'The Culmination of Contemporary Economism'

For half a century my brother earned his living making picture frames, some of which were themselves works of art. In later years he relied more on accounts with hotel chains and the glass office buildings in downtown Cleveland. Frames for these corporate accounts he called “cookie-cutter,” assembled as they often were from prefabricated kits. Profitable but dull, and he raged against them while accepting their checks. For the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame he framed hundreds of photos, documents and ephemera. 

Ken was also an artist manqué – a painter and collagist. His work hangs in our bedroom and office. In the seventies, he began signing all his of serious work on the back, sometimes concealing his name, the date and a brief weather report. (“Sunny, high of 75.”) You can look around online and see samples of his work. It’s often satirical or drily funny. His work reminds me sometimes of Glen Baxter’s, but with a raunchy, occasionally savage streak. My nephew is collecting the paintings, drawings and collages – hundreds of them, sometimes painted on scraps of lumber -- that Ken left in his apartment, shop and elsewhere. He sold a few over the years but refused to “market” himself. Most of his pictures are too good to throw away or stick in a storage unit and wait for someone else to throw away.

 

Ken was always confident of his aesthetic tastes. His favorite artist was probably Albrecht Dürer. He hated the fashion-driven art world. In his own idiosyncratic way he was a Midwestern aesthete.  

 

He was delighted years ago when I introduced him to the great Colombian aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila, known as Don Colacho. Ken would have cheered at this observation: “It has required a titanic effort to make the modern world so ugly.”

And this: “The evolution of works of art into objects of art and of objects of art into investments or into articles for consumption is a modern phenomenon. A process that does not evidence a diffusion of the aesthetic, but rather the culmination of contemporary economism.”