What Art Is, Part 5: Art and Fashion
Fashion as a commodity can be considered anti-art. Far removed from merely meeting the human need for clothing, fashion’s purpose is to gratify personal vanity and promote social distinction. Fashion is the materialization of ideals such as appearance, self-absorption, and conspicuous consumption. Fashion reinforces one’s ideas about self and the world, pandering to the craving for acceptance and power. Where art celebrates the connectedness of individuals, fashion homogenizes the crowd into fleshless corporations of sellers and uniformed hordes of buyers.Abstract Painting with Houndstooth (oil on canvas, 2005) is a fundamentally abstract painting, a mode associated with the spiritual, or the purportedly spiritual. The houndstooth pattern quotes a currently fashionable weave. A generalized gestural brushstroke interrupts the matrix, invoking the rhetoric of the spiritual upon the anti-ideals of commerce and the fashionable.
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