social criticisms
by vicente-ignacio de veyra iii

 
Vol. 1, No. 5
October 6, 2004

Passion for Profit (and Vice Versa)
(Part 2)

 

CROSS-STITCHING has arrived at a level of popularity in the late ‘90s that put up shops catering specially to the cross-stitching market. What were sold in these shops were cross-stitching patterns, threads, needles, and accessories, and of course such shops would usually offer a framing service (largely outsourced beyond most people's knowledge).

Many a provincial art gallery must have gone accustomed by now to those constant walk-in wives’ whispered comments to their husbands regarding the steep price of paintings compared to cross-stitched works sold by cross-stitchers. Yet these art galleries would simply either smirk or guffaw at such a perhaps middle or nouveau-riche class-deriving commentary, supposedly coming from positions of unworldliness. But the guffaws are nervous guffaws.

But kitsch or not, when certain clients prefer to spend their pesos on a large cross-stitched Mona Lisa than on a medium-sized original and style-rich still life from a prestigious gallery at SM Artwalk, offered for the same modest price, neither tastelessness nor threat is what is actually carried by the relatively mechanized cross-stitching reality.

What should be more culturally valuable to artists and gallery owners are the symbolic values dangled by the cross-stitching presence, values that should stop them from either smiling at or ignoring the same. These values do provide, after all, a rethink on the position of gallery art in our society, and might lead artists to reform their aesthetic braggadocio.

CROSS-STITCHING is supposedly a trendy pastime that took over the role played by the crocheting of doilies. However, its continuing presence now seems to threaten the art commodity, whether admitted by the galleries and not-yet-established artists or not (it is the struggling artist, after all, who is most threatened by the unacknowledged competition). This threat occurs because the trendy folk art entered from the beginning the wall space that’s been supposedly better served by (and reserved for) the intelligent or tasteful painting or frieze-sculpture format.

And here is our cue. When we speak about the service of art to present society, we seldom inquire about art’s function -- beyond its claim -- in reality. But let’s do it conversely, examining instead the function of the framed cross-stitched work, so to arrive at the allegedly opposite function of its higher-art space bully.

The cross-stitched work actually provides one function that it shares with the painting art. And that is the empathy a buyer or viewer gets from the implied labor or action upon the piece -- viewers often talk about the difficulty of certain combinations, of certain crosses, so similar to discussions about the difficulty of superimpositions of color in an oil glaze or watercolor masterpiece. Perhaps not so similar, if we are to be snobbish, and here is where we should nudge ourselves to begin to talk about our beloved art’s opposite function and the popular knowledge about it.

The decline of popular appreciation for the studio arts can be likened to the alienation the common Filipino feels towards the elements of the ballet. Painting has become so esoteric (to Tom Wolfe painting has become the painted word, or a literary manifesto illustration, or critic’s art than anything) that it now can be borne in our minds to be an upper-class art. And even among the upper classes, how certain are we about the valuation placed upon an artist’s celebrated work? Are the popularly-purchased art of an artist, the way GSIS President Winston Garcia defended the institution’s art acquisitions, more for the love of investing than for the love of the purchased art? If so, then we could say that cross-stitching has become the more real art of the real people, appreciated for their postcard and almost-decontextualized Western (Southern American? English?) beauty and primarily for their implied action (remember action painting?). How is the common man (or woman-wife) supposed to approach the distortions upon reality of Ben Cabrera’s drawings? Unless somebody gifted him/her an expensive coffeetable book published by the CCP that discourses on the BenCabs’ academic worth! Cross-stitched work appreciation, on the other hand, has created a sort of people’s art, even if this art may fail the test that gives one a license to call itself an art.

And don’t tell me that most framed cross-stitched works are just decorative, implying that paintings at the prestigious galleries are mostly not. Even pieces that pretend to be in the service of some theater or poetry on canvas necessarily function in the age of the interior designer as interior designer-friendly colored objects, no matter how “ugly” an artist tries to make his paintings look -- the act of framing alone already elevates any intended ugliness to the level of glamour, like putting punk art in the hands of Paul McCartney’s daughter.

Don’t tell me, too, that the paintings at the galleries are more serious products. I doubt that the buyer of the Marxist “skulls” composition in a desaparecido-addressing Antipas Delotavo is more interested in the artist’s mental activism than in the fact that the painting’s skulls would perhaps echo this buyer’s father’s dental mini-skulls collection on a narra antique cabinet in a room. I doubt that the buyer of a dreamy Chagallian composition in a recent Marcel Antonio is more interested in the artist’s visual song than in the way his coloration echoes the buyer’s curtain and sofa and rug combine’s color-taste. I say paintings have actually become the expensive tools for the charlatan "interior designers" in the painting-acquiring class -- ever heard how artistas and other celebrities talk about their homes and the way their paintings fit into their personality groove? It’s like buying a Horowitz CD to softly background a party noise.

". . . does the bad context of a purchase of an art make the art less of an art? And so, therefore, can we say that art buying is a practice external to the art, and that the art exists on a different field or plane, that is to say, separate from the marketing activities and movements in auction shops that involve these art?"

I have no doubt that many artists in our country deserve more recognition than what they’re getting from the buying class, the class which also sponsors (directly or indirectly) the short-changing coffeetable books on art. For I have great doubt that the buyers of what may be great or good Filipino art have given their artists ample recognition beyond the sole fact that the artists have been given the capacity to paint on via the mercenary support of this clientele. Conversely speaking, I have no doubt many artists in our country do not deserve recognition from the art world, a world sometimes dictated by purchasers (and corrupt dealers).

In this light, I say cross-stitching “artists” has had almost the same effect on their customers as great or good painting had had on their critics, an effect I may academically snobbishly term “correct appreciation” -- especially perhaps that the purchase of a cross-stitched work more often than not doesn’t involve resale value.

SO WHAT’S an artist to do? First, he should stop laughing at the cross-stitched art buyer. The buyer could be one of those real people -- as it were -- who walks into a gallery, probably even with the knowledge that the pieces could be grossly expensive, for the sake of breathing in the actions implied in the art, perhaps also the drama espoused by the art. No, resale values not in mind, rugs and sofas not in mind. The “paintings”, therefore, respected for themselves and not as interactive material for the artist in everyone.

Otherwise, assuming that the buyers of serious gallery art are an academicized lot, the cross-stitched work’s buyer can then be appreciated as a product of a culture alienated from the complex significances of this European art and an education system that distributes such knowledge within levels of privilege and underprivilege. That’s not even saying anything yet about the economics of the art, how painting was transferred from the patronage of a royalty or papacy to the patronage of the merchant class. Such a reality would thus put into question the validity of a Marxist direction in, say, a Delotavo. Did the patrons of the Mexican Marxist painter Diego Rivera share a certain amount of Marxism with the artist’s celebrated and purchased works? Were they purchased from positions of opportunism in opposition to the existing Mexican regime of the time or with sheer decorative intents?

A more radical question would be this: does the bad context of a purchase of an art make the art less of an art? And so, therefore, can we say that art buying is a practice external to the art, and that the art exists on a different field or plane, that is to say, separate from the marketing activities and movements in auction shops that involve these art? For it would seem that the valuation of a van Gogh within academic and critical circles would be drastically different from the valuation placed upon it by an auction and coverage by Bloomberg TV. So that we may say that the passionate affair between art and the critical art appreciation of art magazines is a necessary affair that has yet to coexist with the loveless marriage between artworks and their purchasers.

If such is the arrangement, then, perhaps echoing the difference in approach to a Christian artwork between a corrupt medieval church and a parish’s God-fearing populace, then we can say that the relationship between the cross-stitched work’s buyer and the work is no different from the approach to a painting that you and I might have at a gallery. The big cultural difference might perhaps be between our approach to an expensive painting (an appreciative approach) and that by its wealthy buyer (an investing or interactive approach). Ergo sum, our laughter towards the cross-stitched work’s buyer may have been misplaced, considering the possibility that such a buyer may both have an appreciative as well as interactive approach to her kind of art. The reason being, most likely, that he/she neither belongs to a church hierarchy, royalty, or big capitalist class qua buyer or patron. The small cultural difference between the cross-stitched work’s buyer’s approach and ours, then, is only that – cultural. It would be a cultural difference devoid of a hierarchical difference. It might do us a lot of good, therefore, to take a diplomatic stance and bridge that gap between the cross-stitched work’s buyer and us, the snobbish culturati, considering that the difference is small. We can perhaps to easily share our culture with them, theirs with us, which latter culture we could “elevate” by our snobbishness to fit our intellectual masturbatory leanings.

However, might such enhancements on artists’ and critics’ affairs endanger the necessary loveless marriage between serious artists and their buyers? Would art (and its artists) die (the way that poetry died) without the marriage? I doubt it. For I believe the marriage has been aware of the affair, and has in fact been using it to put a premium on both the marriage and the affair. The buyer (husband) has actually been putting his wife (the artist) on sale.