And
Art Today
Recently
the artist Nelson Shanks revealed a secret in the shadows of his painting of
Bill Clinton:
The
story rippled around the web, some reveling, some reviling. Apropos emulation,
let me just offer as an antidote to Shanks’ rather too subtle, for-artists-only
joke about the color of shadows, Titian’s famous portrait of Pope Paul III and
his two nephews. A portrait for a sitting pope, kept in the family for
centuries (thus its arrival at the Capodimonte Museum in Naples), with such
almost painful depictions of the natures of each subject, involves cojones on
par with Stephen
Colbert’s White House Correspondents Association Dinner in 2006, and is hard to
imagine pulling off today. But when artists thought more about the art of representation, its rhetoric and poetics, and dealt with the implicit decorum of classical
portraiture, such inside jokes were not (as in the Shanks) the most interesting
part of the painting. The Clinton portrait lacks any sense of composition (look
how it slides off to the left, clipping the ionic column of the mantel), is rather
blandly or neutrally lit, and seems almost obsequious in its youthful portrayal
of its subject. Not here the penetrating portraiture of a Velazquez and his painting of Pope
Innocent X, who exclaimed upon seeing it, “Troppo
vero.” Too true, indeed. Realism has killed portraiture.
Instead,
classical painting’s privileging of allegory, narrative, and the classical
ideal makes for much more interesting, long-lasting stuff:
And once upon a time art had a meaningful relationship
with the other arts, because they participated in a larger, comprehensive
cultural weltanschauung:
So,
save us from ourselves, or from those who want to save us, like Alain de Botton’s idea of what
art is for:
He suggests a
fifth way, therapeutic, so that in future the Tate could have as an objective
to meet the psychological needs of the nation. He even goes so far as to
outline seven psychological needs which could be met by art; remembering, hope,
sorrow, re-balancing, self-understanding, growth, appreciation. But the key
message repeated in different guises throughout his work is that we could all
benefit from regular guidance; “despite the powerful elite prejudice against
guidance works of art are not diminished by being accompanied by instruction
manuals ‑ art has a clear function: it is a therapeutic
tool to help us lead more fulfilled lives”. - See more at:
http://www.drb.ie/essays/the-uses-of-art#sthash.cHAkVlEJ.dpuf
On
where we are vis-à-vis the canon, here is Arthur Krystal, “What We Lose if We Lose the Canon”. But
like most people today (obviously not attuned to his canonical authors' ways of
thinking), he confuses imitation and emulation:
Too much
veneration for Homer, Pindar, and the Greek playwrights; for Seneca, Cicero,
Virgil, and Ovid would only compel modern poets to emulate them.
“Only”
emulate them? I think the author means imitate, because there is no such thing
as only emulating, emulation primarily being about rivaling, exceeding in some
way or another. Dante “only” emulated Virgil...
One
could argue architecture has a similar canon, in so much as it has affinities
to the liberal arts; and while I don’t endorse the particulars I do wish more
schools of architecture thought a bit
like Harvard does about what they were doing.
Finally,
what the camera did to painting the computer is doing to architecture:
The
camera didn’t, in fact, kill painting. It begged the question of the value of
realism, not of representation per se; but because realism and representation were
becoming conflated and confused around the time the camera emerged, it was
thought ceci
tuera cela. Only when you lose the sense of what your art does, do
you, in fact, let it die…
