Collage/Print: Artificially Flavored / Art validation in the court of the crowd / Original art and...(copy?)

RTomens, 2022

All art is Art-ifice. 

All art is artificial?

'The mistake we make is that we think we have to create works for everybody.' - Dieter Roth

Another mistake we (artists) make is to think that unless a certain number of people like our work it's not valid, or validated. It's validation increases according to the number of people liking it. The validation trap: we want/expect/need the numbers.

In the court held by this imaginary crowd the artist is judged and either found 'innocent' by general consensus or 'guilty'; their punishment, deafening silence, no reaction at all and once that sentence is passed the artist hangs himself by the rope of insecurity.

By their followers ye shall know them. So few? Stature once afforded by gallery-owners, dealers and buyers now comes from The Invisible Masses, or select group in my case, because, of course, I tell myself that they are 'select', not selected by me, but by themselves, to be an elite, as opposed to mere numbers amongst many - ha-ha!

So I make an image (this morning). What else am I going to do? It was a paper collage but I turned it into a print. Print over a print...over a collage. We cannot even call the original collage 'authentic'; it being a construct of readymade photos. Long ago I abandoned the idea of 'originality'. That's not strictly true since I do draw (drawing on inspiration from others, of course). They are only partially 'my' ideas. All art comprises of somebody else's ideas filtered through the self, hopefully to emerge as an original take on what went before.