05-16-2016, 11:00 PM
Art exists because people do art. People do art because such is their nature. Art as a celebration of the artist by the artist -- practically a definition of narcissism -- will become irrelevant. One wisely refrains from baring one's inner life unless such is worthy of expression.
Do you really want to take a voyage not simply into your interior, but instead deep into someone else's interior?In view of the paintings of Vincent, I'm not sure that I want to. Maybe I prefer to see into something else. Maybe to see how fragile something once sturdy (let us say a barn more than a century old) truly is as a relic of itself in better times.
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.
Do you really want to take a voyage not simply into your interior, but instead deep into someone else's interior?In view of the paintings of Vincent, I'm not sure that I want to. Maybe I prefer to see into something else. Maybe to see how fragile something once sturdy (let us say a barn more than a century old) truly is as a relic of itself in better times.
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.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.