Art Link to the World

Home
Gallery
Authentication
Knowing the Difference
Purpose/ Philosophy
Artist/Title Index
Art Terms
Pricing/Shipping

Purpose/Philosophy

" ... Monkey Walk ... "  ( circa 1973 )

monkey_do.jpg

"Today, as you know, I am famous and very rich . But when I am alone with myself, I haven't the courage to consider myself an artist, in the great and ancient sense of that word ... I am only a public entertainer, who understands his age."  
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
from "The Trousered Ape"
Duncan Williams, 1971
 
"Poets ... philosophers, painters, sculptors and musicians are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations of their age."
Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792-1822)
from the Preface to "Prometheus Unbound", 1820
 
"True art, art that comes from the center of a people, from their very core, is inherently political. The stuff you see on Sixth Avenue in New York is dead art, art that the patriarchy wants to buy, a terrible self-indulgence and insidious."
Beverly Smith
from Linda Bellows interview
"Spare Rib", August, 1982
 
"All great art ... creates in the beholder not self-satisfaction but wonder and awe. It's great liberation is to lift us out of ourselves"
Dorothy Thompson (1894-1961)
from "The Twelve-foot Ceiling",
The Courage to Be Happy, 1957
 
"No one has ever written or painted, sculpted, modeled, built, invented, except to get out of hell."
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948)
from "Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society", 1947,
Antonin Artaud Anthology, ed. Jack Hirschman, 1965
 

hr18.900.jpg

ART AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT

fleur_de_lys.50.jpg

 
 
"Monk Studying" 1885

monk_reading.terms2.jpg

hr18.900.jpg

fleur_de_lys.50.jpg

 
 
"Little Rosebud" 1868

rosebud3.jpg

THE ACADEMIC ART OF PAST CENTURIES  has left Western culture an astounding legacy of  aesthetic wonders. With the encroach-ment of  various "Modernist" move-ments  throughout most of the 20th century, that legacy had all but disap-peared. But for the struggling and epi-sodic successes of   misanthropic move-ments like the Sym-bolists or the Sur-realists, followed by "American Realists" and the various sub-strata of the great American illustrators,  basic "Art 101" principles were barely kept alive.

 
THE HISTORY OF ART  has instructed us, if nothing else, that all art is held hostage by a social construct. The social nature of art; the social forces that play into any "movement", are forces that  students of art must com-prehend before they can claim to be knowledgeable about art.
 
This holds especially true today, considering the wall of noise a student or collector must face before he/she gets serious about art, for there is one more salient fact about today's art world that few in academia will own .
 
Today, in the first decade of the 21st century, at the very threshold of the third Millennium, art has essentially been reduced to :
 
An opinion.
 
The quixotic behaviour of the "Minimalists" within our culture's recent memory up to today's "Neo-Concep-tualists" has bequeathed upon our collective neuro-template a distinct impression that anyone can "do" art.
 
I would like to suggest what the above mind-set is really saying to us : 1) Either the "Neos"can "do" art or, 2) No one can "do" art.
 
But today's truly talented artists know that real art, or say the least, great art, takes not only skill and talent, but equally important, time and labor. They also realize that art based on the time honored basic principles of cen-turies past  remains the legitimate and indispensable template that puts the lie to charlatans who claim to be artists.        

fleur_de_lys.50.jpg

 
 
"In the Dew" 1876

garden_of_roses.small.jpg
FOR THE BETTER PART OF THE 20th CENTURY,  art principles such as perspective, com-position and balance  (or "The Rule of Golden Sec-tion" ) and chiaroscuro, time honored by art-ists since the Renais-sance,  were scoffed at and abandoned by the purveyers of taste  who pushed the envelope of hubris into uncharted extremes : old is bad; dif-ferent is good.
 
After all, it was "art scholars"  (an oxy-moron) of the early 20th century who said this was so.
 
And the public listened.
 
And when the public listened, too many artists, whether or not they wished to, followed suit.
 
Not since the early Rennaisance, when artists were held hostage by the Church, had artists been held hostage by so fickle a patron as the public.
 
By the end of the 19th century, talented, academically trained artists were told if they didn't sell out to the prevailing winds, their art would die a slow death; and in fact their art was consigned to a painful obsolescence, buried in the deep and publically inaccessible base-ments of the world's great academies and museums.
 
The new mass assembly public wanted mass assembly art. The artists obliged. The public had become too naive to realize that, in place of art, the artists handed down to posterity the only spirit they had left for the public : 
 
The spirit of contempt. 
 
Never was that contempt so self-evident as in the new Picasso phenomena called "Cubism" (a "movement" which late in the game even Picasso himself once professed privately to his daughter was "a joke") ... or Dali, constructing his sculpture with his own excrement  ( or so he stated once in a talk show interview, who knows?!!... perhaps a DNA test would be in order ! ) ... or empty "Minimalist" canvases ( empty, as in no art ) ... or "Jack the Dripper" himself , "painting energy"  by slinging oil (and, no doubt, alcohol ) onto his canvases ... and if all that's not enough contempt for you, try some of the "constructs"  of today's art circus.
 
How about if I paste my first cell phone to an empty canvas ? Or my first Nikon ?
 
You buying ?
 
(Well, my friends would probably buy into the Nikon idea, but if I told them that pasting my Nikon to an empty can-vas was a work of art, they'd  take the Nikon in gratitude, then rush me off to the "quiet place" of my dreams and I wouldn't expect any less of them.)  

girl_lollipop.325.jpg

fleur_de_lys.50.jpg

"Nitza"... ( circa 1971)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

scan0064.5.jpg

fleur_de_lys.50.jpg

"Mrs. Ogilvy" 1896
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

runner.jpg

fleur_de_lys.50.jpg

"Free "... ( circa 1976 )
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

owg_ladies.small.jpg

fleur_de_lys.50.jpg

"The Enchantress" 1837
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

girl_door.325.jpg

fleur_de_lys.50.jpg

"Child of Summer Town"... ( c.1975 )
 
 
 
 
 
 

le_bout_du_sillon.small.jpg

fleur_de_lys.50.jpg

"End  of the Row" 1905

THE MAJORITY OF POSTMODERN  "neos" who would like to think of themselves as progressive movements or indepen-dent "schools" are really not new; they are in fact the heirs of an early 20th century form of fatalism, the practitioners of which preached, when you can't do art, fudge it.

HOW WE CAME  to all this began... When? Well, one will argue that "Modernism" began with the steam engine, but this doesn't mean you have to be a Luddite to love the academic art of centuries past. What fueled the wholesale rejection of academic art was not steam, but  the self-appointed "experts" ...  and naive albeit wealthy patrons of Paris/ London and New York who bedded down with a new  mythological muse.

AND SHE HAD A NAME.

The new muse had a name, although hidden from most. Her name was Caprice, and She's been peddling Her wares since the end of Belle Epoque. Academic art was finished; old out, Caprice, in ... and the deal wasn't even struck behind a closed door or smoke filled room.

She was not beautiful. Beauty collects dust. Imagine a steamroller. That was Lady Caprice.

 

SO WHAT DO WE DO ?  Can't sue anybody; the chief culprits have passed. I didn't say my oily rag at the Guggenheim was art, I just said it was "original". Any wealthy attorney ( a very wealthy attorney ) out here in cyberspace who wants to entertain a class action suit against the Guggen-heim and MOMA and et. al. for chronic, massive fraud on the public, then have at it, my friend, and may Chagall's sweet bluebirds of happi-ness be with you.

 

 

 

IN MY DAYS OF YOUTH, 
I was called an artist and lauded with many awards to that ef-fect, and I was lucky enough to know, very early on, that it's best not to wear that crown until someone in the trade, someone who really knows art, takes that leap and calls you an artist. That is really the greatest compliment anyone can pay, with or without awards.
 
 

fleur_de_lys.50.jpg

 
 
"Siren of Paris" 1908

sirene_de_paris.small.jpg

 

ONE TIME, IN THE EARLY  90's, a new client and his wife approached our booth at an antique show to com-plete a deal over a small oil painting of a beautiful Hispanic lady from 1900. As he and his wife left the booth, the husband turned to me and said :

"We only want real art."
 
They were not at all trained in art, but they were not naive; they were both professional business leaders in their community.
 
And I knew precisely what they meant.
 
That one seemingly naive decla-ration encapsulated what I had already long been suspecting : there was a real hunger out there for the art of the past, the "real" academic art ( not neces-sarily just narrative or represen-tational )...but the academic art which spoke to people and didn't talk down to them.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Real art.

That is what we sell.

That is our opinion,

And we welcome yours.

James Ballard

               March, 2008              

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

hr18.900.jpg

CLICK Index FOR SPECIFIC ARTISTS / TITLES, OR CLICK LINKS BELOW FOR SINGLE CATEGORIES :

hr18.900.jpg

bois_de_la_haye.small.jpg

fleur_de_lys.50.jpg

"Woods Near the Hague" 1867

hr18.900.jpg

 
 

hr18.900.jpg

window_shopping2.275.jpg

 
 
 
 
Get in touch to offer comments and join our mailing list.
 
You can e-mail us at :
 
...or call us for pricing/shipping questions at :
Tele : (256)-714-0960
 
...or you can write us at :
P.O Box 7333
Huntsville, Alabama, 35807
 

Solution Graphics