Americans grew up on television. From the time we can actually focus on it we are in front of it. IT was a way for our parents to leave the room and it was a way for us to find - comfort. It has shaped our world for good and ill. We forage through the endless list of channels most nights looking for some diversion - very much like our hairy ancestors used to have to stalk animals for sustenance. The sickly thing about the wielding of the remote is the slight thrill of satisfaction when we've found something that will entertain us. We're not really interesed in being uplifted or expanded by our viewing experiences - We just want not to be bored, not to be bothered, not to be looking into our own existence for reality. As long as the show is on we are entertained...

Painting has hit the wall - for all of its ubiquity - there's nothing new going on. I became aware of this about 10 years ago. I used to haunt the galleries and studios of friends and friends of friends and the thing that struck me was the sameness of it all. Most of the serious painters I knew were trying to talk about the Baroque and about how abstraction was in or was entering into a Baroque stage. Meanwhile we were all busy happily translating technique, surface and side into a boring, easy, flat, unhappy painted experience - I couldn't see the connection between this mannered academic painting and the expansive visual world of the Baroque. Frank Stella's Working Space - which had been the catalyst for this theoretical chat up - seemed to lay the pipe for a lot of painting that had nothing to do with what he was talking about. A new form of abstraction was not being formed.

The amazing thing was that a newly expanding gallery scene had begun to happen at the same time - Chelsea was being promoted as a Mecca for new art commerce. Markets were clipping along - a lot of new money was happening - and soon we had - what seemed like - hundreds of new galleries looking for a generation of work to feature in their display windows. It was a plethora of programmed channels fueled by the hedge fund remote viewers. The art press began to expand right along with this new gallery scene. And along with these expanded forms of electronic communication came the need for something to be communicated - the need for content. Soon every artist with a show and a dream of success was being feted in the multi-media universe that had exploded across the web. Almost overnight Art had fashioned itself as a small subset of the entertainment industry. Everyhting was in place just before the new century was to begin.

9/11 changed everything - as we keep hearing. There was a blip in the art world. A slight one. Like all the other recovering industries - we watched a retrenchment and a rush of publicity. The online articles at the time were taking a wait and see mode - just as the housing market began to pump the great US economy with the lyrical monetary promises of packaged subprime debt - just like the junk bond orgy of the early Reagan era. The ball began to roll once again.

Content is what drives the imagination among the remote viewers. The universities have been steadfast in creating an army of trained professionals steeped in the language of recent art. In the 80s Postmodernism - which had been firmly established in Europe since the 60s - was quickly being translated and packaged for an American audience - much the same way that a number of hip successful television shows are taken wholesale from England and translated into American. The art industry - armed with money, product, studios and a continuous industry fueled by trained professionals (MFA became the new MBA) - had discovered that it had on its hands a marketable product. It became Art Incorporated - auction houses, online publications, and museums began to navigate in the waters of commerce by floating debt offerings, launching condos for the equestrian classes and even going public. Art after 9/11 became big business.

Meanwhile the studios began to hum along. The really successful artists realized what was happening and began to play to the cameras in ways that Warhol had never even dreamed about.

to be continued...