"Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth..."But at least they didn't steal Bob Dylan's art. Too bad the same can'tbe said for Dylan when it came to liberating other artists' work.Since a show of his paintings recently opened at Manhattan's GagosianGallery, it's come to the art world's attention that these picturesmay not be on the up and up.
The show in question is simply called "The Asia Series."Based on the musician's recent trip to the Far East, the work wasbilled as a reflection on what he saw and felt. However, the imageryin the actual paintings has been directly linked to the work ofvarious photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson. Truth beknown, Dylan's pictures reproduce the photos verbatim. This is notwhat the art experience is supposed to be about.
While some may claim his usage of photographs can belinked to the Photorealist movement, Dylan is cutting corners. Duringthe late 1960s and early 1970s, a new art movement was launched;Photorealism. Artists, including Chuck Close, Richard Estes, andCharles Bell, relied on photographs as springboards to create theirpaintings. But these Photorealists took their own photographs. So inessence, even though these artists "copied" photographs, they werestill capturing their initial vision. In Estes's case, he focused onthe urban landscape and how reflections, which appeared in storefrontwindows, twisted and distorted themselves into highly abstractcompositions. Charles Bell painted close-ups of gumball machines andtheir contents; multi-color spheres interspersed with the occasionaltoy surprise. Chuck Close mined facial portraiture, exposing withexcruciating detail the sitter's pores, freckles, and wrinkles. Theseworks provided the viewer with a fresh look at the visual world thatsurrounds us. Great art gets you to view your environment in new ways.When that occurs, you feel alive.
What Bob Dylan did was take someone else's photograph,copy the imagery onto a canvas, and then pass it off as a genuinecreative gesture. Yes, in theory, Dylan did bring some of himself tothe work by the physical act of painting the pictures. Still, there'snothing authentic about not thinking for yourself. Whether it waslaziness or lack of confidence in his ability to crossover from onecreative field to another, a la Julian Schnabel, Dylan couldn't comeup with his own iconography.
It's hard to make good art. Works of art, that survive thetest of time, are made by painters who perfect their craft overdecades and have something original to say that reflects their lifeexperiences and the times they live in. At the end of the day, it'sabout fabricating work that has a soul. Until Bob Dylan is prepared toput the same effort into his painting, that he has put into hisindisputably brilliant music, better that he stick to hissong-writing. As he once so famously stated, "To live outside the law,you must be honest."
Richard Polsky is the author of the forthcoming book The Art Prophets,which includes a chapter on Photorealism, to be released by OtherPress on October 25th.