In business, we are told, location (and its close-cousin, presentation) is everything. The business of selling or presenting art is no different. Rich, recession-proof patrons will fly a thousand miles and spend unseemly amounts of money to purchase art in meccas like New York or Los Angeles, even though the work they are purchasing might have been made down the street and available there for a lot less money and carbon expenditure. Some patrons have what Joyce Wadler terms “art anxiety,” a condition that drives its sufferers to pay consultants healthy sums to insure that their art is OK, that it was bought at the right galleries and that they won’t be embarrassed to show it to their friends. Recession-prone middle America is equally susceptible to the subtle powers of presentation. Send them to another city on business or pleasure and they are likely to spend some time (and money) walking quietly and respectfully past whatever art exhibit the local Art Center or Museum has seen fit to hang. But, as I learned recently, put a museum masterpiece in the wrong location and it will go virtually ignored; and place an intriguing cultural artifact under spotlights and on a nicely painted wall and you’ll have transformed it into art.

Recently, after nearly three years of others’ planning, many months of my hoping the whole thing would just fade away, and a few quick minutes of packing, I went on my first cruise.[1] With my in-laws. All thirteen of them.

Applying my late grandfather’s advice about marriage (a marriage counselor for years, he said all marital problems could be reduced to one essential problem: unmet expectations; the key to a happy marriage, he told me, was to lower one’s expectations, something I’ve been helping my wife do for close to 14 years), I lowered my expectations for the cruise to zero. I expected to have nothing to do, to be surrounded by my in-laws and to be completely bored.

Consequently, when we had to stay in Miami a day prior to the cruise I didn’t try to fulfill my own desires, running around town visiting museums and galleries or family art collections. Mine would be an art-free vacation, which, the more I thought about it, didn’t seem such a bad idea anyway.

What happened on the cruise, then, came as a surprise. The next day, waiting for our room to be prepared and our luggage delivered, I sat in the Celebrity Century’s Island Café. When my eyes, performing what is now an involuntary reaction, scanned the walls for visuals (poorly decorated walls can make me nauseated but bare walls can make me positively claustophobic) they landed on a long, colorful, oversized work hanging above the already-sunburned faces of a middle age couple in leisureware. Rather than a badly reproduced poster of a badly executed painting (what I think of as visual Muzak and what you find in most hotels), behind this couple about to embark upon “the cruise of a lifetime” appeared to be a six-foot long reproduction of a James Rosenquist. When a smartly dressed waiter quickly and deftly removed trays and glasses after the departure of the aforementioned couple, I idled over for a closer work. It wasn’t a Rosenquist reproduction afterall. It was an original.

I assumed this quirk of interior decorating must be some strange anomaly, possibly the result of the ship’s captain having inherited the work from an eccentric relative and, not knowing what it was, and not wanting to hang it in his own stateroom, having placed it in the café. As I entered the formal restaurant for dinner that evening, however, I saw that the foyer was graced with a Rauschenberg. And when I exited dinner, I noted two Warhols standing guard on either end of the aft stairs. For the next three days I spent spare moments (between the six meals a day, two quick shore excursions, a few unsatisfying games of Ping-Pong and quick dips in the two, small, salt-watered pools shared by over a thousand people) swaying from aft to fore and starboard to port, checking out the art. Which was everywhere, from the tenement housing on deck 4, where my own stateroom was located, to the Penthouse on deck 12. Warhol, Johns, Rauschenberg, Frankenthaler, Rosenquist. [2] Most of them, admittedly, works on paper.[3] From what I could tell, though, all of this art was going unnoticed. During the four days at sea I saw not one of my cruisemates stopping to take a closer look at a work.

A barbershop in Mondesa, a township outside of Swakopmund

These same cruisemates sat annoyed, and eventually indignant, when delays caused by the United States Navy meant that we could only spend a few hours in our first stop, Key West, a place whose principal attractions seem to be looking at the inbred cats at Ernest Hemingway’s house, eating overpriced key-lime pie and going to what-was-once-but-hasn’t-been-for-half-a-century, the southernmost point of the United Sates. I imagine that had the ship’s art collection been on display at the Key West Museum of Art and History, [4] located a few paces from our ship’s point of disembarkation, many of my cruisemates would have waited in line and shelled out $20 to see the pieces. They would have been quiet, would have read the carefully prepared exhibition materials and would have returned home feeling cultured.

When I came home (pleasantly surprised by the outcome of the cruise — thank you grandpa), I stopped by to see Travis Tanner at Tanner Frames. While there, Trent Alvey, fairly recently returned from her own travels, walked in and the three of us discussed the upcoming exhibition of works by Namibian sign painter William Daniel, organized by Trent and hosted by Tanner Frames (opening Friday, May 16). Trent met Daniel, who specializes in barbershop signs, when she went to Africa a few years ago. Their friendship has grown during Trent’s annual visits to the country with her husband, Dennis. This year, the couple brought back paintings by Daniel for an exhibition of folk or outsider art, in hopes of raising money for his college fund.

In an art age overloaded with concept, the outsider artist appeals to us for their simple, unpretentious, unadulterated enthusiasm for making images. That’s not to say that Daniel is some sort of compulsive visual idiot savant, the type of outsider artist the art world tends to embrace. He is a craftsman, making commercial products typical of his culture (much like the guild artists of the early Renaissance). He lives in a poor country. He wants to go to college, and Trent and Dennis want to help him. Originally created for commercial purposes and generally appearing on ramshackle huts, or hung from a tree, barber shop signs like Daniels’ have received attention in museums and galleries in the United States. And now Daniels’ paintings will be measured, hung and straightened on freshly painted walls and under spotlights.

Once under those spotlights, these works will demand a closer (different) look. They will ask the question, “Are we art?” They do have a certain charm. Picasso famously appropriated the artifacts of Africa and made them part of his own personal style. The stylistic elements that charmed Picasso, can still be found in Africa, even in these barbershop signs by Daniel and others like him. Look at the almond eyes, the multiple perspectives. In one piece you see the face from at least two angles. It looks straight on, but at the same time, we can see the lines on the back of the neck. Luckily these stylistic elements are not hindered by the self-consciousness of an art-school grad.

These pieces will not enter the canon (if, indeed there will be one in the future). They are not part of the contemporary “conversation.” They weren’t even made as “art.” But in an art world, where, in Arthur Danto’s words, “everything goes,” sign paintings like these become art. As long as they are hung in the right place. And a Rosenquist or a Warhol, hung in the wrong place, becomes visual Muzak.

[1] Any resemblance between this essay and David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” including this use of footnotes, is purely intentional. Every time I mentioned the impending cruise to a friend, they said “Have you read David Foster Wallace on cruises?” I hadn’t, and chose not to until after I returned home. Which was a smart decision. The essay is fabulous, but I doubt it would have helped me with the cheery disposition I managed to maintain for the duration of the cruise.

[2] They even had Picasso, Chagall and other modernists. Once again, works on paper. These were later part of a special Art Auction, where the Picasso hung next to a Thomas Kinkaide.

[3]I learned, only after returning home, that all the new Century cruise lines were decked out with top class art collections, each in excess of 1.5 million. Self-guided audio tours were even available at guest services.

[4]What was at the Museum, at least in its gardens, were three grossly-sized sculptural interpretations of famous paintings: Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” van Gogh’s “Woman of Arles,” and Matisse’s “Dance II.”

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.