| |
Darwin's Manifesto VI
Darwin Leon
Again, artists should be highly skilled in an objective sense, first of all, no matter how abstract or unrepresentative of anything plainly visible their art might be. To be truly attuned to the nature of the spirit of art, it behooves the dedicated artist, at least the artist who would strike out on her own, not to be too hasty to be unique, but rather to do her best to recapitulate the history of art from time to time, absorbing the essential elements of the most remarkable styles and approaches of the great masters.
Art must be saved by artists. Art is presently a species endangered by the anti-art defeatism that was stillborn as a joke on the jokesters a century ago. Confronted with the horrendous destruction of the Great War, writers blamed the destruction on culture and wanted to destroy culture. But culture is the mental development and evolution of the human race. Yes, anguished writers believed they could find some relief from their fear and anxiety by destroying culture, the deliberative product of the human mind and memory, with barbarous mechanisms such as cutting arbitrarily chosen cultural arrangements up and randomly pasting the pieces back together into, say, an absurd "poem."
|
|
Cart
