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What future for the fine arts?

By Peter Sellick - posted Tuesday, 4 January 2011


This is a kind of fantasy or pornography because it strives to reproduce and thus own something that cannot be owned. These works strive to create a perfect scene but despite the skill in producing the scene the paintings are strangely expressionless.

Roger Scruton tells us that the difference between fantasy and imagination is that the former is a copy of reality but the latter searches for a deeper vision.

Photorealist work is also void of narrative and lacks the expression the great painters of the past brought to their work, that mysterious something of paint and canvas that tells us much more than a photograph possibly could.

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A sign of hope is that art criticism is finally seeing that the emperor has no clothes. Christopher Allen who writes for the Weekend Australian is a case in point. He nails the point precisely:

You don’t become an artist by aping a cool style or even by finding your own distinctive look; you grow into being an artist, if at all, by acquiring a deep understanding of the craft you practice, looking at the world around you and eventually finding something that you really need to say and that cannot be said in any other way.

So many young painters look for their own restricted style and then repeat it ad infinitum. The problem is that the style may be distinctive, it may set one apart, but it rarely breaks free from its own strictures to produce something surprisingly good and genuinely new.

Roger Scruton, an Oxford philosopher, has also entered the lists of those who deplore the state of the fine arts in our time:

Originality is not an attempt to capture attention come what may, or to shock or disturb in order to shut out competition from the world. The most original works of art may be genial applications of a well-known vocabulary, like the late quartets of Haydn, or whispered meditations like the Sonnets of Rilke. They may be all but unnoticeable amid the fanfares of contemporary self advertisement, like the trapped interiors of Vuillard or the tucked-away churches of Borromini. What makes them original is not their defiance of the past or their rude assault on settled expectations, but the element of surprise with which they invest the forms and repertoire of tradition. Without tradition, originality cannot exist: for it is only against a tradition that it becomes perceivable. Tradition and originality are two components of a single process, whereby the individual makes himself known through his membership of the historical group. (Roger Scruton An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture. Duckworth 1998).

The absence of narrative in the fine arts reflects the modern arrival at the notion that we do not have a story apart from the story that we tell ourselves. The fragmentation of our society is produced by this insight; we now have no common story except for the shallow and false story that we are on the road to more and more amenable life styles.

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The fact that we in the developed countries already live in surplus, except for the problem of death, seems to have escaped us.

This common story we tell ourselves, which is really an unfounded optimism, has banished the idea of judgment, which has obvious moral, but also aesthetic, repercussions . All artists are thought to be sincere and to sincerely attempt to convey some personal vision. Who are we to judge?

This means that art prizes typically make awards to works that defy understanding or deliver pleasure. A world free of judgment is a world where judgment is suspended and a grand conceit eventuates. No one dares to speak the truth for fear of appearing to be Philistine and to be garnered with all those naysayers in history that held up the progress of true art.

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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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