A reader congratulates Matt on the opening of the showplace for the future Dali-Lamb Museum in Chicago.  Is it important, the reader asks, for an artist to live to see their work acquired into a museum’s permanent collection?

Matt responds:

I believe it was my friend and art mentor Simone Nathan who said, “Most artists aren’t recognized until they’re long in their graves—and there are some art critics who won’t even look at an artist until they’ve been dead 25 or 50 years.”

So I think everything is selective.I used to think there was a lot of what I called “bullshit art.”  I went to museums and saw ripped canvases with nothing on them, and then I would look at traditional Balinese paintings and carvings where every inch, every micro-inch, was painted with minute detail.

One side of me, the materialistic sense, thought that if someone were to buy a painting of mine on canvas, I’d want to spend as much time as I possibly could decorating it with my figures, because it costs that much, and people should get their money’s worth.

The other part of me is saying, “I’m going to tear this canvas up, and if you don’t like it, stick it!”

So I saw with my own flawed judgment at the time that if these are all acceptable in a museum, then everything from one side to the other is acceptable.

Who makes the decision?  I believe that’s probably a great discussion in a school of art.

As far as I’m concerned, I don’t know and frankly, I don’t care.

I think most decisions are made politically.  The political decision always seems to come down to “Me me me me me me me...  What do I like?  If everybody likes it and I don’t, then I’m the door keeper!  It make me feel more powerful!”

If it’s a dedicated museum, I would expect that if I walk into the Picasso Museum I’ll see all Picassos.  And then you have great scholars of Picasso discussing everything he did, why he named it what he named it, why he chose the colors he chose...  It’s a great way to spend your life.  It gives people something to do.

Because of my lack of knowledge, I don’t know what the touchstones are, but I must say as I go into museums, people wander about, supposedly haphazardly but probably gravitating toward that which they most love.

Why does everyone go to see the Mona Lisa?  So they can go home and crow that they saw it.  Or Michelangelo’s David.  Does that, after a while, become the thing itself?  You went to the Grand Canyon and saw it, you went to Niagra Falls and watched the water fall over it.  Does that make you more powerful?

I think all of that is tied into the museum.

We’re in the process of opening Dali-Lamb Museums, and there are historians writing about the philosophies of Dali and Lamb.  They claim that aspects of the points of view and imagery complement one another.

I’m not qualified to speculate on that, although as a layman, before I got into the arts, I looked on Dali as very bizarre character.  Maybe that’s why we’re soulmates.

Matt