want to go to what’s entailed in that and how digital raises the stakes on that. In previous contexts, you know, there were sort of three contexts for a work of art: the commercial gallery, the institutional Gallery, and the domestic environment. If people are going to see something in their home, there’s going to be a very finite number of people who are going to see it. Somebody might see something in an institutional gallery. The presumption there is that it’s curated and that everything in this gallery is important. Not everybody’s gonna necessarily like everything in this gallery. But everything was ostensibly selected for some significance; somebody said “you should pay attention to this, if it’s in here, we have culled a lot of stuff that you didn’t need to see.” And yes, maybe not everybody who walks through the institutional gallery pays equal attention to every work. But every work in the gallery is assumed to be special. It’s reified by its institutional presence and it should command your attention by virtue of the authority of the auspices under which it’s presented. And so that gives it a boost. It says, “Hey, pay attention to this, don’t ignore this. You’re in a museum, everything’s here, it’s important.” If you’re in a commercial gallery, as often as not, you’re in a one man show. And you’re competing with yourself. If not, you’re in a in a group show. But for most of the group shows, I’ve seen, while there may be a standout work here or there, typically, it’s still a finite number, you’re only competing with 20 or 30 other painters. The viewer may pay more attention to one painting than to another, one painting may register more than the others, but at least all got a shot at bat. With the internet, however, there is not an assumption that you’re about to see an image or it’s important to pay attention, or that there’s only 30 images, and everybody’s gonna get to turn at the bat. There is a ubiquity of images, there’s a superfluity of images, there’s literally hundreds of millions and billions of images, and you will very likely be lost in the cacophony, you may not actually get your time at bat, you may have an infinitesimal fraction of a second, if that, to garner somebody’s attention. So the stakes of getting attention and getting somebody to pause for a second and contemplate the work at whatever level; the narrative, the technical, the whatever level. The odds are just astronomically stacked against you.
Conor Walton
I don’t I don’t totally agree. I think in the short term, yes, if you’re looking for results tomorrow, you put the picture out today and you want to go viral? Instantly? Yeah, it’s extremely unlikely. And you may succeed every so often, and just by continuing to put stuff out it happens. But I think if you’re playing a longer game, I do believe in a sort of process where the cream rises to the top. And it may take a long time to rise because we’re talking about a very, very big vat of milk, but the process of sifting will go on in some shape or form. And most of those images that are being produced by the millions and billions every day are going to end up, you know, in the in the recycle bin, so I think in the long run there is a process of sifting and contextualization, that may take a good deal of time. But the other side of this is that, to some extent, we don’t have a lot of choice, because when you talk about the auspices and authority of the museum and all of that sort of thing, well, the museums are losing authority hand over fist and in the current cultural context, which is one of fragmentation and breakdown and polarization and competing historical narratives (most of which are going to turn out to be false; most of which are highly delusional in terms of where people think history and the zeitgeist is going and why this art is important) all of that is undermining the auspice and the authority of the museum and making it very hard for artists like me to get into the museum, because work like mine is challenging to the mainstream and the institutions in ways that they’re not comfortable at all with. So we’re blocked on so many fronts that I think we just have to go with what our current circumstances allow, and a lot of that is what the technology is allowing. It’s allowing a sort of a bottom-up approach to cultural resonance, rather than a sort of top-down approach that tended to dominate the 20th century where every major artist had several big backers. You had the dealer, you had the millionaire or billionaire collector who bought the work and inserted it into the institutions, and the institutions said, “This is great art!” The works were inserted into the art historical canon and appeared in all the history books, and everyone had to bow before the work. That sort of model just doesn’t function anymore. It doesn’t function, particularly when the institutions have been corrupted to the point where the work that they try to endow with their auspices, and say, “This is great art!” is sort of shite, and half the people are saying, “Really?” you know? “Really??”
Joseph Bravo
That goes to the lack of credibility of institutions in general, whether that’s the institutions of science, of the academy, the institutions of government, the institutions of museums. And there’s two asides here. One of the things that people love do is to walk through the contemporary art gallery at the museum and play two games. One, they like to see bunnies in the clouds. They say, “I wonder what this is supposed to look like?” And it usually has nothing to do with the context of the art. Or they like this other game; “Isn’t that ridiculous? That makes no sense at all.” And then then they feel very self-satisfied as they go, “Man! Can you imagine how much some idiot paid for this thing? If I had money, I wouldn’t be as stupid as the guy who parted with a fortune for this thing. Boy, I’m smarter than the rich people who buy this stuff. And just think of those pretentious curators with all their PhDs and their institutional auspice. And they make these stupid choices for this stuff!” And so they walk around the gallery, they put their hand on their hip and they feel superior to the institution, essentially deriding something that may be dubious, legitimately. Or it may simply be over their head and not be that dubious. But either way, it’s a fun game to play, where you can feel smarter than the institutions and the authorities. Whereas when you walk through an 18th century painting gallery, you feel stupid. It’s not them. It’s you. You’re walking through and saying “I don’t know who this painter is. I don’t know who this historical figure is.” The onus is on your ignorance. You don’t go through the 18th century gallery and go, “Who was the idiot who painted this thing?” or “Who was the idiot who chose this thing?” You walk out feeling like “I don’t know enough history, I don’t know enough about art.” Whereas when you walk into contemporary institution, the Contemporary Gallery, you feel “I don’t need to know anything in order to play this game, because clearly the people playing don’t know anything either.” And so I think that’s one of the reasons that the institutional auspices have now become sort of popularly dubious. You know, even if you don’t care about 18th century art, you presume that the experts in it know what they’re doing. It may not be to your taste, it may not be your cultural priorities. But you don’t presume that the person who curated the 18th century gallery was a fool. Whereas in the Contemporary Gallery, I see this all the time, because I’ll be in the contemporary galleries, I’ll stand there and eavesdrop. And civilians walk up and talk about the art. And very rarely do they make astute observations. Mostly, they feel self-satisfied, and feel their superiority to either the artist, the curator, the collector, the dealer, whatever, and it just reconfirmed their notion that the system is a scam.
Conor Walton
Maybe I’m hanging around with the wrong people, but most of my friends who visit modern art galleries are very much co-opted. I think a lot of the audience for modern art has bought into it and accepted it at some level, and they’re a little bit skeptical about some of the very recent stuff, but they’ve accommodated themselves to the work of the 1960s, the 1970s and 1980s. The propaganda machine has worked.
Joseph Bravo
This is a reflection of your select demographic of friends. I see differently as a former director and curator at a museum, where I actually stand in the gallery, while people walk in and see the art. And I observe people observing art. And I can tell you that 99 plus percent, 99.9% of the people who walk into an art gallery, are not initiates of the art world. One, they don’t have the same preoccupations as artists. Most of them have never had an art history class in their entire life. They come in and they see images without context, and they have emotional and visceral reactions to them. And when it comes to 20th century art in particular, it’s just a big enigma to them. And they respond viscerally to it. They don’t see these as elements in an existent dialogue for which they are familiar with the narrative.
Conor Walton
When I visit the Tate, I don’t see people walking around with their tomatoes. I don’t think that they’re in a spirit of hostility. They may be a bit perplexed. But for the most part, they seem to accept the experience of being perplexed as normal.
Joseph Bravo
Well you get that sense that art is weird. It’s made by weirdos for weirdos, I’m going to come and see the freak show, and see how the weirdos live and take for granted that they’re going to be weird. And that at the end of the day, I have the privilege of leaving the Weird Zone and returning to ordinary reality, as opposed to these, these artsy people who have to live in the twilight zone 24/7. So the Weird Zone is a fun place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
Conor Walton
If you read your average Science Magazine, your Popular Science Magazine, particularly when it gets into physics, quantum physics, the mysteries of the universe, there’s almost a glorification in this situation that the universe is a really weird place. Hell, do you understand this? It’s like, it’s not even supposed to really make sense. And you get the wildest theories! I’ve heard it referred to as postmodern or ironic science, where every week you get these new theories. “What if there are multiple universes?” or there’s some hypothesis about super strings or something else that is entirely beyond the realm of proof, and no real evidence for, but some theorist or mathematician has come up with it and is pushing it as a possibility. And it seems to say, “it’s on the edge of being incomprehensible, and it might be true, it might be false and we have really no way of knowing, so let’s scratch our heads and go, Wow!” And it’s not necessarily very far from the experience of someone going into the art gallery and looking and thinking, “Well, this might be work of genius, or it might be a lot of shite, I can’t really tell the difference.” You know, isn’t this strange?
Joseph Bravo
Well, art has become… one might argue it was always, but in the 20th century, in particular, art became so esoteric that it became like astrophysics, or like particle physics. And that if you didn’t have a PhD from MIT, you couldn’t understand the esoteric nature of the dialogue. But then there’s also the issue that as things become esoteric, then they open the door to charlatanism. That if people can’t tell, unless they have esoteric knowledge, then if they can’t tell the difference between shite and Shinola, then they are susceptible to being conned. And that’s an open invitation to comment, you know, to just come in and say, “Oh, it’s so bad, it’s good!” Or “That’s a that’s a paradox, and that’s interesting.” And so literally, you can poop on a canvas and say, “Oh, it’s profound!” And that superfluity of charlatanism has meant people can’t tell the difference between the bonafide esoteric, and the fallacious. And so they’re just left with an emotional rather than a rational response. Because they don’t know that they don’t know how to think.
Conor Walton
In a very affluent society where judging the difference between good and bad isn’t really a matter of life and death, and arguably it doesn’t really make any difference at all; where you will not be punished for making the mistake, a level of complacency builds up around ‘good judgement’ and the importance of art in education, of being familiarized with great works of art and cultivating one’s taste. Part of the original logic was that, being able to tell good from bad art was a transferable skill, a vital part of developing oneself cognitively, through demanding cultural experience. And that, to some extent has been corrupted by affluence, by lots of things. The rigor that some sort of Darwinian logic imposed where if you made the mistake, you paid the price, has been undermined. Now, actually, we are paying the price. We really are paying the price because it’s gotten to the point where people are so confused about what’s real and what’s fake, and what’s good and what’s bad. Charlatanism has spread out of the art world and relatively minor areas. And now you get in politics and economics in all sorts of areas where fallacious thinking is just super-abundant, and nobody can do anything about it. And, you know, the whole process of thought is subject to widespread corruption. And that’s become the big problem, I think.
Joseph Bravo
Is it thought or is it belief? there’s a difference between thought and belief. And, you know, I attended a Science High School. And from the time we were 13, 14 15 years old, we understood mitosis from meiosis and we understood genetics and how the alleles worked. We understood the difference between adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. We understood the mechanics of science, not just the philosophy of science. And as we’ve gone through this current current COVID crisis, and I’ve had discussions with family members and whatnot, who get their science from the New York Post or the National Enquirer, and then they go, “What makes you think that your sources are more reliable than mine?” and I’m citing the Journal of Epidemiological Studies, the Journal of Infectious Disease, and these are esoteric papers where, you know, you have to know what adenine is, and what a mutation is, and how it takes place, and the mechanics, or you can’t read the second paragraph of the article. And I will return to them and they will say, “You’ve been brainwashed.” And I want to go like, “Well, no, I’m not reading for somebody else’s conclusions. I’m reading for to understand the mechanics.” And to me, this is like telling your mechanic when he says your water pump is broken, “You’ve been brainwashed!” He isn’t brainwashed. He knows. But there is this distrust of the mechanic because it’s a mystery what happens under the hood of a car. It’s just a mystery. So now there’s this distrust where my feelings and beliefs are as good as your facts. So determining charlatanism today in a populist context is hard when the credibility of the institution of science has been been damaged, as well as those of politics and the Academy. Everything has been politicized to the point of distrust, and now there’s nobody to turn to, to deal with the esoteric. Because in the past, when I don’t know what’s wrong with my car, it’s esoteric under the hood but the mechanic knows and I trust him. The art the art historian knows, the art theorist knows, so I trust him to tell me what it’s about. Now, I don’t trust him. And I don’t trust the politician. And so now, I believe whatever narrative makes me feel good about myself. Right? Whatever reaffirms what I already believe. Whereas in science, if you read a scientific journal, what makes an article interesting in science, is that it tells you something that you didn’t already know. It takes what you already know and it adds to it. “Hey, I didn’t know that. That’s counterintuitive to what I already believe. But now I see how this thing works. Now I understand why I was mistaken.” And I take satisfaction in no longer being mistaken. Because I understand the mechanics.
Conor Walton
I get your point. I think our technical civilization is still intact. And you know if your car has a problem, you will take it to the mechanic and the real mechanic will understand more about the car than you do and you accept that and you get on a plane, you know, you don’t understand the jet engine, but you do have faith in the mechanics who checked the plane before it took off. We believe they know what they’re talking about and we still put an awful lot of faith in the technological side of our civilization. It’s most of the other areas that have really suffered. But in terms of doing something about it, what we can do is limited at this point. We can fight some sort of rear-guard action. I think where there is cultural breakdown, and where there is a lot of mistrust people like me, artists, can act in good faith, and ostensibly show ourselves to be acting in good faith, and be sincere, and just do it by using all the things that people do to promote trust in each other. You make eye contact, you show the signs of sincerity, and you explain yourself, and you show yourself to be non-threatening. And you do what you can, knowing that you will not reach a lot of people, but you might reach ten or fifteen percent, or maybe more, and in a big world that counts for something. So, I think I that’s the only way forward that I can see, certainly not aiming to please all of the people all the time. But I think there is an audience for sophisticated art, and part of the game is trying to construct work which can appeal to multiple points of view and be interpreted in terms of multiple narrative starting points. People on opposite sides of a political divide may look at one of my paintings and maybe in the first place think that it’s endorsing their viewpoint, before (if they’re smart) they realize that it could be interpreted equally in quite the opposite way, which then puts the onus on the viewer, essentially, to make an assessment.
Joseph Bravo
Who is your ideal viewer? Because there is an audience for sophisticated art. And that, by implication requires that there are sophisticated viewers. And so I’m inferring from this, that you’re not necessarily making art for everyone, that you’re making art for a sophisticated audience, acknowledging that this audience is fractionally infinitesimal. Anybody might see my one of my opinions, but like it or not, my intended audience is a sophisticated audience. And that means that the vast majority of the meaning in my work is not necessarily going to be available to everybody who might incidentally come across it. But if I show it to enough people, that’s like trawling. And I don’t mean trolling on the internet, but I mean, like fish trawling, where if you dragged your net long enough, you’re gonna catch the kind of fish that you need. And even if you know most of the fish in the net are waste fish and you throw them back in the water, there’s some fish that you’re going to haul into the boat if you just drag that net long enough and get enough fish. In that sense, I think the internet allows you to drag a big drift net. And the hope is that you’re going to catch the occasional fish that you need and you’re going to catch enough of them to sustain yourself. And that was not true before the Internet. You could not count on a big drift net and getting 1000 fishes in here. Are you now you can pretty much count on that. But most of them aren’t gonna be pros, most of them are not going to be your ideal audience.
Conor Walton
There’s never a throw-away, you know, anyone engages with my picture on whatever level, that’s a catch.
Joseph Bravo
Well “catch and release”, if you don’t want to call it throwaway, I mean, it’s a fish that you’re not going to eat for dinner.
Conor Walton
I’m a bit of a fan of Adam Smith, and his Theory of Moral Sentiments. And he talks about the moral agent, essentially, as, to some extent split as being an actor – an agent – but also the spectator of his own actions. And the act of observing yourself and judging yourself is partly conditioned by the experience of having other people observe you and judge you. But ultimately, there’s an imaginative leap, that you construct an ideal imaginary observer of your actions. And you try to justify your actions according to this ideal imaginary observer, which you might call you conscience. And at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether such a person exists. What matters is whether you can justify your actions to yourself through this imaginative act of thinking. It doesn’t matter whether the actual viewers are fallible, or short-sighted, or half-blind, or not in possession of sufficient facts. It’s a question of saying, “Am I justified?” You know, almost like in the eyes of God, that from the ideal observer, looking down. Are you justified? Have you done the best that you could, under the circumstances; that if everyone knew what you knew, would they accept you behaved in the best way. And when I’m painting a picture, I try to think in the same way in terms of the ideal observer of my pictures, who may not really exist, in a way. But it’s a fiction that I hold on to, of the most intelligent, the most sophisticated, the most demanding viewer that I try to justify myself to even if I haven’t met him. Then I throw it out. You know, throw the throw the work out into the world, and I’ll get a mixed response. I know, I’ll get a thumbs down from some people, I’ll get a “meh” from some people and a thumbs up from some people. And a few will think, “Wow! This is wonderful!”
Joseph Bravo
Well, let me ask you this: as you create that imaginary pantokrator. And you’re right, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a Christ pantokrator judging you on the gates of paradise, or it’s a politically correct saint in a secular context. I got to thinking about the notion of the difference between ‘virtue’ and ‘virtue signaling’. And we’ve all seen the false piety of the Pharisee’s prayer, “Thank you God for not making me like the Publican”, versus the publican’s prayer, which is you know, you know, “I rely on divine mercy and grace because I’m a pathetic creature”. And and as you create that ideal judge, do you find that he judges you and finds you wanting, or that he judges you and invariably sanctifies you? Because I see a lot of people who are very intent on the Pharisee’s prayer and who are just certain that they are sanctified, because they’ve said all the magic words, and they’ve lit all the right candles and gone through all the right rituals, and they are now confident of their own virtue and eager to signal their piety. But as you’re creating an ideal judge of your work, do you find that the judge looks at your work and finds you wanting?
Conor Walton
Oh, yeah. Yeah, certainly. But the judge is also tolerant and humane. You know, it’s not easy, the whole business is not easy. And you just have to try and do the best you can. Maybe looking around and saying, “Well, what’s better out there?” You know, it’s, just an attempt. And the sort of Christian ‘original sin’ thing I don’t necessarily have to go along with in terms of very harsh judgements. And I will be biased in my own favour, because I’m me, obviously, but I think trying authenticity counts. And in terms of my own experience, I can oscillate wildly in terms of being very happy with my work, at a certain point, looking at it thinking, “I really achieved something”, and looking at the picture two days later and thinking that did not work. And then on other occasions, being totally dissatisfied, feeling quite frustrated at the point that I got to, and only later coming back and seeing, actually, it wasn’t so bad. And I think there’s there is a process that think Joshua Reynolds described very well. (And, of course, he knew Adam Smith, and they were all hanging around together.) But the notion that you have to suspend judgment a little bit, that while in the act you have to open the gates to your Underworld and let your monsters come out to play, and try to make it a safe space, so the monsters aren’t scared, and they will come out and play. And let’s see what happens. And then you have to shoo them away, lock the gate again, and see what they made. And maybe accept some of it, maybe take some of it as an offering and maybe demolish a good bit of it. But there’s a process that you have to let happen patiently. And allowing room for failure, allowing room for messing and farce and just high jinks or whatever. Just hoping that something comes out of it. There needs to be an openness to events and trying things that won’t be undermined by harsh judgments too soon. And isn’t undermined by moralism either; that you allow your darker, nastier monsters out to vent. And that’s healthy; getting in touch with the dark side of your psyche and letting the cynical spirit, the disillusioned spirit express itself, even though in terms of our society, we find that very difficult, very challenging.
Joseph Bravo
Well, that goes to two questions. One, we’re living in a cultural age that is becoming arguably more doctrinaire, more dogmatic. And, and the terms of that dogmatism may have changed from a monotheistic dogmatism to a social and political dogmatism. But the notion that you can, you know, release your darker agents, ‘the monsters’ as you call them, and to see what they do, is that any longer socially permissible? There was a period in the 20th century, when we were coming to the end of a monotheistic moralist hegemony, and there an opening up, a cultural revolution that said, through Freud and through others that you can release these things. In the 1960s we saw this, we saw George Carlin with the seven dirty words you can’t say on television. And it’s sort of liberation of the profane. But we seem to have entered a postmodern world, where profanity is once again, being stigmatized, where you cannot say the profane, you cannot say anything even tangentially profane, not the slightest inference or implication of profanity. And the list of seven dirty words is now expanded to 7000 that you cannot say, without pejorative social consequences. I know what liberalism was in the 1960s and 70s. It thought it had a monopoly on the word tolerance: tolerance was a liberal virtue. But today, self-identified liberalism is intolerant: it has become moralist, orthodox. Has the Postmodernism killed the avant garde?
Conor Walton
Well, I accept most of what you’re saying. But I think that the reality for me in my experience as a painter is that my field is so culturally marginal, that it really doesn’t seem to matter what I say in the work. No one in authority appears to be paying attention. You know, the police are not going to call to my door, because of any painting that I do. And it doesn’t seem like I will be denounced in the mainstream press either for anything that I do. And I’m always half-amazed at what I get away with in some of my pictures. I think they’re a little bit provocative. I almost sort of hold my breath before I press the ‘post’ button on social media, half-expecting that someone is going to be outraged and is going to denounce me for the obvious, you know?
Joseph Bravo
If there is a spectrum of transgression in the contemporary era, you are not to one particular extreme of the transgressive by contemporary standards. Now you might be transgressive according to a more conservative era in terms of religious transgression. I mean, you tweak the nose of monotheism, you tweak the nose of the Catholicism is no longer an authority; that’s a vestigial authority. You’re not particularly transgressive of anything. You’re not the most egregious offender of political correctness.
Conor Walton
Doesn’t it tweak the nose of liberalism quite a bit? And Liberals don’t take a lot of tweaking these days! I seem to get away with stuff, but I suppose I’m aware of being considered unreliable, I’m considered ideologically unreliable, perhaps. And that may be why I haven’t had much luck with the mainstream authorities, the curatoriat and that sort of thing, because my work doesn’t fit a liberal progressivist agenda. If Progressives do turn up my paintings, they’re probably going to be mocked. It’s not that they will be particularly mocked, but almost everyone’s mocked in my paintings.
Joseph Bravo
Okay, I get that they’re not offered to qualified immunity and I understand that your work is probably not at the vanguard of postmodern propaganda. Okay, and that’s not really what you’re trying to do. But nor are you necessarily, you know, in ardent resistance making counter-propaganda to a counter-group narrative. Your work is an idiosyncratic expression. Far more than it is an advocacy for a particular cohort. If you’re advocating for any particular cohort with consistency, it’s the ecosystem. It’s general and broad. It goes even beyond humanity to ecology itself. That’s probably the only thing that you’re a consistently reliable ally to. For anything else, it’s subject to your critique. But at the same time, you said that the institutional office, that the curatorial agenda of contemporary institutions, is at odds with your work, that your work does not serve their priorities. And I’d be curious to hear why you think that is? What is the difference between your priorities and what you perceive institutional optics to be? Is it that they’re against your work adamantly as an antagonist, or that they’re indifferent to it because it’s not easily instrumentalized for their agenda? You know, it’s one thing to want to kill something, it’s another thing to not care, and so you may just get overlooked because you’re not relevant, or you may be the enemy and be the target or, you know, you may be the ally and then be lauded as the instrument of their propaganda. Which do you fall into? What is your relationship to institutional optics? Because you said you wanted a sophisticated audience, ideally, right? And optimally, in theory (as opposed to perhaps in practice) the museum, the curatorial optic is where you’re going to find the sophisticated audience. Now, like I said, in theory, as opposed to practice. What do you find is the distinction between the type of sophistication that one encounters in curatorial optics versus the type of sophistication that you’re requiring of your viewer?
Conor Walton
I think the ruling class has become rather thin-skinned and I think that they have their darlings, in terms of a sort of “de haute en bas”, you know, “we will we will embrace this little minority”, largely because they don’t see it as threatening, really. But I don’t think the ruling class are too keen on any sort of radical critique of their ideology. I think in terms of the modern art curatoriat, there has been a fairly dismissive attitude towards a lot of things that I certainly don’t think should have been dismissed, like skill, old master technique, certain sort of…
Joseph Bravo
That’s really a legacy of the post-war period that hasn’t fully run its course yet, but is waning to some extent. When the Whitney does figurative art today, and it’s just, you know, it’s the crappiest painting, as if saying “You can bring back the figure, you can have some representation, but don’t come back with skill!” That’s the last thing you need to bring back in! Because then you’re anachronistic if you brought skill back. And so there is a legacy of the deskilling of art, there is a legacy of the defiguration of art, but we’ve sort of gradually raised the prohibition on figuration. The mistrust of skill still seems to be a legacy. If you paint too well, somehow that is suspect. It implies a lack of intellectual depth. I remember, you know, in the late 80s there was this notion that “The presence of skill equals the absence of profundity”, which was bad enough, but then they flipped it to “the absence of skill equals the presence of profundity”, and that was a new level of ridiculous. There’s still a vestige of that. Because people in their 40s, 50s and 60s still, you know, were taught by people who came up in the post-war era. So there’s still some of that. But skilled art is providing a spectacle in some way, and I think of those gargantuan silicon, figurative sculptures and whatnot. That is, there’s such spectacle and they’re almost surreal, but meticulously rendered, and you can get a pass for meticulously rendering. If you’re shocking. If you’re weird enough, so long as you don’t transgress the PC narrative. Don’t transgress that. If it’s somewhat neutral you might get away with some skilled figuration. But even with those people who are more inclined to offer a post-third-wave, postmodern, intersexual narrative, if they bring too much skill, that’s considered somehow ‘authoritarian’ and somehow discriminating against those without skill, somehow inherently class biased or patriarchal, or something. Because just to acknowledge skill, because skill offers a certain objectivity (you know, somebody who’s relatively skilled or relatively not) and there is a sort of objective metric to that. And there seems to be still a fear that that’s the camels nose under the tent. “If we let skill back in, oh, god knows where that can lead? We’ll let in the French Academy and Bouguereau if we’re not careful! So let’s avoid that!” And so is that what you’re up against? Is it that sort of legacy of a distrust or skill? Or is there something else? Or are you not cynical enough? Are you not making a spectacle enough?
Conor Walton
Whether I’m not cynical enough or too cynical, I think there’s some sort of hostility to what I do. I’m not sure what exactly is driving it. I think, partly it..
Joseph Bravo
Is it hostility or indifference, which is it?
Conor Walton
There’s both. I think our society has become stretched taut, in some respects, and not very tolerant of expression. An expression that can’t be policed. So, for a lot of those for whom power is important, (and those are the people who climb the ladder and work the system, work society, it’s very much like a tribal process) the whole thing is, “Who do you know? Whose side are you on?” How do you work? How do you work the system? I don’t think, for whatever reason, what I do fits particularly well within the system as it’s currently constructed. And I don’t think there’s a sort of strong counter-narrative that works to embrace that, like in the 19th century when you had the French Academy representing the conventional, the conservative, the status quo, the regime. (And, to some extent, the place of that in modern society is the curatoriat, it is the institutions and all of that sort of thing.) But in the 19th century, you also had an ideology of Romanticism and liberation, which became a very broad church, for all the other forms of expression. It allowed a lot of different types of art, and different ideas to be embraced within the romantic rebellion. There were a lot of very awkward and difficult characters, you know; very antisocial, very troublesome characters could find a place within it and be vindicated and validated within it as a counter-cultural movement, which was moving them towards assimilation, it was moving them towards acceptance into the Canon. And I don’t think these days that there is a very strong counter-cultural narrative that’s there for the subversive expression, the individual expression. The liberal progressive left is so heavily policed in terms of its expression, that it does not welcome anything that’s erratic. People are ‘cancelled’ or expelled because they trip up on something, they say the wrong thing. They offend someone and the bar of offense has been set very, very low. You know, it’s very, very, very low at this point. And on the right, there’s really very little that one can go to in terms of intellectual defense, beyond the sort of a stock libertarian, right-wing “Do what you like! Say what you like!” But it’s not leading towards an assimilation or an incorporation of troublesome work in Canon.
Joseph Bravo
Well, I would say a couple of points. There’s a difference between libertarian and licentious. Okay. Libertarian doesn’t necessarily imply a licensed immorality. It implies a license to individual conscience, not to an act of conscience.
Conor Walton
You’re an old-fashioned libertarian, Joe, but you know, there’s so many people who are using the libertarian argument that it’s useless at this point.
Joseph Bravo
Well, there is an association in the public consciousness of libertarianism with selfishness. And it is one thing to have an agenda to dismantle paternalism. It is another thing to have an agenda to dismantle fraternalism. Someone might be exceedingly fraternal, and not paternal. They resent the dominance of paternalism, but they feel an obligation to fraternalism. And so people will appropriate rhetoric used to dismantle paternalism as a license against fraternalism. And that is an abuse of an argument. That’s a cynical abuse of an argument. Likewise, there’s an equivalent cynicism: I was reading in The Atlantic the other day, and an African-American intellectual author was writing about the intolerance that was coming from the postmodern, politically-correct left to the level of absurdity, where he was talking about one of his colleagues, who was presenting the poetry of James Baldwin in class. James Baldwin’s is hardly an archetype of right-wing white supremacist heteronormative conservatism, he was as counter to that as could be imagined: he was among the first to kick in the door of that and be countercultural to that dominant meme at the time. And when this literature was presented to the class, some students protested that they should not be exposed to this literature because it was causing them intergenerational trauma. And they were reliving intergenerational trauma through the literature of James Baldwin, and that it was oppressive and immoral to expose them to this literature in a university setting. Now, this wasn’t conservative white people who were being heteronormative, who were saying this. It was ostensibly the opposing faction. And so there is a sense of this dogmatic hegemony within the academy. And you raise the point of being countercultural and there is this question of who’s the counterculture now, when the academy itself adopts radicalism and then is forever raising the bar on a fundamentalism in this radicalism? And each sect can raise that to be more prohibitive than the last iteration of the sect. There is a question of what is countercultural, and many on the alt-right, for example, feel that they are the bonafide counterculture because they feel that the academic world is an institutional world that has adopted a radical ideology, then that has entered the corporate world, or at least in the Human Resources Department of the corporate world. And it has entered the rhetoric of politics as well. And they want to go well, you can’t say you’re the revolutionary, if you control the institutions, if you control the human resources department of the corporation, if you control what somebody is going to be held liable for in a civil court, if your worldview controls what is his doctrine in the university, you can’t very well say “I’m the counterculture”, because you are The Man at that point. And whatever is against you, for better or for worse (and it may be for worse) is the de facto counterculture. You can’t say “I am the perpetual revolutionary”, and “I’m in charge of the wheels of power.”
Conor Walton
And I think and I think they’re right, to some extent, and that is a valid argument. And what I see in the left-right divide and alt-right and alt-left is that there does appear to be more laughter, more irony, more self-mockery, and more of an ironic awareness on the on the alt-right, than on the left. And they have almost…
Joseph Bravo
Isn’t that ironic? I mean, isn’t that itself entirely ironic? I remember my father, who was was very traditional in that regard. He said, “Nobody likes a smartass”, and he would sit there and watch the Tonight Show and not laugh all the way through the monologue, and then turn to me at the end. “That wasn’t funny,” he said, because he was very authoritarian. And a lot of humour is based on the irony that something appears one way but in reality is another. And then we laugh as a response to the anxiety created by the cognitive dissonance, that things are not as they appear to be, and that authority might be dubious and anybody questioning of authority might be dubious, and whatnot. Yet today, there is a meme on the alt-right, that says “the left can’t meme”. There is a sense that the left is itself humourless. I’ve heard plenty of hilarious women comics who have a feminist optic, but at the same time, if you say, feminist comedian, you can’t help but squint your eyes a little bit. We don’t associate it with the most liberal sense of humour. Now it can be, but there’s a reason you flinch a little. And the allegedly progressive left has lost its sense of irony, lost its sense of humour to some extent. Especially if it feels that it is immune to humour. “Oh, it’s funny if you say something funny about Donald Trump. But if you try to say anything funny about me, Oh, no. You can’t laugh at me now. Draw the line at my toes.”
Conor Walton
It’s partly that the establishment doesn’t like being mocked and never liked being mocked. But also, people who feel threatened tend to lose their sense of humour. I think large segments of the left feel very, very threatened by what is happening today, by the way the world is moving, and understandably so. And it’s getting hard to laugh when you think maybe you should be crying.
Joseph Bravo
Well, we’re also in something that is, I think, somewhat unprecedented. In the past, the establishment always had a sense of itself as the establishment; you know, Constantine rules Rome and understands that he’s the establishment and he wants everybody understand that he’s the establishment too. The Catholic Church will intend, in turn become the establishment. And then it wants everybody else to understand that it’s the establishment, too, and then Henry VIII will come along, they’ll have a reformation and they will establish the new establishment. But in the contemporary era, we have what is de facto, the establishment, protesting its status as the establishment, going “Who? the establishment? Not moi! I’m not establishment! I’m the revolutionary!” And what happens when revolutionary doctrine becomes the established orthodoxy, and then defines itself as anti-establishment. You didn’t hear Stalin going, “Who, me? I’m not in charge! I’m still resisting something!” Well, what was there left to resist? He annihilated everything that stuck its head up. And yet, today, there’s a sense of “If there is one, alt-righter alive, with his keyboard, then the revolution isn’t complete!” It doesn’t matter that you have 95% of the power: if you don’t have 100% of the power, there’s work still to be done.
Conor Walton
But their grip on power is weak. I don’t think anyone has a strong grip on power these days. And it’s that anxiety, and maybe an understanding that actually we are living in revolutionary times. And the reason that we don’t want to be part of the establishment is because the establishment is going down the tubes, you know, the establishment is toxic. You know, the real establishment, where the money and the power really lies, that’s something that no one is very happy with. So, you do not want to identify yourself, nobody wants to identify themselves with an establishment that is corrupt and failing. But I think authentically, a lot of people are afraid. And people who are afraid don’t necessarily have a great sense of humour. When there is secure authority it is often quite tolerant of the heterodox, the subversive because it doesn’t really feel threatened; it can let some of the subversive spirits out, we can have our Saturnalia and not be too concerned about things. But it’s when people are threatened, when people feel that the whole social fabric is fraying and that there are big rips beginning to appear and people are insecure that it becomes much more troublesome, and maybe the sort of painting that I’m doing, which is heterodox, will be a little bit troublesome because of that.
Joseph Bravo
Well, what is troublesome about your paintings?
Conor Walton
I think I’ve already suggested what some people might find troublesome in them, but my pictures are troublesome to me anyway, since I have to paint them! It’s not really my job to publicly critique my own pictures or second-guess how they’ll be received. People need to make their own minds up and if anyone finds my pictures troublesome or fun or whatever, say so and say why from their own perspectives. And through Facebook and Instagram, they do: I get told a good deal what I’m doing right and wrong, at least with certain pictures. Other pictures don’t appear to be troubling at all, at least to judge by what’s said. One might surmise that certain kinds of work may be viewed negatively without getting an articulate response: they may get the silent, the cold treatment, get ignored. I can try to imagine the silent thoughts of someone who doesn’t like my work, but it also strikes me as a fool’s errand, particularly when I’m lucky enough to have a large and appreciative audience for my work; enough to support me, which is what every artist needs. Thankfully, my pictures aren’t so troublesome as to prevent me having admirers or earning a living.
Let’s wrap this up here! Thanks for taking the time to chat, Joe, and I hope we’ll talk again soon.
