carving ethics

["Clive Murray-White" <clivemw@zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz>]

Hi all,

It's interesting how the ethics debate has gravitated to the "in the
tradition of Michelangelo" against the rest, Ian brings up the next horny
issue of subcontracting and others slide to musings about the tools the old
sculptors would choose to use if they were around today.

Of course they would all use just about everything and, dare I say it,
Michelangelo and Brancusi would use them all with a lot of integrity ie,
ethically whilst many would use them with as little as they always did. In
essence everything would stay the same as there have always been ethical and
unethical makers.

The main difference gets down to those that simply make or have made an end
product, like Koons now Canova then neither of whom cared the slightest bit
about ethics or integrity.

The most interesting sculptors to argue about would surely be Rodin and
Moore. Rodin a fabulous modeller with a very competent team of stone
carvers, the trouble was that the best of Rodin always relied on his touch
so something very substantial is lost when someone else make his pieces in
stone for him.

Henry Moore is harder to pick but a good friend of mine who had worked as
his assistant confirmed my hunches. Moore would make the small sketches and
hand them over to an assistant to turn into the next size up, almost all of
his assistants would do their best to put things into the sculpture based on
their own values as opposed to Moore's, sometime Henry would notice what
they had done but other time he would not. As things got busier ethics got
worse. Bad ethics are often justified by the artist saying, "well everybody
has always done it".

In a sense we must differentiate between the artists who send stuff out,
basically their integrity can only be concentrated in the idea and those who
set out the create the entire work themselves, you get no special points for
this but you can get a severe hammering, and rightly so, if you purport to
be a purist but accidentally show that it simply a veneer.

Regards  Clive Murray-White
Web: www.cowwarr.com