The Candle In The Rib Cage: An Open Letter to Artists in 2024

(and some words for the philistines, too)

The following is an essay by the artist and writer Judson Vereen. You can check out his Substack here. I hope you enjoy it.

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Lately, I have come across opining’s from the philistine types more than ever. I am sick of it, but what is there to do? I thought to write them—I was thinking an open letter, but this came with its own problems. No one identifies as a philistine, and even if someone did, why on earth would they read a letter by a so-called artist, knowing that in its contents is likely a bomb of words, whose sole purpose is to blow them to smithereens?

Much better to write simply to the artists themselves, and add some words for the philistines, too.

To start, I should address who I am mainly speaking to; the artist as craftsman, and the artist that is within us all. That is not to say we are all artists. But to speak to that inkling of artistic spirit inside every human. That we all dream, occasionally, of the impossible and are open to new worlds. That even in the most cadaverous human, there may exist the remnants of a still burning candle, somewhere hidden, a candle inside the rib cage.

I mean to address the amateur. The Sunday painter, the hobbyist. Those that know very little of academic art history, only what they have been able to gather in free libraries, museums, etc. Too, I am speaking to the bedroom musician, the self-published poets. The tinkerers, as well as anyone who has suffered a good bit of starving for their art. Starving—limited not to malnourishment, but also the spiritual starvation that often comes with the absence of an audience.

The starvation of the voice.

Also, the very young and young at heart, alike. I want to speak to the artist that has no clan, no concrete future. I want to speak to those who I may call “my people”, if I believed in the phrase. The people that have no people—those who are alone in this world, in their vision and spirit. First to congratulate you, second to say I am with you—so far as I can be.

It matters little whether your art is good or bad or you feel like an artist one day and a fraud the next. Whether you play the piano or the kazoo, whether you write with a long, felt tip pen or scrawl with bricks of charcoal. Whether your art is technological or is executed from the damp wall of a cave.

I am also talking to myself.

The opposite of all this is the modern-day art students, who fancies themselves as humanitarian activists—the problem here is the collective versus the individual, but I will get to that later.

Also, the gallery “mascot”, as Jean Michel Basquiat put it. This letter may not be directed towards them, though they may find a glimmer of truth in it. However, they need little encouragement. Full of themselves and their puny roles as they often are, bound to their exhibition schedules of handshakes, pow-wows, secret dinners, group showings among close friends and such as they seem, and so enmeshed in cash grants, awards, museum acquisitions as they can be, I find they need no encouragement.

A small dose of discouragement, more like it.

I don’t know what would set them straight. I cannot say forcefully, there are too many of them. It is the “business” of art that they tend to, often forgetting their own lives in the process. This is likely not related to art at all, nor, in my opinion, a life at all.

If you would indulge me in a quick story, I will give you a small sense of what I mean:

In Los Angeles I had received a call from a friend, who knew of my desperate situation. Living in my car, I had little room to maneuver. I had a few hundred dollars left. It was decreasing by the minute, by the meal, by the gas tank! Anyway, he offered me a short stint of work. I could not have said no! I would have—if only I were in the position to turn down work.

The work was chauffeuring an important artist. In fact, she is goddess-like! Her paintings, as well as her name, are known worldwide! Whenever she has an exhibition or makes a big sale, or stumps her toe, apparently, she is interviewed by the likes of the national art papers as well as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, etc. During her exhibition, she will be guaranteed a positive review, and will close the showing a few million dollars richer.

I was her driver and she was intolerable. She let me know my place by introducing me as “my driver.” She never once called me by name, only as “driver.” She was a miserable woman. The details I would hear of her life, from her extraneous phone conversations from the back seat while I drove, were further dehumanizing. It was as though I was not there. No shame as she went from one phone call to the next, dialing up acquaintances, repeating the same stories, word for word, one after the next.

I never saw her smile. Never did she laugh. I could only think—is this what success looks like? Is this what success does? She went on about a building she would buy, and about her sales. It is a wonder she ever got around to painting. A wonder that she still considers herself emblematic of good humanity.

Anyway, could make for an interesting story in more detail some other time. But this is what I mean about the business of success and what it can do to some. I was living in my car, broke as ever, but I could muster a smile, a joke! If I had a driver myself, we would be best of friends! I was a ghost inside a machine, chauffeuring an entrepre-corpse body, a soul destroyed, blasted away by the business end of the shitty art world stick.

What a shame!

I was rich living in my car. She was enmeshed in poverty, the ghetto of one’s bitter mind. This is all anecdotal, I know. But it left an impression. It had some revelatory effect—it was no waste! In fact, I should thank her for being that way. So, thank you, Mary. And this story is not everything—does not cast a very long pessimism towards my own life or how I see the life of the artist.

The artists that are poured out like sludge from academia are performers, mainly. Performing an identity. An IDENTITY no different than the biker gangs, the cult followers, or the adult entertainers.

They have their own clothes, their own slang, their own signals, their own emblems. They thrive on separation. Not totally, just separation by groups. That great American comedian George Carlin said of our betters, “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.” I believe it’s something like that, if not exactly. I find them abhorrent, saved only by the grace that is their unawareness. They cannot stand on their own two legs! I have not made a group of them, they have done that to themselves!

Ambition. I would like to kill it. Whatever is ambitious inside me is troublesome, irksome, injurious. The trouble with ambition is that it knows no bounds. Once it gets going, it can never be apprehended—perhaps only killed. Snuffed in the cradle, so to speak. And this is funny, because I don’t want to kill ALL my ambition. I want to keep some, like the candle in the rib cage. Complete eradication of anything is not appealing to me. I would keep at least one or two philistines around. A few diseases, some criminals, some horrible people. I want to kill all my ambition except a modicum of it. I tend to think on Charles Bukowski’s “Bluebird”.

Kill your ambition, mostly, but keep a small part of it hidden. You may need it one day, I don’t know yet. Ambition towards your craft, your work, is no small thing. And, of course, that is not what I mean. I mean worldly, monetary, social, and public ambition.

There was a time when these things were perhaps obtainable or even noble. Success for the artist or even the genius is a lottery ticket. (There are more geniuses toiling the gutter as there are in the ivory towers!) The modern man has too much to choose from. There is no consensus on good art, what art is, even among those who deftly create it.

Humans are going, now, through the annals of history, a long corridor of portraits, murals, poems, statues, stories, songs and plays, operas and film. And the modern humans, I may say the philistines, if it were only relegated to them, are trouncing through the hall with rotten produce—smearing what they can with moldy tomatoes, stabbing what they can with crusty rusted blades, tearing up all shreds of art from one dispensable theorem to the next. And within this hallway, we slink into our private rooms, with our own cults.

Culture, broadly speaking, has ended.

One cultural event can only be popular to the theoretical maximum of half. Whatever is popular to one half will only be hated by the other half. With one philosophy on art, what it should and should not be, all art is at stake. And perhaps, it should be. But one cannot make art this way; the opinions are wide and varied, and mostly irrelevant. It is enough to drive an artist loony. It is enough to make an artist simply want to sign a urinal. Seal his shit in a can. Tape a banana to a wall. To say to the philistine—nothing is good enough for you anyhow, besides da Vinci, so fuck you! If you like da Vinci so much, why not any words from you on him? Is it art or anti-art? Giving “art” a title is what did us in!

Recently, I wrote an essay, “Nero’s Violin”, graciously published by Poetic Outlaws, where I wrote on the treasures of the world going up in a blaze. Of course, the artist is Nero himself, still fiddling as Rome (the earth) burns mightily in the horizon. That is your ambition! Gone! Can’t be helped. So, what is all this ambition?

The artist should say, in the year of 2024, that if I never sell a painting, never publish a poem, never sell a story, that I will be alright. If I am not alright, it is because I need to eat and keep an abode of some sort. That I should make enough to obtain the bare minimum and simply be, and that can be done in a variety of ways. Anything else is likely to be ego. I want to kill ambition. But to save a small slice, like I mentioned, for one day, when a new horizon emerges. I think not, but I will save a slice for myself—in case I am wrong about everything. This comes from the disastrous realization that mostly, what is ambitious, successful and popular are reflections of a civilization in decline.

To the artist, it matters none.

Society is always in decline in some way. If an artist gets an opportunity, spit in no one’s face. But the artist should not break their back by so-called opportunities. An opportunity cannot set you free—only you can do that.

In the modern lens, we have the philistine to sort out. This entity, I doubt, has changed much over time. They are hostile, unimpressed by much of American art, much of which is modern art.

In voicing their rank disapproval, they are unable to speak about art humanely. They care little of dreamscapes, impossibilities, different viewpoints on the picture plane. In fact, they tend to only consider what is picture perfect rendering or what is intricate. They often say they could produce this so-called modern art themselves—well, go on with it! Who said you couldn’t? They could do it, they say, they just never get around to it.

Ironically, they are the ones who lack magic, but also search more for magic in the work than anyone else. The error is that there exists no magical art. What little magic there is! We need not make a mystery out of art or being an artist, yet that is what they demand and that is the source of their disappointment. They want their abracadabra moment, but it is nowhere to be found. They want the bunny out of the hat, but there is no bunny nor hat. Just an array of colors and form that refuse to hold the hand of the viewer. I think it is the philistine that wants more from art than anyone because they find so little in it.

This is a matter of ignorance born out of not only expectation, but also a brew of distrust, patriotism, impatience and an arrogance of their own doing. It is true that some artists try to integrate magic into their works (by use of special effects, lights, anything with a punchline), and this type of work is most immediately impressive to the novice or the philistine. It is like feeding sugar to a child, roast beef to a canine.

Nowadays, it is so often the patriot types that lay into modern art so damningly, so spitefully. I wish it could be explained to them that if they are interested in patriotism, in the things that America has produced, modern American art should be nearer to the top of the list, rather than take a space beneath the lowly American productions of the modern Hollywood hero film, the empty pop song, or the disastrous American diet, all of which can now be found worldwide. Many modern artists were not American, their art however, is.

The philistine cannot separate art and money. They cannot believe the prices that are paid for some works. Particularly, what they call “Modern” art, which they so often conflate with mere absurdity. Art that is complex or abstract is often thrown in the modern art bin. Just like those, in concern with painting, often think there is abstract painting, and then “real” painting. Abstract painting, to them, is used as a slur. But money and art—it should not concern anyone.

For one, most works do not sell for much money. In fact, most works do not sell at all. The philistines go straight to the highest auction houses, full of billionaires, and that is where they draw their ire. Yes, the market place of the art world is as corrupted as the sale of high-grade weaponry and explosives, narcotics and exotic cars.

Yes, it is disgusting.

But the rich have always had their excesses when they enter into any market looking to buy! This has little to do with the artist as a whole. Nothing to do with the dreamer, the one who sees the impossible, who is searching for something perhaps unattainable, but perhaps within the near grasp of the poet and the explorer. Art is not pulling anything over on you, it is trying to do the opposite.

How many babies will you throw out with the bathwater of the auction house? You throw away the meat of the steak and then complain about the bones. I say money and art are opposites, only related by their unrelatedness. That once a picture goes up for sale at an auction house, and the price is known to all, the painting itself, to the philistine, is dead. It no longer functions as art, but functions as evidence of its unholy, ungodly price tag. It functions as evidence of the disastrous state of man. Of course, this has nothing to do with the art itself, nor the artist who created it.

Yet, it is the artist that gets kicked in the groin, whether or not the artist is alive or long dead a century ago. You’d burn all of art, just to get at back at the auction house.

What should a person do when looking at a painting, then? I think it is not to say, instantly, whether it is good or bad. It is to hear the artist confirm, essentially, their life, their will to live. That is,“I am alive—I have dreamed. I have seen visions that are horrendous and mystifying, beautiful and vague. I see possibilities within myself and perhaps I see them in you, too. You may therefore see them in yourself as well!”

The philistine is not all that much worse than the commentator. Particularly the commentators on art, music and culture that have no skin in the game. No dirt under the fingernails, no bruises or injuries. “He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch”, says Godard. Bravo, Jean-Luc! One ought to practice a craft of some sort, mostly, to be an artist. I say mostly because life can be lived so intentionally and so creatively that one could, with enough effort, make their lifestyle into an art form.

For me, it is the highest form. And these crafts are relatable, if not interchangeable to some degree. A pianist is infinitely more able to comment on the trumpet stylings of Miles Davis. A photographer much more able to comment on the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, etc. But if one has never banged the keys, then I find their disappointment in other areas of music irrelevant. If one has not attempted a sketch, your criticisms of Picasso are likely nullified. There is the rare soul who makes no art, their art is their life—they can comment on anything.

One could argue that the most a philistine or a commentator could say is “I don’t like this”. One might even respond to that by saying “fair enough”. But even this is irksome. Particularly in painting, there is a saying— “good painting rewards long looking”. This is not just an acute phrase on the individual staring at a painting for an extended period of time. The good in painting rewards a (chronic) lifetime of long looking. The “looking” is extended over decades, even centuries, if it can be! And so, the song rewards long listening—that is to say a lifetime of listening. This is the genesis of the righteous phrase, “acquired taste”. First impressions are all the philistine has. Introductory handshakes, no long friendships.

One does not look at a Rothko and say “squares”, or a Jackson Pollock and say “webs”. Rothko rewards painters. Pollock, too. This is true of most abstract expressionism. Painterly as they were, you would scarcely find an individual who could find these paintings more rewarding than the painter.

Why? Because the painter is invested and also understanding of the brush. The bristles of the brush, the fluidity and viscosity of the paint, the intrigue and subtle beauty that is raw canvas.

These are all painterly concerns. It has nothing to do with art! This is NOT a way of saying that painting should only be understood and therefore only valued by painters. It is to suggest that the “long looking” of the viewer is typically behind the painter, and one must try (!) to understand these elements before mocking the works. You are only mocking yourself. Painters who paint before they look are mocking themselves as well, provided they enter into a market with dollar-sign eyes.

Anyways, many people are still confused about Jackson Pollock, though his paintings are from the forties and fifties. We don’t do this with Elvis or Glenn Miller, or anything else. This is a victory for Pollock. A century later, Pollock still befuddles!

Art is a description with no name. A ghostly voice from within a cage which it destroys just as it emerges from it.

It is the spirit of attempting to live timelessly. To go forward and backwards in time from the fixed position of the artist’s birth. It is a disruptor of language, sense and even humanity itself. Art, therefore, is not conservative. It is liberal by nature. It is liberal because its essence is newness.

Art does not necessarily liberate the viewer. The act of creating seeks to liberate the artist, and to suggest to the viewer that they can be liberated, too. Its essence is to break from tradition, always moving forward. One must be able to destroy their predecessors in paint, language, rhythm, syntax, etc.

The modern conservative regularly sees art as a darling of the left. When they mock it, they are speaking politics.

The conservative philistine and the activist walk hand in hand in the darkness of the corridor. Any dart thrown in the corridor is to slap the face of Venus. The Girl with The Pearl Earring is an activist. Mona Lisa a feminist. David a patriarch. Art is being used as a tool, at best, by the philistines and activists. As a mechanism by which political forces are waged or humiliated. One side’s art may humiliate the other, and vice versa.

Art is made for liberation, despite the topics du jour, the overtone window, etc. Art has left some behind, mostly because of the verbiage. I can take up for the conservatives because they feel much of art is popularized by the jesters. True. There is art I would like to piss on. But I still must take up for it. It may be crap, but once one gets started burning books, etc., all speech is at stake.

So, it all goes… Because we have politicized everything. We have politicized ourselves right into the ground. The contents of the heart, style of dress, is political. Breakfast is political. Granola and berries—or grilled ham and biscuits? (you have already decided politically!) As for the leftist activists in the arts, I think the writer Conor Fitzgerald said it quite well, probably the best it could be put:

“…I don’t think it’s noted enough that when given the highest priority, activism is fundamentally philistine, anti-thought and anti-art. “Cancellations”, whether attempted or successful, often reflect this. Nothing is less useful and therefore more hateful to activists than thought and expression, unrestrained and for their own sake. In practice, activism must always narrow, prune, and close off paths - how else to force everyone to the right conclusion?”

-Conor Fitzgerald, Missionary Ignorance.

Quite right. And those activists, of course, are not liberal at all.

Art is still looking, searching, fighting for its life. The stories humans tell, the instinct to write poetry and music is fighting just as hard and long and still is doing so, just as hard and long as man has fought for its right to exist among the cosmos.

Artificial Intelligence threatens this.

Art was always hanging by a thread; it is miraculous we still have it. There is no “art”, only art. Except when made by a computer. We are so prone to call it now, A.I., that we may miss the signal—Artificial. Intelligence. What more does one need to know! We have barely scraped the surface of authentic intelligence.

We have plumbed the bottom of the barrel, however, in cleverness. Artificial Intelligence is humanity’s new toy. It is humans being clever with themselves. And we will not be spared our toys that distract from the banal existence that is summed up by the phrase “contemporary life”.

We are estranged from one another. We are stupefied in busy work. We take little time for leisure, for playing silly—just being. So, I fully expect man to go on playing with his new toys, making artificial art, artificial music, artificial speeches for an increasingly artificial lifestyle of artificial people. We humans have so much that is artificial, why not our intelligence?

However, we have an infinite amount of superficiality and an infinite amount of authenticity. The problem is that our superficiality is often authentic, and our authenticity is often superficial. But these things have always been in a flux, relating and corresponding through unknown channels. We have the power, if we could only find the will, to keep moving along the lines of authenticity.

Look, now, at your fingertips. One could do many things with the fingers and the hand. One could caress a cheek or build a bomb, make something true and timeless, or something that is fake. But the fingertips are crucial. The hand is crucial. It is your connective tissue to the rest of the world. It is where you end and the world begins and therefore where the two exchange in creating. Man’s authenticity is in our fingertips. The eye of course is for perceiving, but the mind and fingertips are for making. You can rub the grit of life between the fingers and feel the very fiber and jetsam of your existence. I encourage this—it is wonderful.

The artist seeks comfort but also discomfort. Pain and pleasure. Easy to say, as these opposites are also quite obscure, not easily separated. One might think that writers like to write. They must! But it is painful. I don’t say “I like to write”, because I do not. It is simply a juxtaposition of pain. One juxtaposes the pain of not writing with the pain of writing. I feel the pain of not writing to be more. The day when I cease to write is the day that “not writing” is no longer painful. Then I will stop with this and simply read, or even better, watch cartoons. I don’t think I will ever stop painting. It is more meditative, in a sense.

You poets, musicians, painters—how disastrous your work can be! What a folly. A farce! Smile through it. You can laugh at yourself and laugh at your work. Oh, the nights I would work until early morning on a picture, only to swipe it away in one violent motion. To go to bed with a wet masterpiece glowing in the corner, only to wake up to find a dry mud pie…

Your cruddy paintings, your pretentious poems, your mild heartache, your delusion, your silly sketches and such—wonder you can still stand! I stand there with you! But solitude and isolation are our slave masters, our despots, our tyrants, our Valentine cards, our first kiss, our first loves. I am speaking of myself! I cannot be there for you but if you’d like to cry then I will sit and cry with you. It is all that I can offer. Not much, but I can cry at will. It is always there; the faucet just needs a jiggle…

Among many things, Modern Humanity has to contend with much. The relentless creation of billionaires. The world’s water supply. Countless wars. The protection of children from politics (please spare them!). Also, our relationship with animals. Man also has to contend with opinions and facts.

Opinions are more damning.

Picasso is largely an opinion, war and hell on Earth are both facts. Love, a fact. Hate, an opinion! Whatever comes our way, artists have mechanisms. Inside the chambers of the heart, the fingertips, the candle in the rib cage. You have the mechanisms whether you sell a painting or not, whether anyone gives a damn or not. Nobody can set you free.

Only you can.

If I had the keys to your cell, I would let you rot! Only in knowing that in due time, you will find your own keys and the prison bars are an illusion. Only in knowing what we both know—there is no cell, no prison bars. Only the jail that man has made for itself. Artist’s fashion their own keys to unlock a new horizon.

About the collective and the individual, groups are generally no good. We are learning this at the pace of ruptured snail, but we are learning. Of course, there will always be groups. It cannot be helped. Theoretical groups, hypothetical groups, conceptual groups real and imagined. Conspiratorial and evangelical, political, religious, atheistic.

But you stand against this! You must.

Not because you have any chance of winning in a fight. Not because there is a vague sense that destiny is yours. If destiny is yours, it is yours alone. You do it because somebody ought to. The reason to provide evidence of the self is self-evident. You fend off Orwell’s boot on the face, the computer, populist sludge. You fend off Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler. Every stroke is an act of courage. Every poem is the rebellious spirit belching out its own arhythmic gospel. It is the assertion of the self. The self, not the person, above all else.

And this is what the art students of today so often get wrong. Their one crucial mistake. They want to make it a club. Well, we may not be in a group. We may not be friends—but not enemies!

The artist is nothing more than an individual. The painting and the poem and the song are testaments to this fact. They can be perceived as windows, mirrors, doors to other realms. They can lead to the chamber of the heart or appeal to the mind. The song can allow the blind to see as the painting can allow the deaf to hear, finally. The poem can awaken the dead. The scrawl on the cave wall can speak to the future just as our new technology can illuminate the canals of the past.

No one will make a statue of you—you are your own statue. You must carve yourself out of stone.

You need not do any explaining; your work is enough. You need not feel like a fraud, just get back to work. You need not work always, remember to play. You are building your own statue by the minute. I cannot say where, but it will be erected somewhere. In the long corridor of man, with the rotten produce, greasy fingerprints, bullet holes, naked dangling lightbulbs, raging fires, there is a portrait of your own making—fact! Destiny is yours and yours alone!

It is late now and I think perhaps I should end the letter here. I have not said all I wish to, no doubt. But there is tomorrow for that if something else comes to mind. The sun is rising, it is so late. Or, should I say, it is getting early. Earlier by the minute…

With gratitude and lots of luck,

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Judson Vereen, author (Like a Bird Knows To Sing, 62 Poems, American Pleasure) and artist. Pursuits include painting, film, music and poetry. Drawing from the New York School and the abstract expressionists, Vereen creates brooding, emotional works that function as the artist's living diary. He is currently working on several book projects, including Notes on a Full Life, a biography of his father Henry Stacy Vereen. He is currently directing a feature-length film in collaboration with his wife, who he lives with in Brazil. Vereen is also a contributor to The Art Districts.
You can find more of his work on Substack in his publication, Dispatches from Bohemian Splendor.