tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10178279.post5903416671574911952..comments2024-03-28T05:13:13.921-04:00Comments on Books, Inq. — The Epilogue: Oh, no ...Frank Wilsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18410473158808750903noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10178279.post-87989205385844196862009-03-18T07:32:00.000-04:002009-03-18T07:32:00.000-04:00It's really very simple, from my perspective. Art ...It's really very simple, from my perspective. Art is dead.<BR/><BR/>That isn't to say it can't be resurrected. Art can and will be lifted from the grave like a Lazarus at the hands of the Almighty. But it will take someone powerful, god-like. How did impressionism trump academic art? On the shoulders of geniuses.<BR/><BR/>Speaking of the visual arts, which I have studied for two decades, there is a pattern that repeats itself every hundred years or so. We're in that pattern now, at the tail-end, waiting for the greatness to show itself again, ready for the cycle to start anew. Put another way, the art of the 20th Century, whatever the -ism, has been burned up, sapped of all its energy, used, the smoldering remains of a forest after a forest fire.<BR/><BR/>But what grows out of that desolate but strangely fertile landscape? New growth, new trees, freshness. New life!<BR/><BR/>Take a look at 19th Cen. French art. Neo-Classicism was a great style until it became officially accepted and marketed (for lack of a better word) through official salons and exhibitions to the middle class. I think what the salons were doing then is analogous to what corporations are doing now. Corporate art is, practically by definition, exempt of any value, at least to anyone with real taste in art. Corporate art is singed and burned, it's for the soulless, for the ignorant, for those that find value in the superficiality rather than value in the inherently valuable; corporate art is the charred remains of redwood trees teetering in burnt-out rows across a scorched earth, the soul obliterated, ready to collapse under the pressure of new life germinating under the bleak surface.Patrick Duganhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03390894853435820639noreply@blogger.com