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What future for the fine arts?

By Peter Sellick - posted Tuesday, 4 January 2011


The obsession with the new has driven artists to blasphemy and pornography as being the only areas that are still liable to shock and dismay. But alas even these attempts are becoming a bore.

The real destructive power of neoism in the fine arts is that it decrees that we cannot go back, we cannot stand in any tradition even if that is a tradition of composition and drawing and the painterly skills.

Certainly we cannot go back to producing a painting that has a narrative base.

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Why can we not produce a Madonna and child, a crucifixion scene, Abraham about to slit Isaac’s throat, the baptism of Jesus or any number of biblical scenes that were the bread and butter of artistic expression for over a thousand years?

Is it the case that it has all been done before and no more needs to be expressed, that previous artists have emptied the genre? This cannot be so. We still persist in painting portraits, probably the oldest genre of them all and find them still very interesting and challenging.

We cannot go back because a decree has been sent out by our artistic masters that there is no way back to past expressions, that it is impossible for a modern artist to attempt such an expression. We must press on towards a new land of new expressions that will bring us new fame and insight. A visit to the Pompidou centre recently convinced me that this is bosh.

The new land of freedom and individual expression ripped from the constraints and traditions of the past is mostly a desert. We have been hoodwinked. One of the reasons that we cannot go back is that artists insist on the genius of their own creative expression and thus decry any influence in their attempt to distinguish themselves.

They lack not only the artistic skills to produce a narrative work but they are ignorant of the narratives themselves and how they may be portrayed in a new way.

There is no necessary reason for the art of the present day to disavow narrative subjects. The abandonment of such subjects came about because of sentimental story pictures of the Victorians and the discovery of the sensuality of paint in its own right by the impressionists. But by throwing out the baby with the bathwater we have consigned the fine arts to be an expression of story-less sensuality, subtle textures and patterns or unexpected contrasts.

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Duchamp’s urinal gave the message that anything can be art and thus broadened the category so that it was in fact no category. This statement cut the link between the modern artist and the artistic tradition and we have had nearly a century of artists who refuse to be taught what their predecessors had discovered.

The result has been trivial works that are more the result of fashion than a real expression of the human or of beauty.

It is interesting that there has been a resurgence of photo-realism in painting. It is as if, finding nowhere to go forward there is an attempt to go back to representation. In Western Australia this often take the form of beachscapes or wave breaks that strive to represent a scene as accurately as possible.

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Peter Sellick is a director of Coondle Art Presentations who are agents for the religious work of Bob Booth.



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About the Author

Peter Sellick an Anglican deacon working in Perth with a background in the biological sciences.

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