The context behind my upcoming proposals to Contemporary Art Museums to honor my life’s work.
Pan Kicking the Universe, One of the Space Series paintings.
In the coming weeks I’m sending letters to several major contemporary art museums proposing they honor my life’s work either with a solo show of my Space Series or a 60-year retrospective (I entered my sixth decade as a full-time artist a few years ago), or both.
The Space Series is as monumental as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel plus it doesn’t have the baggage of being a handmaiden of any institution, like the Catholic Church—it is 100% self-funded.
My artistic integrity is unmatched, no commercial work, no commissions, zero pandering, and 100% for the love of art.
And I have no peers in aesthetic innovation that have integrated new color and light theory, body theory, philosophy of, and art criticism—not only in practice but documented in my books on those subjects.
There is no way to sneak/bootleg my work that is so challenging to their world view of art. A Trojan horse will not do the trick. An epochal change is the way, a frontal assault with every moral and intellectual weapon I have.
The greatest point of leverage is that I’m simply riding the crest of a wave of 40,000 years of figurative art. Which is objectively the birth, the catalyst, and the support of human cognition, bringing together perception, emotion, and thought. Figurative art predates religion, language, and civilization by 35,000 years, and engagement with figurative art is universal to every human who ever existed—and it is programmed into our DNA, evidenced by three- and four-year-olds drawing figurative subjects. Figurative art is also what first distinguished us from other lifeforms. Additionally, figurative art is inherently human, belonging to everyone regardless of race, religion, or tribe.
The entire edifice of the contemporary art world, since the late 1940s, was built on negating figurative art and all it represents (above). There is zero innovation in negating our legacy of figurative art—it is a dead end emotionally, intellectually, and perceptually.
Leaders in these institutions have the euphoria of being on the top of the art world but the cost is they can’t feel it for their “art.” The hollow, empty, nauseating feeling is that they betrayed humanity, not like killing someone, but in erasing humankind at is cognitive root, i.e., figurative art. They are engaged in ethnocide on an astronomical scale. It is highly unlikely they could face this demon clearly and survive. It won’t be as simple for them to not be evil but embrace its antidote: eudaemonistic figurative art.
The art institutions are not going away, they are integral to civilization. But their legacy will be based on how good or evil the people running them are.
I haven’t written the cover letter for my proposed exhibitions yet, but it will be a doozy.
It will only take one of them to stand up with truth and take an evolutionary stance to right the course for contemporary art institutions.
Doing this is a fun and delightful project.
Michael Newberry 