SmArts

July 7-13, 2014

Local art for tourists

By Molly Rector

molly@dailydata.com

I’m visiting a small town on the Eastern shore of Lake Michigan. It’s one of several similar towns along this lake that does such an uncanny impersonation of an ocean. Of course, most of the year, significant swaths of these towns are boarded up against the aggressive weather characteristic of the region. These are towns that make their living during vacation season peddling ice cream to the tourists who weave in and out of the antique shops and local art galleries that inevitably make up the heart of their commercial districts. 

I’m always interested in the flavor of the local art that makes up galleries in small towns like these. It seems that because the tourist industry in these places is so heavily reliant on the landscape, the art available to tourists generally also relies on the landscape. Visiting a little town called Pentwater (a few miles from Ludington, where I’m staying), I had the opportunity to visit several galleries, and while each had some lovely, original work (in most cases, the ceramics were beautiful and compelling), each also seemed to have variations on the same kind of work: watercolor seascapes (lakescapes?), paintings of lighthouses, that kind of thing. 

While there isn’t anything inherently wrong with watercolor seascapes and paintings of lighthouses, seeing so many works like these, it seemed clear to me that many of these works were hanging in these galleries not because they were meant to be works of art (in the high-brow, challenging sense of the term), but because they were meant to sell to out-of-towners who aren’t used to seeing large bodies of water and all the associated accouterments (seagulls, dune grass, lighthouses, sailboats). 

I wonder, keeping this in mind, how much (if at all) dependence on tourists as clients prevents these artists from pursuing more original kinds of work. It makes a certain kind of sense to me that work geared toward any particular clientele would stymy an artist’s creative process. Knowing that the work has to sell, and has to sell in a really limited market, places clear limitations on artistic elements ranging from subject-matter to style to size of the work. Of course it’s possible that these artists really do, deep down, want to paint lighthouses (I certainly wish I could paint anything that complex), but I can’t help imagining the art in tiny towns like these, where the tourist industry doesn’t dictate the subject matter of the art.