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| A painting by the late Morris Katz, Instant Artist |
I almost owned a Morris Katz painting once. Katz, who died in 2010, billed himself as the Instant Artist. In the late 1970s, when I was writing columns for Dow-Jones about the gargantuan resort hotels in New York State's Catskill Mountains (aka the Borscht Belt), I encountered Katz one night. All the hotels had nightclub shows, virtually every night. Sometimes, the shows featured name acts from Hollywood and Broadway. Sometimes, they featured singing waiters from the hotel. Sometimes they featured Morris Katz.
Katz would get up on stage with a palette, a couple of palette knives, a canvas and an idea to paint a blue version of a forest in ten minutes, bantering away the whole time. Then he would perhaps do a pink version. And then a realistically coloured version. I caught that show one night, wrote about it, and, the next time I stopped by to see the hotel's general manager about something, he handed me a painting Katz had left for me in appreciation of my column about him.
I couldn't accept it; it was Dow-Jones' policy that no writer should accept anything worth more than a cup of coffee. I was the exception; I was hosted at the hotels, often for a whole weekend, and that was OK because I wasn't writing journalism; I was writing things to pump up the Catskills' economy. Still the exception did not extend to tangible items, so I took the painting to the executive editor--it would have been crass and insulting to refuse it outright--to deal with.
I didn't think Katz created great art. He probably created some appreciation of art and artists, though, and that's all good.
But Katz' development of "instant" painting makes me nervous. Back then, what Katz did was an anomaly worthy of note in some way. It had no particular influence on the art world at all; it had more influence on the Guinness Book of World Records, in which Katz holds a couple of titles. Now, artists are into the daily painting chase, posting each deathless, and sometimes soul-less, work on etsy for cash flow.
Cash flow is good. I'd like some. But how good is making art into an instant thing? We already have instant photography light years beyond Polaroids. There are iPod apps, apparently, for creating art, able to turn virtually anyone into an artist, whether they have any imagination, any skill, any desire to create lasting works.
Are we, by doing the painting-a-day routine, simply cheapening our art until it will have no value at all? That would be fine in a Star Trek universe, in which people are all paid the same and simply do for their income whatever it is their talents and interests suggest. Starship captains were paid the same as starship cooks; the only difference, really, was how they chose to spend their income on the holodeck.
We are not there yet. I wish we were. But we won't be in the lifetime of most working artists today. So I ask: What are we doing? Are we cutting our own throats in the medium term for a little cash flow in the short term? And is there any remedy for the situation?
