The bias of a saeculum towards a specific artform

[Bob Butler 54]

(05-16-2016, 11:00 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: It's the canvas, the sculpture, or the mobile that is the rightful focus, and not the artist who is the rightful focus. The artist as star, as if he were John Wayne or Jack Nicholson (or to be more gender-neutral, Katharine Hepburn or Lauren Bacall) is a 20th-century phenomenon that we may tire of. Maybe we go back to primitives for clarity and lack of pretense. A bit of abstraction might make things interesting.

It started before the 20th Century.  See Sarah Bernhardt, Jenny Lind and maybe Lillie Langtry.  It might perhaps go further back than that, but without big media, easy travel, the ability to record performances and other technological factors, the true superstars or might have been superstars of older times are forgotten.

There is also the link between the great actors / actresses and their audience.  Many, John Wayne might be a good example, develop a well known persona that resonates well with the audience.  The performer ends up cast as playing variants of that persona repeatedly, a persona that resonates very well with a given time and place.  I don't really expect this playing to the audience to go away with cultures being real and media being able to spread a style of performance so easily.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, an artist in tune with his audience and an audience who knows what it wants from a performer aren't negligible factors.