What deserves going on the private plinth? Getting framed and hung it turns out is not a small endeavor for work made in house. For starters, the actual cost of framing is a lot more than the cost of materials used in the art work itself. Added to that, for me, the irony that the time that it takes to frame a work is significantly more than the time that it took to make the work itself isn’t lost on me. A fact that emphasizes the point that everything that’s made isn’t going to be a priority for framing.
So now the question is “What is deserving of a plinth?”
The accumulated pile of drawings are starting to sort themselves out into a few separate piles that go beyond what’s being seen as the good and the bad (a whole separate discussion), but now the “good” pile itself is being sorted by “relevant connection” or what I see as my personal relationship to the drawing itself. The underlying concern is that it’s gotten hard to justify work that pulls from outside resource material. The reasoning is that the relationships that populate the images aren’t my relationships, they belong to someone else, these may serve as exercises, but they don’t belong on my walls (maybe the fridge, but not the walls).
Still, when I buy art work from other artists to hang in my own home, it’s usually not the relationships in the pictures themselves that I am initially connecting with, instead it’s the real or imagined connection with the artist themselves that holds the primary priority.
Rarely do I buy a work without any connection to the artist or the subject. If I like a work, but don’t yet at least have a passing familiarity with the artist, I generally prefer to become somewhat familiar with the artist before buying work.
So how is this shaking out as I decide what to frame and hang? I’m choosing to invest in the work that’s based on my own real world relationships, art work that uses friends and family as the subjects instead of strangers from the internet.
(On a side note, I believe this is why patrons are hesitant about purchasing figurative works for their own walls, the relationship just isn’t there. A connection to the artist themself needs to at least be first established.)
Zygote Blum 