Just by rejecting abstract art or the whole modern art and by dedicating one’s effort within representational art not much is guaranteed. Most of representational art is in fact awful. Simpering banality abounds. Epigonism of bad sources mounts up heaps of dreadful dross. Mere act of rejecting circulating counterfeits is right but that by itself is not valuable.
In many, all-too-many cases representational contemporary painting betrays the author as crypto-modernist who has little interest in observation, in study, in very serious inquiry into the World outside of the sparse thicket of his “concepts”. Paintings like that are so indefensibly naked revealing impatient disregard for any effort toward truth of the objects depicted, arrogant dismissal of respect for the splendor of the world.
I recall without pleasure an occasion when my dear friends told me of a lady friend they knew who paints only clouds. Sounded promising [meaning-more promising than if she chose narrow limits of painting only vacuum cleaners] but when I finally saw one of her paintings it was some amorphous congregation of whitish globs on a darker background. Apparently she found no willingness of looking up at the patiently available models, no sense of silently screaming idiocy of this artistic offering.
Out of this anecdote I can tease out two morals: one, that expectations of the viewers were lowered so low that anything, but anything enclosed by the rectangle of a picture frame will solicit at least an encouraging nod and a smile of approval, and a second moral is that our contemporaries have gotten used to the generally held opinion that artists are harmless morons and should not be confronted with heartless criticism. We live in the padded rooms and nurse tells us we are “great”.
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