While browsing my old copy of the Art of Australia, I made some notes that seem relevant today. Thoughts and ideas that guide me into always try to start anew. Hoping not to repeat past works. With a spirit of experimentation, dynamism and inventiveness.
“The Art of Australia” by Robert Hughes.
“ Good taste” feeds on the past... Being nostalgic it is a useless instrument for measuring the worth of the new.
If an artist depends on it...his ability to expand his consciousness will gradually atrophy, his style will close in on him like Poe’s shrinking room, and in the end he will be left with nothing but copied variations on a prototype he barely understands.
“Times of luxury art recur. Their feature is that art loses its ritual and dynamic character. It becomes decorative. Pictures are passive; no longer outlets through which emotion and ideas are directed on experience with intense force, they exist on plesantly equal terms with the bureau above which they hang. Both are simple objects,
Art abdicates its true role, which is to intensify experience; instead, it makes life more ingratiating by giving it a little twist here and a tweak there, drawing what sustenance it has from simple materal value. The spiritual life of its society is not strong enough to insist on some kind of expression through symbols".
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
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I recall reading similar remarks deriding "good taste" from such diverse artists as Dali, Picasso and Duchamp. Seems it's just a euphemism for playing it safe, copying the successful products of the past.
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