Coffeeshop Art (and other four-letter words)
Growing up surrounded by a generally pleasant, yet extremely passive-aggressive citizenry is the burden of all children raised in the Midwestern tradition. Expletives are usually found in kitchens, barrooms and back alleys, but in my childhood, the usage of F-bombs and other ‘pirate language’ was reserved exclusively for car rides. As soon as the windows of the family car rolled up, the beautiful tapestry of expletives and almost-expletives would roll out. The driver behind us always seemed to be a 12-cylinder @$#hole trying to get everyone killed in a fiery hell of twisted metal, and there was always that old lady Cadillac in front that should have had her f*#%ing license revoked when she turned 90, since it’s better to be on the streets with god-damned drunks than with these sickly, dim-witted old farts.
Road rage is how I learned to be publicly vexed, and this is how I drive to this day, more often than not entirely unaware of what kind of filth is pouring out of my face while I otherwise drive responsibly, civilly obeying turn orders. I couldn’t tell you the last time I merged onto the freeway without cussing. For me, it has become as habitual as a turn signal and — due to my shoddy electrical system — much more reliable. With the help of some recent soul searching, and the Taoist literature that sits prominently atop my passenger-side trash heap, I’ve come to a conclusion about why I feel alright cussing away my hours en route as opposed to indulging in more pedestrian indecencies: it’s easy to rage at the faceless populace of drivers. It’s easy to lose touch with humanity when everyone around you is rendered anonymous by the vehicles they drive.
Anonymity functions as a powerful catalyst for personal opinions, and coffee shop art is about as anonymous as art gets. Consider, in contrast: galleries, museums, and schools operate as support structures for the work they display. By showing the work, these institutions bestow their stamps of approval on the art and their corresponding artists. In the cafe, however, art must fend for itself; the artist’s name may be displayed adjacent to the work, but it exists outside of the context of a school, museum, or gallery. Whether the work shown in the shop belongs to a middle school kid or a 52 year-old who recently discovered the joys of acrylics is unknown; no context is given in a coffee shop. All we know is that it didn’t upset the owner enough to get taken down.
Excluding owners of coffee shops that almost exclusively serve the art community, such as the Black Dog in St. Paul, proprietors are not generally considered ‘in the know’ when it comes to things in the artistic realm. Therefore, they serve as poor support systems, if any support is given at all. Coffeehouses, through an assumed art-naivety, create a perfect atmosphere for developing s#*^-storms of the hater persuasion. The art that adorns the wall of a coffee shop invites excellent outbursts of amateur art criticism and general sneering. These works become a front line in the battle for art’s social relevance, competing against other forms of media precisely where art seems most vulnerable and the least appreciated: in public. These coffee shop artworks reach audiences that would otherwise have no connection to art outside of their own collection of mantel pieces and greeting cards. Yet this pioneering effort on the side of the artists does not grant them heroic martyrdom. Instead the art is often shunned, especially by those in the art community.
From what I understand of the art world, and according to the laws of cool, extremely prejudicial disinterest and even disgust trump any heartfelt feelings. Art insiders fear being associated with something saccharine or kitsch. I’ve heard this mentality played out in my discussions about art that resides both inside and outside of coffee shops, but never is comment so consistently critical as when a piece hangs anonymously on the walls of a cafe. Their wits sharpened by their own fear of rejection and compounded with the fact that they make note of their atmosphere, artists tend to be especially ready to bully the work around them. This is not to say coffee shop art should be off-limits for criticisms, or that pieces hung in a coffee shop should never be considered pure s#*^ or a legitimately hideous disaster, but the term ‘coffee shop art’ needs to be freed of its negative connotations if any sort of sensible debate of merit is to take place.
Acquaintances and friends remain unconvinced that I am a nice person. Despite this I feel secure in stating that my personal connotations with coffeeshop art are no more drastic or wicked than that of the average coffee shop patron. When approached by the concept of coffee shop art, a few unhappy thoughts come to mind: amateurish, in the sense of hopeless; tacky, in the sense of Kinkade; and bland, as in vegan Thanksgivings. Like a child teasing a peer on the playground, this dismissive thought process helps me make amends for my own fear of rejection by distancing myself from the potential humiliation that may ensue. With the anonymity of the artist and the institutionally unsupported proximity of the art, it makes for a great place to sit and hurl insults at the exposed work.
While driving I remind myself that the aforementioned 12-cylinder @$#hole tailgater driving behind me isn’t out to get me. She’s probably only peripherally concerned with my presence on the road, and the old lady in front of me may actually be a 16 year-old boy with weird hair. Maybe he has a new-found fear of roadways brought on by a video montage of car crashes he just watched at his friend’s house involving motorcyclists and semi-trucks. Does this make their driving acceptable? Hell no. But it does frame it in such a way that it is not a direct insult on my personal driving sensibilities. In turn I try to use this mode of thinking to reconsider works I find in cafes.
Currently I am surrounded by a series of extremely textural abstract paintings. Do I like them? No, but I really try to give them the same amount of attention that I would grant to a piece at the MIA or the Soap Factory. It’s art, it’s the reason many of us bothered graduating from high school or college, and it continues to be a life-preserver to many in this cold, dark, winter-nightmare of a state. Every driver out there wants to get to where they are going, in this way we are an estranged team and as such we each deserve some benefit of the doubt. Likewise all artists in this city, no matter how awful their rococo-style-mixed-media-portraits-of-their-girlfriend are right now, deserves some respect. You don’t have to like it but at least holster your hate-ray upon entering the coffee shop. If the art fails, let them be remembered for what they are: 16 year-old kids with weird hair who have conquered their own fears enough to take to the streets and fight on the front line under art’s banner.
Illustration by Jake Ramberg
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