A lot of collectors plunge into the business head-first and are either totally satisfied (and therefore impervious to critical thought) or they find, as they go along, that they were perhaps a bit too impulsive at the outset and might want to get rid of some of the dreck they purchased when they were green and, well, green.

Why not start modestly, people? There are all sorts of ways, both inexpensive and not, to do that. The most obvious is with student work. In some cases, it's as good, or better, than what is available in galleries. In others, it isn't, but it's cheap and will afford the untutored collector an opportunity to live with artwork that isn't necessarily "commercial."
I would, in fact, advise anybody who is seriously interested in starting a collection informed by an evolving personal aesthetic to avoid purchasing artwork in commercial galleries. Put a year's moratorium on it, then come back.
The honest collector will find he's already outgrown a lot of it, and will save his or her money.

A more honorable and legitimate way to acquire artwork in one's aesthetic infancy is to go to the print market. And by print, or prints, I don't mean the bastard stuff that's available at "print galleries" in the mall. You'll have to swing a pretty big cat to find an etching or lithograph in these places. And, if you do, it'll be drenched patriotism and/or family values. Or it'll show a cute little place off in a glitzy little corner thronged by pretty people who don't ever have to brush their teeth. If that's what you want, you should probably stop reading now.

There aren't many print galleries in our nation, so the beginning collector must seek them out. They are among us, however, and even a casual search will locate a few. The most famous is, of course, the Old Print Shop in New York City. It's an old, old family business that represents artists both living and dead.
Most the beginning collector won't have heard of - but that's nothing. Most serious printmakers don't make it into the big-box style art history manuals that are force-fed college students. Oh, you'll see a Hopper etching or a Grant Wood print, but, by and large, printmakers aren't even the "artist's" second cousins; they're more like the jailbirds nobody ever talks about. Those dark, dark people who do something bad and get put away. When they do their time, or escape, they lay low for the most part and are rarely seen by civilized persons again.

This black-sheep situation is as disturbing as it is grimly humorous. Many great artists were printmakers.
Rembrandt's etchings are among his greatest accomplishments. I'd rate Whistler on his etchings first and his paintings second. Hopper was known exclusively as a printmaker until his breakthrough watercolor exhibit in the 1920's. By that time, he was a middle-aged man.

But back to the Old Print Shop for a moment.

The Old Print Shop is a model of what print shops were, and still ought to be. You can go in there without an appointment and look around for a while.
Its wallspace is crammed with the work of mostly dead artists who had acheived some prominence in their lifetime, but have since slipped off the art historical radar. Martin Lewis is among its most famous alumnus. The Old Print Shop represents his entire estate. It was here that I also first saw Lewis' paintings, sparkling realist/impressionist sketches of American industrial sites and precipitous Japanese landscapes. All you have to do is ask and a salesmen will pull open a drawer and show you original Martin Lewis'. I think Lewis was one of the great interpreters of city life - New York City in particular. His fabulous noctures (though he didn't call them that) teem with exciting mysteries and almost-surreal dangers. No one could re-awaken an already-legendary place as Lewis could. He tapped into the great mood-swings of day and night; ecstasy and despair; longing and frustration; a sense of belonging cross-bred with the certainty of being entirely on one's own. His worried crowds bustle along stately boulevards or ratty old buildings the next generation will claim for its own tawdry designs.
His workmen are sweaty people who have to get the job done - even if it's 3 a.m. and nobody's eaten anything since eleven. His people are not lonely, as Hopper's are, but the place they must negotiate is often oppressively present. Lewis' New York City is both exhausted and majestic; great and piddling; world-class both in its pretensions and excellences and pathetically homely among its wayward and forgotten. I breathe Lewis' air when I see his prints and I value them as I value Thomas Wolfe and Arthur Miller; John Cheever and Dorothy Parker; Charles
Addams and E. B. White.

Lewis was Hopper's teacher - which is to say he showed Hopper the rudiments of the craft. Hopper ran with it in his own way, of course. Of the two, however, I prefer Lewis. Hopper would make his greatest mark, I think, as a painter.

In order to best appreciate a place like the Old Print Shop, it would be a good idea to go to the library and check out as many books on printmaking as you can possibly stomach. While I have no particular volume in mind, excellent anthologies of American printmaking have been available since the 30's. Thomas Craven edited a pretty good one back then. Joseph Pennell, a Whistler acolyte, and an excellent printmaker in his own way, put together the very best anthology I know - though it's hard to find. In it, he presented the best of both American and European printmakers up to First World War. It'll probably come up from time to time on amazon.com.

The greatest virtue of prints, aside from their artistic merit, is their price. Many of my friend Bill Murphy's prints can be had for less than $500.00.
This is one of the great deals of the century. Here you can own an original work by a master printer for what a lot of gullible folk pay for a totally worthless, elaborately framed faux-print at a strip mall and think they're getting a good deal. I cannot emphasize the value. . .of this value enough. The work of Bill's Staten Island and New York City colleagues is similarly affordable. A rich collector could sneak into the exhibit a number of these artists are having right now at the Noble Maritime Museum and scoop up the lot without blinking. And he or she would have the germ of a wonderful print collection.

Privacy issues forbid me to tell you a great deal about a prominent print collector/art dealer who lives in Central Virginia, yet she an independent-minded person "of parts," as they used to say; she loves great prints and printmakers as much as I do and does the best she can to promote them. Her efforts have fallen largely on deaf ears, except in two cases. She is able to market the lively and irreverant imagery of a young man who is still very much rooted in working-class values, but can step back from them and take a hard look at their absurdities and contradictions. His satirical gifts are widely appreciated and he is at least moderately popular.
The more profound artist of the two is also insanely prolific - and indisputably master of the more finicky techniques required of an etcher as well the spontaneous, even gestural, drawing that's needed in drypoint. I wish I could tell you more about these people, but I must respect this collector and dealer's
request that I not mention names.

What's behind this apparent indifference to, and lack of feeling for, this kind of work? I can't address all the causes here, but the most obvious, for me, is their rigor. Prints are essentially drawings and drawings are about structure and volume. It's much easier on the eye to appreciate these things in a painting, when they're "clothed" in color. The color makes 'em go down easy, as it were, and keeps them at bay. A print has nowhere to hide - but, then, nor do you, the viewer. To appreciate an excellent print, you must know something about drawing. You must also appreciate how drawing applies to the special process of creating a print on either a plate or stone and pulling it out, by hand, of the press yourself, or in the company of a master printer. It's not easy to learn these things. Nor is it easy to slough off the viewing habits of a lifetime - whereby "easy" color holds the ticket - and become addicted to "first processes" like drawing.

Yet why not? Collecting should not only cater to one's acquisitive instincts, but to one's curiosity, not only about art, but about the issues art must deal
with: sin and redemption; the love of place and/or self; the denial (and necessary embrace) of mortality; joy and abundance; the infinite promise of being young and the crabbed compromises of getting older. Prints have always been, for the artist, the most personal of media. A great artist only needs a very small space in which to express a world of regret or triumph.
Rembrandt conjures up a mighty cathedral in the space of a foot; he gives you a resurrection, not in a wall-sized canvas, but in something you can put in your pocket if you must. In prints, it is you, the collector, who are on view as well as the printmaker him (or her)self. Prints are not forgiving, but they will bring infinite joy and satisfaction to anybody who takes the time and trouble to wrestle with them a bit. Nothing is worth owning that's gotten with a checkbook only. And with most any print, your checkbook will stay loaded.

In my next installment, I'll talk a bit more about specific printmakers, particularly Americans, and
where they might be presently available.

I bitch a lot in emails and letters about the stuff I routinely see hanging in lobbies and boardrooms. Much of it is there because somebody ran into somebody else at a party or ball-game and the deal was closed before a moderately educated person could get in on it.

Everybody has seen this kind of thing. Duck prints are popular in Richmond, which is the city I most identify with unfortunate and summary decisions regarding interior decoration. (Not that it's alone in this. Some of the worst stuff I've ever seen was in New York City, cosmopolitan capitol of the known world. It should be remembered, however, that New York contains seven boroughs and what you often see in places is strictly out of Astoria, if you know what I
mean.)

At any rate, why is it that you can't walk into a corporate headquarters, say, and not see paintings, etchings, drawings, and sculpture that resonate with powerful feeling, super-accomplished draftsmanship, and aesthetic sophistication? Well, sometimes they get it right. A well-known financial conglomerate in Richmond has a pretty good art collection that is, however, controlled largely by two people with overlapping prejudices that should be tempered with overlapping prejudices from the outside. However, they get it right half of the time, with the result that the corporate campus is fairly enriched with examples of the best art Virginia has to offer. Not all the best art, but some of it. And in a culture that dismisses art except as a means to project its image to the world, that ain't too bad. I'd rather it be mostly good, but nodoby there listens to me and I can't tell the chain of command anything except "Okay, I'm going!"

Generally, however, the work you find in such places is wretched and should not have ever gotten in the door, let alone into the boardroom.

Why does this happen? Well, it comes out of a fairly complex dynamic, but, from my vast and dismal experience in the art world, I'd posit this reason:

one group (the producers, or "artists") relinquishes control while another group(the curators, dealers, and other "cool" sorts who can't make an honest living) takes control. It's prettyy darn simple, really.

Parallel situtations exist in almost any government.

When a dictator or demagogue rises to power, he or she does so through a complicated series of small victories and compromises in which other people willingly participate. No monopoly (or dictator) gets to be a one overnight; he (or it) gets there partly because we let it and partly because anybody who wants something that badly is willing to work twice as hard getting it as you work to oppose it.

In the past, it was fairly difficult, as an artist, to be independent. The culture of the marketplace was too entrenched and largely immovable. Now, however, things are more fluid and an artist doesn't necessarily have to depend on a dealer or curator to do his or her business. A website can lead a potential client to artwork that had never been available before. Printed matter is cheap now, so an artist can easily send the mailer that was once the responsibility of the dealer exclusively. An artist may just up and call a business him(or her)self and make an appointment. This is not often possible because curators and dealers often have interested businesspeople staked out already and don't like it when an artist attempts to encroach on territory they consider their own. But this is a belief, not a reality in most cases, and if a dealer connives to exclude an artist not only from a collection, but from the corporate ear, as it were, the artist should have every legal right to prosecute that dealer. Nobody owns anyone else the last time I looked and this sort of profiling should not be tolerated - particularly if the dealer has shown no interest in the artist's work to begin with. It's not unlike killing an ex-lover because you don't want anybody else to have her - even if you're not necessarily interested yourself!

I realize I haven't connected this ugly boardroom thing to the political culture of the art world. Yet.

Let me first say that dealers and curators could be quite useful if they wanted to be. Most, however, search for the main chance and stick with it. I rarely see a great deal of passion or curiosity on the part of most arts professionals; they have their little roster of people who are in - as well as their aesthetic do's and dont's - and pretty much stick with them. There is a certain social and academic pressure to do so and they mostly cave into it. If the world were swarming with dealers and curators of provocatively independent mind, the situation would be much different. But I only know of one art dealer who doesn't give a damn about credentials (Did said artist graduate from Yale? Know anybody from there perhaps?) or pedigree (So you haven't shown in New York? And the Pollock-Krasner turned you down how many times?.) What would an artistic Shakespeare - who only made it through middle school - do today?

Probably get on the phone and stay on it till something happened.

As I maybe didn't say, however, dealers and curators are in a certain way necessary. They don't make bad judgments all the time. In fact, whenever I'm looking for interesting artwork, where do I go? I check out the ads in ArtNews and American Art Review - even Southwest Art. I don't necessarily believe I'm getting everything from these sources, but I don't omit them because you always find something worthwhile, even if it does have to come from an art gallery.

Am I down on art dealers and curators? Yes. I think the vast majority do their jobs only by half.

Knowing this, however, the talented, but unpopular, artist who has not found favor with them must go his or her own way and make the existing system work - or create a new one.

Now: let's go back to the lousy art you mostly see in boardrooms and lobbies and pizza parlors and other public places that might just as well have good art.

How do you change that? For one, you should contact these places and tell whoever is in charge that they could possibly do better - in a nice way, of course.
Generally, you will end up talking to a dealer or curator, which is often a dead end. Best to speak to someone for whom the corporate (or pizza parlor) image is paramount. Preferably, you should meet this person, or a friend of this person, socially. In other words, you should try to do what the in-folk have already done. And be twice as gracious as you ever were with your grandmother. If you're selling a new concept, you are the embodiment of that concept.
It does no good to rough it up from the git-go.
There'll be plenty of time for you to put your personal stamp on things.

Ultimately, it is the artist who is the trailblazer in this regard. And while the search for the boardroom is hardly tantamount to the dignity of man, it has some redeemming social significance. Most civil rights pioneers were also its victims, alas. Luckily, an artist/entrepreneur is not necessarily trying to crack police department and other govermmental infrastructures. He or she is just trying to get the message out: I'M HERE is the content of that message and it's - compared to the strident rhetoric of the civil rights movement - fairly innocuous. But it is a necessary, and often painful, step to make that annoncement and to experience its repercussions. When I was in Richmond, I couldn't get a reviewer to come and see any exhibit at my gallery for love or money.
So rather than flog that dead horse, I contacted other writers, some of whom responded, some of whom did not.

But by the time I left, I was not unknown - and, in many cases, unliked. I've made a living at painting and selling pictures for many years now and I attribute that to getting my message out in a small way to the sort of people who would welcome it. I'd also attribute it, in equal measure, to the luck of the draw. It is fallacious and even arrogant to believe you are the sole agent of your life's accomplishments. Being the master of your own fate disappeared with hunting and gathering societies which compelled a gritty self-reliance past anything we socially dependent organisms can understand. In our life, salvation depends on knowing other people, not being able to go out and clobber a mastodon and drag it back to your cave - although the solitary nature of an artist's life is sometimes reminiscent of that dankish place.

There will always always be ugly pictures in boardrooms, but we who don't care to see them must do something about it except bitch to our friends, lovers, and bartenders about it. And we have to start by believing we can do something ourselves rather than allow this precious opportunity to be frittered away by others who can't possibly care about it as much as
we should.