A Bear – Poles Apart

A piece of art is always original. If it isn’t, it’s a copy and not itself an art. It may still be beautiful, inspiring and thought provoking, but the artistic value would be referring back to the original. A person who copies a piece of art is not an artist.

These precepts are very much understood today, so much so that it has become an obsession. More than anything, the contemporary artist seems to fear doing something that has already been done. There must be originality in everything about a work, not only its execution, not only its message, but the form of art itself.  In its extreme consequence the artist avoids using material that others have used, refrains from any known method of creation and invents for himself a brand-new genre every time he sits down to produce.

Modern art is a crazy quest for originality, and that is based on a misunderstanding. Art must be original, true, but there’s no need for originality in form and language. One is allowed to express one’s ideas by means of well-tried methods. In fact, there is an obvious advantage to using a language that both the artist and the viewer are familiar with. If a new system of expression is used every time, it’s difficult to comprehend it and assess the quality of the work.

Of course, art must not be easily accessible, but it is rather unnecessary to create difficulties that don’t add anything to the artistic value. Why set up barriers if nothing is gained from them? It’s nice to speak another language, but if speaker and listener already share a jargon, why not use that one?

In the classical period of any art, one style was practiced by most performers; it was repeated, and then perfected, and wonderful art arose. The originality was not in the genre but in the single masterpiece.

Modern art has its masterpieces, but the craze for originality also paves the way for charlatans.

An art revolution was started when one day in 1917 a joker exhibited a urinal at a gallery. Was that art or was it not? If it was then all kinds of wild and crazy objects must be allowed and those traditional items, the dull paintings and plain statues would be squeezed out in the evolutionary process of survival of the fanciest.

Everyone didn’t agree and there are still conservative painters and sculptors laboring in the old trade, but there is a dominant notion in contemporary art that the choice of objects must always be original and so the boundaries of what is admitted to the fashionable art world is ever expanding. In that process, what has already been done quickly passes into history; it remains interesting, but it cannot be repeated for art must perpetually reinvent itself, it seems.

For a thousand years ancient Egyptian artists kept drawing human shapes in profile. In medieval time church paintings were being reproduced throughout centuries. After the renaissance the artistic periods were shorter, but art history was still a slow river leisurely developing without violent interruptions. But then that darn urinal blasted it all.

Of course, that silly object was nothing special, only the question it asked: What is art? And for a century now the leading force in artistic development has been the attempt to answer that question. But really, does it need to be answered?

It’s certainly important to know what a word means before we can talk about it, and therefore all words need definitions, but that is usually a problem dictionary authors and philosophers struggle with. It wouldn’t be the business of an artist to define anything, even art itself, any more than it’s the business of a shoemaker to define shoes.

The artist, or whatever he’s called, should make whatever he finds interesting, and whether or not someone wants to give it that prestigious name of art, should be irrelevant.

Duchamp’s urinal was not art according to the definition of 1917, but according to today’s definition, it probably is. So what? The piece was not interesting in itself back then any more than it is now. Ask not if something is art. Look at it if it’s interesting.

Art is the expression of our time. It is often said so, and it is often right. The artist is working steeped in his time, making comments on what he observes around him. But more importantly, he is himself a product of his time, having been shaped by his environment and nurtured by the dogmas of his period. True, he criticizes what he sees, but he is doomed to do it from his own narrow perspective.

His truth then must be relative to his time, and if that is so, it is hardly a truth at all.

If that is right, how can we enjoy the art of the past? We hear it speak to us from distant ages and we recognize its voice in a language we can still understand. The Greek sculptor from a century BC has no problem articulating himself to us and Shakespeare is at least as appreciated in our quarters as he was in Stratford of 1600.

Their art is truly timeless, but today’s artist can only comment on our time. Is that so? Of course not. However, there is still a sense that contemporary artists always need to reinvent their genre as time changes, speaking a language that must be uniquely appropriate to the moment. But if we can understand the language of the distant past, how come we can’t speak it? And even if granted that it takes more practice to enunciate than to listen, why is it that modern art is articulated in so many different codes? Who can possibly comprehend modern art if it is a prerequisite to have been shaped in the same form of experience as the artist?

Art is the search for truth expressed in an aesthetic language. The truth is timeless, and the language must be shared between artist and viewer. If modern art is only modern and the artist only speaks to himself, it fails.