# Not Art  *Painting NOT ART across a store-bought canvas at home in Austin. The photograph and its story are in my [[photo journey/2019-12-31 - Bryant Painting Not Art at the Ashton on New Year's Eve|Photo Journey]].* The painting that hung behind me in our home in [[wiki/Austin, Texas|Austin]] had come off a conveyor belt. When we first moved in we had nothing on the walls, so we went to a gallery and picked something up: a large abstract canvas in ochre, gray and black, four or five hundred dollars, the kind of piece most people have seen a thousand times without ever really seeing it once. I could not find a local artist in time, and I knew almost as soon as it arrived that I had bought a **[[wiki/Commodification|commodity]]** dressed as a painting. In a broadcast in March 2016 I told my audience what I intended to do about it, and in November 2016, live on camera, Jenni and I did it. We took red paint to its face, wrote NOT ART across it, and I spat on it. The defacement was the first honest thing that ever happened to that canvas, and everything I want to say here grew out of that one afternoon. ## The theme ride A mass-produced painting is a peculiar object; it has every feature of art except the one that matters. It was made in a monoculture, on an assembly line, for an equally indistinguishable buyer, and no one who made it ever imagined the room it would hang in or the person who would walk past it every morning. I call this the **theme ride** of society: the long track of prepackaged experiences that carries people past scenery built to be glanced at and never entered. The rider feels movement and mistakes it for travel. {{A thing made for everyone is made for no one, and an object made for no one can decorate a wall for years without ever saying a word.}} ## Contribution is the whole of value **Value** enters an object at the point of human **contribution**. The canvas was worth whatever the gallery charged, but its worth as art was nothing until someone added to it what no machine could have added: a judgment, a refusal, an intention with a name attached. What was fraudulent became real the moment a person contributed to it, and what had been made merely for consumption by the masses became something a mind had touched. The same law governs a business, a book, a meal and a friendship as surely as it governs a painting. {{What makes art is contribution, and what makes value is contribution; everything else is inventory.}} ## Why a hundred people walk up **[[wiki/Attention Economy|Attention]]** follows evidence of a mind. Bring a hundred people into a room with a mass-produced print and perhaps one of them will stop to look at it; write NOT ART across the same print in red and all hundred will walk up to it. Nothing about the pigment explains the difference. The presence of another mind is among the first things a social animal searches for in any environment, the work of what psychologists call **[[wiki/Theory of Mind|theory of mind]]**, and a defaced canvas announces that someone was here, someone decided something, someone meant it. A gesture that costs its maker something, even a ruined canvas, is a kind of **[[wiki/Costly Signaling|costly signal]]**: it cannot be faked by a machine that risks nothing. {{People will cross a room for evidence of a mind and walk past a masterpiece of manufacturing without a glance.}} The irony at the center of NOT ART is the whole of its meaning. The words that deny it is art are the words that make it art, because the moment the lie was named, the canvas became a statement about the conveyor belt and the produced society that runs on it. I called it the lie, I defiled it, and in that act of refusal it acquired the one thing it had always lacked, which was an **[[wiki/Authorship|author]]**. Negation performed deliberately is a **[[wiki/Creativity|creative]]** act; it draws a line that the factory never thought to draw. {{Saying no to a counterfeit is often the first original thing a person ever does.}} ## The readymade in reverse Marcel Duchamp showed more than a century ago that art can be made by a human decision about a factory object. In April 1917 he submitted [a porcelain urinal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)), signed "R. Mutt," to the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York; the society's rules admitted every paying artist, so the piece was not formally rejected, only hidden behind a partition and kept out of sight. Duchamp called such works readymades, everyday objects raised to the dignity of art by the artist's act of choice, and a defense published that year in *The Blind Man* put the whole argument in three words: "He CHOSE it." Duchamp took a factory object and made it art by choosing it; I took factory art and made it art by refusing it. Both experiments reach the same verdict: art{Art{ lives in the human decision, never in the factory.}} Walter Benjamin explained what a factory takes away from a work of art. In his essay [*The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction), written in 1935 and published in 1936, he argued that reproduction diminishes the **aura** of a work, the uniqueness bound up with "its unique existence at the place where it happens to be." A conveyor-belt canvas is the absence of aura made physical; it hangs in thousands of rooms at once and belongs completely to none of them. Red paint and two words gave that one canvas a place, a moment and a maker. {{A single human act can give back to a copy the aura that the factory took away.}} ## Observation is creation Perception does more than record the world; it participates in making it. My observation made that canvas art, and the same mechanism operates every day in the way we look at one another. Tell a child over and over that they are bad, and the judgment does its work and creates badness; hold the space for a child to be good, even through a little naughtiness, and that judgment does its work too. The message travels through words, and also through body language, **[[wiki/Nonverbal Communication|nonverbal communication]]** and every channel of total communication, which is how careless people carelessly hurt others without ever knowing it. Psychologists call one version of this the [[wiki/Self-Fulfilling Prophecy|self-fulfilling prophecy]]; I think of it as the responsibility that comes with having eyes. {{Every judgment is a brush; we are always painting the people we look at, so we may as well paint them well.}} ## You came off the line too Each of us was produced on an assembly line called common culture, and the pressure of **[[wiki/Conformity|conformity]]** is its conveyor belt. From birth, commercials and the popular narrative collate a person into a product disciple and a brand disciple, someone who wants what was designed to be wanted and hangs it on the wall without a second thought. The canvas behind me was a portrait of that process, which is why it made such a good teacher. The answer for a person is the same as the answer for the painting: look within, find the falsity that was installed there, violate it, and refuse to be part of it any longer. That is what I meant when I wrote that you are the artist and the art. {{A person becomes original on the day they deface what was manufactured in them.}} ## The one thing the world cannot get anywhere else Your truth is the one thing the world cannot get anywhere else, and **[[wiki/Authenticity|authenticity]]** is the name we give to living from it. Products can be duplicated, scaled and shipped; who you are cannot, and that is the source of every lasting kind of wealth a person will ever build. Getting off the conveyor belt of conventional thinking is how a poverty paradigm becomes a wealth paradigm, the personal version of **[[wiki/Abundance Economics|abundance economics]]**, one in which the success of others becomes a cause for celebration, because abundance no longer looks like a fixed supply that someone else is draining. It is also why I tell people to find and buy from local artists, and why I encourage local artists, the human heart of the **[[wiki/Creator Economy|creator economy]]**, to price their work so that more people can live with it; an artist who sells a hundred pieces at a fair price builds more than one who waits for a single buyer at a proud price. {{Irreplaceability is the deepest form of wealth; the world can buy almost anything except the one person it cannot find anywhere else.}} ## Only the bored are boring A **[[wiki/Curiosity|curious]]** mind cannot be bored, because to a curious mind the whole world is material. A scientist or an artist can sit on a park bench and watch paint dry while thinking about evaporation, about the way the light moves across the surface, and about the painting it reminds them they want to make. The canvas I bought by mistake became a lesson, then a broadcast, then a work of art, because I refused to find it boring. People who announce that something is boring are usually reporting on themselves; when I find a person boring, I take it as a sign that I have not yet done enough digging. {{Boredom is a report on the observer, never on the world.}} ## The price of getting off the belt Leaving the conveyor belt carries a cost. Jenni and I were lying on that belt like everyone else, and when we finally got up off it, the alarms went off; the line rarely lets anyone step away quietly. The trap is also subtler than anyone expects. Hardly a day goes by that I do not notice some part of it that was invisible to me the day before, which keeps me humble about how much of any person, me included, is still manufactured. The work of becoming yourself is never finished, and that is good news, because it means there is always one more layer of the factory left to paint over. ## The new conveyor belt **[[wiki/Machine Intelligence|Machine intelligence]]** is becoming the largest conveyor belt in history, and that is wonderful news. [[wiki/Generative AI|Generative systems]] can already produce images, music and prose in quantities no workshop could match, which means the finished surface of a thing, its polish, its competence, its resemblance to art, is on its way to costing almost nothing. When surfaces become abundant, the scarce and precious thing is the human decision: the choice, the refusal, the point of view, the moment someone with a history and a name intervenes. **[[wiki/Automation|Automation]]** takes over the manufacturing so that each of us can spend more of our lives on contribution. {{As machines make the polished surface free, the human intervention becomes the signature of value.}} ## The most honest painting I ever owned My NOT ART canvas became the most honest piece of art I have ever owned. It reminds me that value is never manufactured, only contributed; that attention follows a mind; that my judgments are paint whether I intend them to be or not; and that a person, like a painting, becomes real at the moment they refuse to be a product. Every wall in the world carries some print that is waiting for a person brave enough to write the truth across it. {{Every life begins on an assembly line; a life becomes a work of art at the moment its owner picks up the brush.}} ## Related topics - [[wiki/Creativity|Creativity]] - [[wiki/Originality|Originality]] - [[wiki/Authenticity|Authenticity]] - [[wiki/Conformity|Conformity]] - [[wiki/Curiosity|Curiosity]] - [[wiki/Self-Fulfilling Prophecy|Self-Fulfilling Prophecy]] - [[wiki/Generative AI|Generative AI]] - [[wiki/Commodification|Commodification]] - [[wiki/Attention Economy|Attention Economy]] - [[wiki/Theory of Mind|Theory of Mind]] - [[wiki/Costly Signaling|Costly Signaling]] - [[wiki/Authorship|Authorship]] - [[wiki/Nonverbal Communication|Nonverbal Communication]] - [[wiki/Creator Economy|Creator Economy]] - [[wiki/Abundance Economics|Abundance Economics]] - [[wiki/Machine Intelligence|Machine Intelligence]] - [[wiki/Automation|Automation]] - [[wiki/Austin, Texas|Austin, Texas]] ## Related articles - [[photo journey/2019-12-31 - Bryant Painting Not Art at the Ashton on New Year's Eve|Bryant Painting Not Art at the Ashton on New Year's Eve]]: the photograph and my reflection. - [[livestreams/Constructing Genius by Recognizing and Developing Your Gifts, Part 2 - Livestream|Constructing Genius by Recognizing and Developing Your Gifts, Part 2]] *(Mar 29, 2016)*: where I first described painting NOT ART on a mass-produced canvas. - [[livestreams/Craft, Value, and the Recovery of Fair Compensation, Part 1 - Livestream|Craft, Value, and the Recovery of Fair Compensation, Part 1]] *(Nov 17, 2016)*: the broadcast in which Jenni and I painted it. - [[reminders/Creativity/Creation Carries the Value of Its Maker by Bryant McGill|Creation Carries the Value of Its Maker]] - [[reminders/Originality/Authenticity Is the Creator's Irreplaceable Advantage by Bryant McGill|Authenticity Is the Creator's Irreplaceable Advantage]]