Let's talk art/was Book Review - 'The Mating Mind:...' by Geoffrey Miller
Ed Deak
Please read this with a smile on your face, as I'm just having a ball with
the subject, mainly to get away from politics.
I'm also a professional artist and as you know the field has more factions
and sects than fundamentalist religions. Our likes and dislikes are
subjective, obvious and necessary to remain creative, but there must be
limits to the blind acceptance of any garbage thrown at us as art, just
because it is "diffrunt".
When I was going to artschool in Cambridge, Picasso was god to some of our
instructors. Some of my best friends have been and are still his disciples.
Just as some of my non artist friends are Reformers, or crappers, or
whatever they call themselves. I remember seeing some movies about Picasso
at the school, how he worked in his studio etc. He was quoted saying that
when he was 20 he could paint like Rembrandt and it took him 50 years to
learn to paint with the innocence of a 5 year old child. He was shown
running around the studio with charcoal and brushes making arbitrary lines
and blobs on canvases all over the place. Then he ran outside, set up some
drain tiles stuck broken branches into them, called them sculptures and the
world went ga-ga over his brilliance.
The innocence of a 5 year old is something to be respected, encouraged and
treasured, but anybody who thinks and works like a 5 year old at 70 has
serious retardation or learning capacity problems. We don't accept the work
of plumbers, or accountants with the mental age of 5, so why should we
accept the work of artists?
Here again we come to a wall of double standards. Painters and sculptors are
supposed to keep on always producing something "new and diffrunt", because
"everything else has already been done by the old masters". At the same time
the musicians even in the wildest screaming rock bands are expected to show
training and skill. Why? Why is "Carmen" still the most performed opera
after 130 years, when originally it was a flop and the disappointment may
have killed it's composer Bizet? Why not the musicians and singers just keep
on expressing themselves spontaneously, without any score or plot, any which
way they like? Should we accept Kiri Te Kanawa singing "Si, mi chiamo Mimi",
or Placido Domingo's reply with "Che gelida manina", or Perlman playing a
Stradivarius with the skills of 5 year olds?
If not, then why should we accept crude smears with blobs of paint and the
indiscriminate scribbling of lines as art, because they are "spontaneous"?
I respect the World far too much to accept and enjoy the distortions of
nature's beauty, especially of the female body. But then some of us are also
against the destruction of nature with genetic distortions. The fact that
Picasso was anti-nazi doesn't necessarily give him a standing in art. Why
should it? His "Guernica" hasn't made a dent even with his communist
comrades, who condemned his art as being degenerate and against "socialist
realism". What anybody can see in 13,000 pieces of junk like his "Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon" is beyond my hick's comprehension. But then, I don't
like neo-classical economists either though their fried out brains may work
at the intellectual level of 5 year olds, which may raise them to Picasso's
degree of innocence.
Crude, distorted faces with both eyes on the one side, or huge lumps of
wasted stone and bronze, like Henry Moore's "Archer" in front of Toronto
City Hall, or his numerous "Reclining nudes", are not much more than heaps
of petrified, monster heaps of dinosaur shit for me. Neither am I
sophisticated enough to like jazz, like pointless voice excursions of Ella
Fitzgerald, or rock....On the other hand, when my grown up, early middle age
kids hear my favourite Franz Lehar, or Dvorak CDs they're just about ready
to throw up..... Which could be a supporting argument for reincarnation,
with wandering souls randomly picking new homes just for the purpose of
driving the inhabitants crazy.
It would be a very dull, globalized world if we'd all think and act the same
way. At the same time, are we supposed to accept Stone Age artistic, or
mental standards as norms to follow?
Abstraction has a great role in art. I have done a fair number of abstract
sculptures years ago. However, many realist paintings, like some of the
works of Andrew Wyeth, or the Dreamland paintings of the great Australian
artist Ainslie Roberts are also superb abstractions, including the works of
Rodin, or the 200 year old paintings of Turner, or the 350 year old
masterpieces of the incomparable Velazquez.
Let me finish with a little story on so called art for our non-Canadian
friends. It must be about 10 years ago when the National Gallery in Ottawa
paid $7.6 million for a huge painting titled "The Voice of Fire" by an
American artist. The painting is basically a large vertical banner with a
blue stripe in the middle and red stripes on each side.
Of course, the purchase caused a lot of debate and outrage, with the media
playing it up for all it was worth. At one point a bald headed, bejewelled
gallery owner was interviewed on BCTV on the subject. He defended the
painting by stating that the 2 red outside stripes weren't just plain red,
but were red painted over blue. Which is called
glazing in technical terms, invented a million years ago.
When he was asked: "Who decides what is art?" - his immediate and very
serious answer was: " A group of experts in New York City!".
I rest my case.........................
Cheers, Ed (Ed Deak, Big Lake, BC, Canada)
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MichaelP
ED: I keep the smile on my face - and not just because you ask me to - but
because I don't think you've gone the full distance in your analysis
And I say that because in describing yourself as a professional artist,
you pick on Picasso by saying --
<The innocence of a 5 year old is something to be respected, encouraged
and treasured, but anybody who thinks and works like a 5 year old at 70
has serious retardation or learning capacity problems. We don't accept the
work of plumbers, or accountants with the mental age of 5, so why should
we accept the work of artists?>
In this question, you're missing out the matter of 'skill'. The typical
five-year old hasn't picked up the skill to do the plumbing or the
accounting, or to perform or even to create.
I'm not going to suggest that the five-year old doesn't have vision, or
imagination, rather that the transformative skill is missing - there's
only a limited ability to execute the five-year old's plumbing design, or
to have the five-year old describe an experience.
So I merely suggest that the 70 year old doesn't display serious
retardation or learning capacity problems merely for trying to see with
the eyes of a five-year old - there are 65 additional years of accumulated
skill and learned trickery which can make the 70 year-old's output more
effective.
And I won't accept your implied premise that I'll display serious
retardation or learning capacity problems if I fail to see Picasso, (or
your artistic work) with your eyes.
Now take us back to the original premise, which was - that the (male?)
human brain developed as a way to advertize survivability traits for women
to choose from, wasn't it ?
Cheers
MichaelP