Ten Year Anniversary of AFC Blog
¡Ay, Caramba! Today marks the 10th anniversary of my founding the Art For A Change web log.
This labor of love was brought into existence on November 27, 2004. In prior years, I wrote articles that appeared on my website and e-newsletter, but in 2004 I made the change to the blogging platform due to its immediacy.
As a lifelong realist painter, printmaker, and draftsman, I felt compelled to write about the visual arts, not just for other artists, but for those with little engagement in art. Being an artist was not enough, it was also necessary to be an advocate for art.
But what kind of art? As the name of this site suggests, one of my concerns is that we remember how to summon art as a means of authentic progress and human solidarity. Once integral facets of art, those ideals have been severely weakened as the art world continues its fall into commodification and hyper-commercialism.
There is another meaning to the title, Art For A Change. After surveying the paucity, artlessness, and detachment of today’s official art world, the name proclaims that art will have to be found elsewhere. It will rise from the ground up, outside of officialdom – it lives here.
The first post I made to this web log was a quote from the American photojournalist Dorothea Lange. Celebrated for documenting life in the US during the Great Depression, Lange said:
“Everything is propaganda for what you believe in actually. I don’t see that it could be otherwise. The harder and the more deeply you believe in anything, the more in a sense you’re a propagandist. Conviction, propaganda, faith, I don’t know, I have never been able to come to the conclusion that that’s a bad word.”
While this web log focuses on the visual arts, over the years I have made mention of dramatists, photographers, writers, and others who share my philosophy regarding art. Though I have not mentioned her before in my writings, one such person is the American author Ursula Le Guin. In a speech given by Ms. Le Guin at the National Book Awards as she received the 2014 Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 85-year old author described the world of publishing in much the same way as I describe the art world;
“I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”
The Art For A Change web log shall continue to be a voice for those artists “who can remember freedom,” and a wellspring where change begins in art. In the future, you can expect from this blog a number of exciting projects designed to undermine the divine right of kings, both in the art world and otherwise.