"Genius is an accident; mediocrity is a fact."

The Smithsonian American Art Museum hosts a great lecture series by artists, critics, and scholars of contemporary art, and recently featured Dave Hickey, a critic who won the MacArthur "Genius Award" in 2001 and also served as executive editor of "Art In America."

I scribbled lots of notes during this fascinating lecture titled, "The Evils of Creationism: Art History According to Darwin."  I don't recall he ever talked about creationism or Darwin!  Here are just a couple things from the lecture that struck me:

• Hickey was very critical of American art institutions, which he says in their effort to level things out to be "fair" end up encouraging mediocrity. He says we can fund 1,000,000 slide guitarists but that won't make a Gregg Allman more likely.
• Arts organizations tend to support artists who are well-intentioned, well-behaved, grateful artists because they believe artists deserve support and care. Organizations don't focus on the objects artists produce and whether they are beautiful, or at least good quality. This is what he calls "stupid money."  Money isn't given to the reclusive, arrogant little kid in the corner who obsessively draws with a protective arm around his sketch pad so no one can see what he is doing. HIckey believes art is a place for the effed up.  It should be a refuge for the misfits and not a place that drives away the true geniuses. 
• Hickey suggested we create the Church of Surfing.  Now *that* is genius!

Watch the lecture on video HERE.

Blogger, artist, and teacher John James Anderson was there too and had this to say:

Hickey was introduced as a man with a singularly American voice. I disagree. Though his subjects are generally American, as with other critics of American culture (I'm thinking of the Australian, Robert Hughes) Hickey's strength comes from a perspective that is keenly not from America. After all, he is from the Republic of Texas, which allows him the ability to circumnavigate the apologetic bull shit and ass-kissing in his writing. Basically a Molly Ivins for the art world.

The subject of the talk was The Evils of Creationism: Art History According to Darwin. I don't recall either Creationism or Darwin being specifically mentioned.

While he began by linking today's art market to the art market developed in the Renaissance, the point of his argument – which basically ranted against having a federal Department of the Arts – was how an evil called "stupid money" upsets the whole apple cart.

"If blood money gets blood on your hands, and dirty money makes everything it touches dirty, what does stupid money do to the intellect of those who receive it?"

Hickey noted how, in the past 40 years, a lot of money has been thrown into the art with good intentions, but it has been distributed by committees who give the money to the wrong artists. They don't give it to the genius who might show up drunk - if at all. They give it to the person that is likable, sober, and makes okay work. MFA programs are no better because, as he put it, "I have never seen a bad artist go through an MFA program and come out the other side a good artist." What happens is that bad artist might come out the other side a better-educated bad artist.

The issue with stupid money is akin to an article, forward to me from a friend, regarding child sports titled, "Stop the Little League Arms Race." The economist Charles Wheelan basically argues that if everyone placed their kids in accelerated athletics programs the net result would be a waste of time, money and quality family time - not to mention a lot of surgeries to correct limbs prematurely mangled by stress fractures - and that the really talented kids would still rise above the fray because money cannot buy talent.

The same can be said for art.