Soulless?

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

Hi all,

These sorts of issues always suck me in, though I'm often very tempted to
let them go through to the keeper.

My beef with the issue is that contentions like, art is mainly about
intention or idea, seem like they are hard to challenge but when you think
about it things aren't quite what they seem.

What really happens is that as time goes on, and on we tend to forget what
an artist's intention or even idea may have been and even replace them with
current interpretations based entirely on how we like to "see" these days.

Even with brand new work we come to it with our own ideas about what it may
be about etc.

Time washes the newness off everything and sadly, some would say, the new
has to take its place and chances along side the old, the good old "urinal"
simply becomes an interesting artefact from the beginning of last century,
and to a large extent the reasons for its production, if that's what we can
call it, have long disappeared.

What actually happens is that almost all art has to take its chances on a
completely different playing field to the one that it was originally
"designed" for. And strangely all sorts of other issues catch up to the
ideas or intentions which progressively diminish in importance.

The easiest proof of this is the way history/time favours the great artist
as opposed to the originator of an idea or type of art. If we follow this a
little further we can start to see the folly in accepting statements like
Frank Stellal's fabulously liberating contention that claimed that since
Jackson Pollock had "taken on" Picasso and won, all that American artists (+
the rest of us) had to do was to "take on Jackson" . Less than 50 years
later we have almost forgotten that there was such a battle to nail
Picasso's dominance and what is infinitely more interesting we find
ourselves asking whether he actually stayed "nailed". I think not.

What is even more interesting to me is the fact, as time goes on the really
good artists just keep getting better while the not-so-goods quietly
disappear.

What all this seems to say is that any art that isn't the whole package is
going to run increasingly into trouble as time goes on.

Best wished to all Clive

Web: www.cowwarr.com