Alternative Visions to Denver Airport NWO Murals
ARC Philosophy Chapter II: (page 2 of 5)
Good Art/Bad Art - Pulling Back the Curtain,
by Fred Ross
http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/2001 ... d_art2.asp
DURING MOST OF THE 20TH CENTURY, the type of propaganda that has been hurled at academic artists is so insidious that people have been literally trained to discredit, out-of-hand, any work containing well-crafted figures or elements, or any other evidence of technical mastery. All the beauty and subtlety of emotions, -- interplay of composition, design and theme, -- the interlacing of color, tone and mood, -- are never seen. The viewer has been taught that academic painting on a prima facie basis is bad by definition -- bad by virtue of its resorting to the use of human figures, themes or stories and objects from the real world.
Prestige suggestion causes them to automatically assume that a work must be great if it's by any of the "big names" of modern art, so they at once start looking for reasons why it must be proclaimed great. Any failing to find greatness is not considered a failing in the art but in the intelligence and sensibilities of the viewer. Students operating under that kind of intimidating pressure, you can be sure, will find greatness - no matter what they are looking at.
The reverse of this has been trained into them when they view academic paintings. They have been taught that works exhibiting realistic rendering are "bad art" and therefore any good that is seen is not due to qualities inherent in their artistic accomplishments, but are rather due to a lack of intelligence and taste in the viewer. The same intimidating pressure works in reverse to ensure that a work by Bouguereau, Lord Leighton, Burne-Jones, Gérôme, Frederick Hart, or any of the rest of you here, will not be seen as anything other than bad by definition.
No student in a school with this kind of dictatorial brain-washing will ever risk exploring or even listening to opposing views, for fear of being stigmatized from that point on, with some undesirable label and being universally despised ... sadly, a very effective deterrent to independent thought. Thus the visual experience of well-drawn representational elements is perceived as a negative, ad hominem, that proves with knee-jerk automaticity the presumed "badness" of the art and its creator.
It is especially ironic that these are the same people who trumpet the virtues and inalienable right to freedom of speech, while they surreptitiously and steadfastly conspire to remove that freedom from those with whom they disagree.
Equally ironic is the charge that academic painting is "uninspired," a proclamation issued by critics who are unable to see beyond the technical virtuosity for which they condemn it, to see what is being said. This rich visual language is wasted on eyes that will not see. It would be no different than dismissing out-of-hand a piece of music as soon as it was determined that notes, chords and keys were used, or dismissing any work of literature upon noticing words arranged in grammatically correct sentences.
That is not to say that all academic art is great, or above criticism - certainly, it is not. It would be no less fallacious to issue blanket praise to an entire category than to condemn it. Academic painting ranges from brilliantly conceived and deeply inspired, to trite and silly, depending on the subject and the artist.
That being said, I find even the worst of it more meaningful than art based on the ridiculous notion that it is somehow important to prove the canvas is flat, and/or that one needs no skill or technique to be an artist - views generally embraced by those who condemn the entire category of academic art. Their point seems to be to elevate to legitimacy that which has removed all standards and prior defining characteristics of art. In other words, by defining non-art as art, the logical conclusion is that art is non-art.
Modern artists are told that they must create something totally original. Nothing about what they do can ever have been done before in any way shape or form, otherwise they risk being called "derivative". How utterly absurd.
These critics like to say Bouguereau's work is really only derivative, harking back to earlier artists. Only in the 20th century has such a thing ever been scorned. To this I have one thing to say:
WHAT, dear friends, IS WRONG WITH BEING DERIVATIVE?
That's one of the core beliefs of modernism that must be soundly vanquished by common sense and logical analysis. Nobody can accomplish anything of merit if they are in fact not derivative. Only by mastering the accomplishments of the past and then adding to it can we go still further. Every other field of endeavor recognizes this truth. Without the knowledge of the past we are doomed to everlasting primitivism.
And, as far as holding our works up to the old masters, that's what we want to have happen. If we are to accomplish things of true merit and excellence, we must germinate and nurture great masters in the next millennium, too. Bouguereau was quite aware that his work would be compared on the altar of past accomplishments, as did his contemporaries. It was precisely because they mastered the techniques of the past, built upon them and then opened them up to an avalanche of new subject matter and Enlightenment ideals, that they accomplished the greatest half-century of painting in art history.
The word derivative comes from the word derive, or to come from, not to copy. Bouguereau, Lord Leighton, Alma-Tadema, Gérôme, Vibert, Burne-Jones, etc. did not copy the art of earlier eras, but they most certainly derived from the prior schools. Many of the methods of learning the skills of drawing, modeling, perspective, composition, the sourcing and preparing of pigments, canvas preparation, paint application etc., were developed before them.
Michelangelo, you could also say, was derivative of Donatello, whose David was sculpted decades before. Leonardo and Raphael were derivative of Giotto and Roger Vander Weyden. All of 17th century Dutch art built on the breakthroughs of the High Renaissance, which itself derived from the accomplishments of the early renaissance. Praxiteles in ancient Greece most certainly derived much technique and knowledge from those sculptors who came during the centuries before him. All we really care about today is that he did it the best.
met Mick Jagger because as Richards said in rolling stone interview, the government had decided, at that time, to give art training to the proles - although richards seemed to be very tough but with a real working class sense of fairness as seen in Marianne Faithful's portrait of him in her autobiography and richards mention having to avoid the bicycle chains in school and kind of distanced himself from too much emotion by saying that when the school offered art training to those who wanted it he said yeah, I'll draw naked ladies rather than sit in class but the UK certainly benefitted financial despite the tax refugees and in terms of status and tourism from the artistic partnerships that came from these meetings in art class for the workingclass.
