By the time I graduated college, on my way to grad school to study sculpture, it seemed all the vicissitudes had all vicissitated and we had arrived at the end of history. The Post-Modern condition; it was the new-born waiting to be fed, and for most people, art talk was esoteric mumbo-jumbo. When you lived into it as a practitioner or as an interested party, there existed no reality save the latest thought form, there was no developmental reality,  no destination in this new way of thinking about art. Art meant nothing outside of its own context. We had entered the pointless forest. All meaning was provisional. There was no such thing as ultimate meaning, no potential for transfiguration. To make art that had a spiritual dimension was kind of “Crunchy”—for hippies and Pre-Raphael-ite wanna-be’s. The idea of originality in the face of “the age of mechanical reproduction” needed a good scolding behind the woodshed. Some very smart-sounding artists were hard at work appropriating, conceptualizing, and as I like to say, shaving the log of meaning down to a toothpick. I bought into it in a very big way and this thinking continues to hover around.

Why is Duchamp’s (Elsa’s) Fountain cited as the most important work of 20th Century art? This from a consortium of 500 critics, dealers, historians who agreed when asked in 2005 “What is the mostest bestus work of art of the 20th Century? The ready-made urinal filled the bill for importance. Topping Picasso. So what, you say? So what, I say, I when I stop trying to act smart and get on with my true study searching for the binding energy of the Universe of Art—the closest thing to some kind of Higgs Boson particle of art. I mean, art is such a powerful aspect of what it means to be human and has been since the dawn of human kind, why wouldn’t you go looking for a magic well, the wellspring, the source?

What we’re talking about here is the dynamic flow of history—the sense that a particular age could be felt through the works of art produced in that time constraint. I’m of the opinion that making art “at the end of art” was an intellectual puzzle/game and a lot of fun to play and the art the game generated dragged you across a territory you may have ignored. This is why we love art, and BTW esoteric art that doesn’t make sense at first. But once you do lean into a new style, a new movement you can find yourself in a new world. Humans like this, even if resistant at first. I do! I do! I do!. Give me a puzzle and I’m happy. But don’t you want to talk to everyone and not a just bunch of hare-brained eggheads of art?? Again, I do! —Hence I’ve been looking for a universal language, ’cause I believe art is our birthright.

It comes down to an understanding that metabolism and energy-flow in human biological systems is altered when you engage with art especially if you believe as I do, (and everyone does really, if you come down to it) that making art is deep in our genome.

So think of art as the switching yard for human energy. Like inhabiting someone not you on a stage, or believing those glowing phosphors as truth on the nightly news, reaching down into your insides to pull out some music, or maybe  just saying “Hey! Buddy, look at this.” … For example, seeing a close-in shot of an actor acting out the making of a fastidiously manufactured PB&J, crusts cut-off, on the popular series Breaking Bad, and you know a whole lot about the guy. This is the infill the mind does. This is how the pictures we make for each other, become revered, revered when they reach into the well, the source of the water we all share as part of our genome. Images and sounds and words and pictures or just a compelling presence as for example  the sculpture of Eva Hesse. When its good, it tells the story of living as a human, it zips right into the mind, the soul, the spirit,  So I’ve been asking, “Is there a Higgs Boson particle for identifying something as a “Good Work Of Art”? And I’ve been asking this question by making art in the studio every day of my whole adult life. Not a lot of folks are called to the task but those who are called, find art making the most compelling thing to do.