The Abbatoirs of Art

4/10/2004. From a letter.

Did Saturday chores with Chris today. We stopped at the Korean (or possibly Viet or Taiwanese) market where Chris is on first-name terms with the fish guy, being probably their best customer. While waiting outside I was startled by a sign in the window: Chilean Sea Bass, $12.99. It wasn't so much the price that got me as the really fine drawing of a toothfish (sold as Sea Bass) on the same poster. Looking at it with the critical eye of a hardened museum jock, I saw it was an original, done in colored Pentel. When I pointed it out to Chris, she was sure the fish man must've done it. She went back in and got him to confess that in Taiwan, or Vietnam, or wherever it was, he was a professional artist. He promised to give her a poster. I'd cheerfully pay for one.

So it is with photography too. Some of the stuff I've seen online is remarkable. I suppose anybody might occasionally get off a lucky shot, but some amateurs are consistently excellent – far better than the Foine Arteests whose crap adorns the walls of the world's most prestigious museums.

It's a blessing that the new arts of the 20th century – e.g. film, cartooning and photography – have seldom been considered art, being instead mere entertainment (like Shakespeare's plays) and (the real kicker) uncollectable. (You can collect comics like stamps or bottle caps, I guess, but not like Gaugins. Ditto for photos; who wants something that can be endlessly reproduced?) That low status has kept them out of the museums and away from the academy. Museums are the mausoleums, academies the abbatoirs of art.