>It was art in its day, but a modern sculptor creating Greco-Roman statuary is less an artist than Marcel Duchamp exhibiting an upside down urinal, because the act of exhibiting the urinal as art calls into question the unconscious assumptions about what art should look like. Right?
No. Wrong.
Tradition and change are beautiful and exciting together, more than either is apart. Art that lacks one or the other attribute is every bit as much art as art that has the opposite, or both. Neither of these attributes belong tossed into an upside down urinal. Tradition conveys its patterns forwards, and change allows us to mutate from that baseline of skills and methods to discover new thought and beauty. Pure conservatism would indeed rob us of new thought, just as pure progressivism robs us of beauty now.
If the professional art establishment tries to snip a wing off of the wondrous bird we as humans have discovered, I shall reject it and revolt. Even if all I can do is to crudely glue it back on to present the hobbled bird to a fractured and confused audience and only a few recognize what I am doing to resuscitate our vision of its form, it is a start. I will remain faithful to what it really is to observe and create art.
If you can't see the truth in that, as I said before, I have very little interest in communicating with you.
No. Wrong.
Tradition and change are beautiful and exciting together, more than either is apart. Art that lacks one or the other attribute is every bit as much art as art that has the opposite, or both. Neither of these attributes belong tossed into an upside down urinal. Tradition conveys its patterns forwards, and change allows us to mutate from that baseline of skills and methods to discover new thought and beauty. Pure conservatism would indeed rob us of new thought, just as pure progressivism robs us of beauty now.
If the professional art establishment tries to snip a wing off of the wondrous bird we as humans have discovered, I shall reject it and revolt. Even if all I can do is to crudely glue it back on to present the hobbled bird to a fractured and confused audience and only a few recognize what I am doing to resuscitate our vision of its form, it is a start. I will remain faithful to what it really is to observe and create art.
If you can't see the truth in that, as I said before, I have very little interest in communicating with you.