Art Clokey would have been 90 years old today, he passed away two years ago. Art was one of the guys I modeled my own career after since he created my favorite childhood character GUMBY.
Now my most common comment I get from fans is that they were raised on Earthworm Jim. I understand that sentiment all too well. Yes, it gets old to hear that every day of the last 15 years of my life, but it’s more than tolerable. Earthworm Jim or any of my other characters will always mean more to others that it will to me. Earthworm Jim is to them what Gumby is to me. Earthworm Jim doesn’t bring me back to being a 6 year old again, Gumby is my transport. I remember those formica table tops, Brady Bunch on prime time TV, hearing Partridge Family songs on my little AM radio and bright colored glass ashtrays in all of our friend’s houses.
That’s the multiplying effect one gets with mass media. It’s like launching a thousand messages in a thousand bottles without knowing who is going to be the recipient. That makes mass media a powerful tool, and like all forms of power, it can corrupt the wielder, and ought be handled with even greater responsibility.
Back to Clokey. Gumby became a mass media character, but he started as an art project called “Gumbasia”. Clokey represents a new form of fine artist that came about in the age of movies, inexpensive printing and a public with a voracious appetite for entertainment. Where does the fine art end and the commercial art begin? Clokey never drew that distinction, even when selling his services to the Lutheran Church to make Davey and Goliath religious shorts…a religion that was not his own, by the way. Clokey was more an Eastern Mystic than a Lutheran.
Along with Clokey came other artists who used commercial industrialization as a mode of delivery. Jim Henson, Dr. Seuss and Peter Max used entertainment as their fine art medium. While there’s no reason not to enjoy a fine oil painting in a church, now the masses get the painting delivered on their television sets and gaming systems.
My pal Cliff Cramp’s answer to the question, “What is the purpose of art?”
The artist is the first member of his own audience. Before I show anything, before I even make anything, the artwork is in my mind. Most artists work in solitude, so our work is seen by us first. Then it might go out to others, perhaps our family and friends, or our bosses if we’re professional artists. Then to who-knows-where from there.
But the first sucker to taste the snake oil is the artist himself. When I see good art, I assume the artist cares enough about himself to put on a good show for his audience of one. When I see bad art I assume the artist is lying to himself first, and it only gets worse from there.
This gets me back to my first question that any artist has to answer every day he decides to make something, “Why make anything at all?” The answer is similar to our very existence, “Why am I here? What is my reason? Was is my job? What is my nature?” The answer to these and other questions are rarely, “To make a video game.” because making art product never suits me as a landing place. It’s pointing forward to something else. Perhaps to provide for family, to bring joy to others or to explore, but the goal is not to just paint a certain painting. There’s a through line in there somewhere that pierces the long string of art and points forward to other works.
I don’t know Bill Watterson, but he is a great artist and brought laughter to millions with his comic Calvin and Hobbes. He disappeared from public display of his art, but I know he’s still producing art. It’s his job, his identity, his nature. He can’t not make art. It is likely for an audience of one, but there is an audience. When a tree falls in the forest it makes a noise, at least for that tree it does.
I’m on a panel this Tuesday the 26th talking about making a living on creating properties: LINK
Many don’t understand the legal underpinnings of what I do to make a living. I come up with something, I sell it to another party. But why can’t some employer just say, “That’s a good idea, I’ll take it. And you’re fired!”? Well, it’s all because we have rights to our intellectual property, and some of the strongest description of those rights in the whole world are right here in America.
I will be signing books, participating on a panel, and having fun meeting all of the suits in DC that help fight for our intellectual property rights. Come on over!
This guy forgot to mention the Salem Witch Trials and Hitler being a Catholic:
#1
Submitted on 2011/02/09 at 8:18 pm
I agree truth doesn’t evolve. But the subjects you talk about there are always exceptions to. We consume life, animals and plants to live and so do they. It’s perfectly fine to murder someone in society if they threaten your life or walk in your house uninvited. Or if a person murders another person the state then murders them.In the middle east the majority considers it acceptable to murder a wife who dishonored you in some way, or to stone a person to death if they commit adultery.
So yeah it depends on where you live and how you were raised. And it also depends on your level of education and understanding of the world around you, maybe realizing just how vast the universe is and how minuscule and insignificant their complaints against thins like sexuality and aborting fetuses are.
As more people got smarter they became more considerate it seems granted there are always more stupid people then smart people and you have to bang things into their head like “racism isn’t a good mentality to have and truth is there is no ‘race’ genetically speaking.” before they even start to process things differently and self examine themselves and seems to have a cut off point when this can happen around age 30.craftyandy
#2
Submitted on 2011/02/09 at 8:01 pm
everything has free will. Maybe you should stop seeking answers to things no one knows the answers to and find out what is true and accepting what the human race doesn’t know instead of filling in the holes with mystical beings.craftyandy
#3
Submitted on 2011/02/09 at 7:57 pm
yeah to bad most religious people don’t acknowledge it if it goes against what the bible says, they rather be willfully ignorant and arrogant in claiming they know what happens when you die and think and having faith in something is actual great when it means believing and agreeing with something as true when there is lack of evidence to even indicate it so.craftyandy
#4
Submitted on 2011/02/09 at 7:54 pm |
Why is “thou shall not rape” not one of the ten commandments? According to the bible it was required that a non virgin girl who is raped must be married to her rapist. When did the bible say slavery was wrong? Or selling your daughter as a sex slave is wrong? Just going to pretend the old testament never happened right?
If the only truth comes from God then we will never get it. The human race found all it’s knowledge on their own by asking questions, challenging the status quo and not by praying to the invisible man in the sky for the answers to just fall from the sky. The bible has been wrong on almost every scientific account and it fails as a moral guide.
People didn’t need the ten commandments to realize that murdering one another is not beneficial to society.craftyandy
No value is true today that wasn’t true one thousand years ago. It’s wrong to murder now, and nothing about the way the universe progresses can make murder right. If enslaving a man for the color of his skin is wrong today, then it was wrong 200 years ago and will be just as wrong 200 years from now.
True ideas originate from a different place than culture, so they are independent of fashion, history or evolution. Aristotle’s Law of Non Contradiction (A cannot be both A and not A at the same time and in the same way) wasn’t invented by Aristotle, it was revealed by him. We were operating under the Law of Non Contradiction and will always operate under this law, because like all true things, it wasn’t created by culture.
If anything, almost every true thing that has ever existed was campaigned against by various cultures throughout man’s history. Different cultures have believed that man can be enslaved because of the color of their skin or that Jews were the source of the world’s problems or that a child should be sacrificed to ward off evil spirits.
This is why I shrug when culture is at odds with some of my values. Given culture’s terrible track record at getting things right I should hope it opposes at least some of my values.
There is no attribute of culture that can keep it from changing while there is no attribute of the truth that can move it one way or another. You can’t improve on a true ideal.
