Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/12/09
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Thanks for bringing the discussion into the 21st C.
Chris Saganich
- -----Original Message-----
From: owner-leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us [mailto:owner-leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us] On Behalf Of Peter Klein
Sent: Monday, December 08, 2003 11:32 PM
To: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
Subject: RE: [Leica] #$@%$^ art photographers
At 06:29 PM 12/8/03 -0800, "B. D. Colen" <bdcolen@earthlink.net> opined:
>Allow me to throw a rotten tomato into this discussion and suggest that
>self-promotion has been an important aspect of the successful artists
>repertoire not for the last several decades, but rather for the last
>millennium. Do you really think that the successful artists of the
>renaissance weren't inveterate self-promoters? Obviously the
>self-promotion took different forms - sucking up to rich princes,
No thanks. Besides, I don't think today's corporate CEO is the equivalent
of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Perhaps of the Borgias or the Medicis, but
minus the patronage. These guys don't build monuments to their
greatness. They just stash the cash offshore.
>sleeping with rich princesses, etc.,
*Now* you tell me!!!
>but it's always been part of the
>game. Virtually any artist who wanted to sell work in his or her
>life-time, rather than wait to be discovered after death, had to be a
>self-promoter.
True, but I'm not sure the self-promotion took quite the degree of
flamboyance and self-indulgence that it does these days. In most eras, art
served God or society, self-expression was filtered through fairly strong
conventions, and new techniques were based on the desire to find better and
broader ways to order things to express how we perceived the world.
The idea of the artist as revolutionary, and the idea of emotional
self-expression as an end unto itself is a 19th-century Romantic
concept. Some of today's so-called artists are the heirs of
Romanticism--but their antics are amplified by the power of media and the
science of mass influence into something much more. Add to that the desire
to sweep away all convention and regarding any sense of order as the
enemy--these are things that the turn of the 20th century started, and the
post World War I era cemented.
We end up with something that, yes, evolved from the sucking up to princes
and sleeping with princesses; but has metamorphasized into something very
different. And in many cases it has replaced or supplanted the art
itself. Franz Liszt was in many ways the 19th Century equivalent of a rock
star. But he was also one of the finest composers and performers of his
time. The music came first, and the self-promotion served the
music. Today the music (or art) often serves the self-promotion, if it
survives at all.
The revolutionaries of the early-mid 20th century knew what they were
rebelling against. I'm not sure many post-1960s artists do. It is one
thing (and, I think a good thing) to say that content dictates form. It is
quite another to say that lack of form dictates content. It is a good
thing to do something new and different. It is quite another to do
something completely incoherent, guided only by libido, ego and
self-indulgence, and claim that anyone who doesn't like it is an ignorant
Phillistine.
OK, I'll shut up now. . .
- --Peter Klein
Seattle, WA
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