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MAKE ART GREAT AGAIN
WORKSHOP IN THE WOODS
The Kopkind Colony is an educational summer
residency program that provides opportunities
for independent journalists and community organizers
to meet, discuss current
issues and participate in seminars
and presentations by guest
lecturers. Located in Guilford,
Vermont, on the site of the Tree
Frog Farm, the long-time residence
of renowned author and
journalist Andrew Kopkind, the
kopkind.org photo
Kopkind
Colony seeks to mentor young and not-so-young
reporters and writers in the social and political
journalism that Kopkind practiced throughout his
career. Previous presenters during the Colony’s
summer session have been community organizer
Kevin Alexander Gray, author Dr. Donald Tibbs
and activist lawyer Pamela Bridgewater Toure.
More about the Kopkind Colony and its various
programs, past and present, can be found at
kopkind.org.
We have a website which is called “Freedom from
Art,” at freedomfromart.org. On it, we say that art
should be stripped of its nonprofit status – that will
change everything overnight. We also say we should
also stop coercing people, stop telling people, from
children to adults, how good art is. But economics are
the most important part. Donations to art institutions
should not be tax-deductible. People say to me that a
lot of museums would then have to close down, and
I say, OK, that’s very good. A lot of museums should
be closed down. But here’s something that I discovered
lately that I want to share with you. Every museum,
every art institution, every artist, every collector,
everyone has these huge storage rooms where they
keep art. I estimate that 99.9 percent of art that has
been created, and is being created now, is destined
to be locked up in a warehouse somewhere. That art
has little or no chance of ever seeing the light of day.
The vast majority of art produced today will be stored
face-to-face in huge, dark rooms, and it’s a waste. A
kind of pollution. Art production can be seen as a true
form of pollution – physical pollution, of course, but
also intellectual pollution. There are now hundreds
of thousands, maybe millions, of artists making art
around the world, if you take China, Russia, you
know. What is that about? Why are they doing this?
What’s the chance that their work will ever be seen?
There is no chance. But everyone desires to seen, to
be shown. My works, with my ex-collaborator, are
in every major museum – MoMA, the Guggenheim,
the Met, you name it – but I haven’t seen those works
in years. They’re somewhere, stored away. But we’re
lucky artists – we’re in those museums. Most artists
are not in any museums – they’re nowhere. It’s like
over-production, like a totally senseless machine that
just produces certain things.
Tell us about Artenol, because if you want to destroy art,
it seems nonsensical to put a magazine out.
It’s about art being nonsensical. I need to prove that
to people. It’s like the magazine The Masses. They
were trying to prove that the existing social system is
wrong. That it needed to be replaced or destroyed. We
want to do the same thing, but culturally.
Art, before it was subverted by those with privilege and
money, was used as a vehicle for community work, for the
people. To say that it should be destroyed, doesn’t that
disregard the other ways that art can be used?
Your first statement, that money that came into art
and destroyed whatever came before, destroyed its
connection to the community – let me tell you, there
never was a time “before.” Artists have always been
the lackeys of the ruling class; they’ve always served
the ruling class. There was a time before, when art
was made for the church, for the religious public. The
rich people subsidized it, of course, but they were
giving money to the church, not to artists. An important
difference was that God was behind the art of that
period. There were teachings, the Bible, the story.
Artists were the illustrators of the religious system’s
story, which was totally ingrained in people’s minds.
You couldn’t ask a medieval person if he believed in
God – it was a given. If God exists, art exists. If there’s
no God, no art. In modern times, though, art itself
took on the function of religion. Artists became the
priests, the agents of God’s will. With the demise of
traditional religion, the rich people, the elite, began
putting their money into the new art religion, and
they co-opted its priest class, the artists. I was just
lecturing at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown,
Mass., and they had a show from the Prado collection
in Madrid of paintings of naked women, of Venuses.
Read a
Washington Post
story on how
Donald Trump
might make art
great again at
artenol.org.
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