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in the days before he became a sort of one-man wrecking ball, James Carville
said something that was really smart. Pinpointing the issue that would
win his client, Bill Clinton, The 1992 election for President, the strategist
coined the phrase, "It's the economy, stupid."
It still is --- only more so. The American people have enjoyed 93 straight months of growth --- the longest peacetime expansion ever. Unlike periods of growth in the past, this one is benefiting almost everyone, bestowing remarkable gifts on the nation, including a balanced budget by a tidal wave of tax revenues. It's the New Economy, stupid, and it is changing politics and buying habits forever. For one thing, it will probably keep Clinton in office, despite his perjury. It is the reason, writes William Schneider in the National Journal, for the nearly unprecedented gains in the November elections for Democrats. Because he is President, Clinton gets the credit even though there is little that even he can claim to have done to promote the growth we have seen since 1992. At least he has erected no serious roadblocks: no big tax increases, new federal programs, regulatory regimes. And he has let Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan do their work. Today the GOP is hunkered down in pessimism, snarling at what it sees as moral decline and skeptical of the future. It has done its best to deserve the scorn of California and the rest of dynamic America. The rest of the work --- most of it, really --- came from the private sector, including the renovation of fat, corpocratic firms. At the same time, the computer revolution budded and started to bloom with the Internet. "Despite its infancy", writes Brian Wesbury of Griffin, Kubik, Stephens & Thompson Inc., a Chicago consulting firm, "the computer is changing every industry on the face of the earth." |
The experts
still don't get it. And above all, we as artists still don't get it. There
is a booming market out there with unlimited potential and in large part,
the artists of the world are setting on their collective hands attempting
to "do business as usual" in a new and potentially explosive marketplace.
"It's the NEW economy, stupid."
Could it be that, as P. Roger Elliott states in his book, State of the Art(s), "Artists have themselves fallen into the trap of believing that they, not the public, determine what art really is." This attitude has resulted in a narrowing of the art market to a select few in whom the public, conditioned to believe that it would be unfashionable to do otherwise, have come to embrace. This need not be a scenario that we need to continue to perpetuate. Yet in order to reach out to the new economy we will need to have the courage to make sweeping changes in the way we do business: no more helter-skelter internet postings which do very little more than confuse the public and depress the market. Artists have the ability to reinvent a global art market if they are willing to make the necessary sacrifices. If they are willing to put aside their individuality in marketing while maintaining it in their creative endeavors. If they are willing and able to begin today to form an International organization without the intrusiveness of governmental assistance. If they are able to come to the realization that changing the attitudes of a public, which has been bullied into accepting art that it neither likes nor understands, is a detailed process that can only be accomplished if artists and art lovers come together and work diligently toward that end. It is the NEW economy, one that can be a boon to artists around the world or one that can pass us up in a nano-second. Clinton has received credit for this economy simply because he has stayed out of the way. It is time for artists to lead, follow, or just stay out of the way. |
 The
Albrecht Kemper Museum of ArtDec. 6 - March 7, 1999 ---Bold Improvisation: Afracian American Quilts from the collection of Scott Heffley January 21 - Feb. 21 --- 25th Annual membership Exhibit |
