the question is simple enough, why can’t we moderns create great ART?
We can all agree that great Artists have lived in the past,
just a few names to remind you, Da Vinci, Goethe, Shakespeare,
Van Gogh, Michelangelo, even in the last century we have Picasso…
so, who can you name right now, working right now, that is a great Artist?
I can’t name one and I doubt you can name one…and the names most
people will come up with are musicians, not painters, not writers, not
poets, not architects, but musicians… Dylan for example…
I even type up greatest Artist living today, right now and got a list
of people I have never heard of…for example Liu Xiaodong, and the listing
I saw said and I quote: “Perhaps one of the greatest painters of all time”…
a great deal of the list were Artists from the east, Liu for example
and Zhang Xiaogang…plus a scattering of German Artists…
and several American Artists… the only names I had heard of is Jeff Koons…
and Keith Haring…I saw a show of Haring’s work in the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art… and it was ok, the wife and I travel up
to the city every so often and go to the SFMOMA…due to covid, we haven’t been there
in a while…
anyway, the vast majority of Artists listed I have never heard of
and so I must take someone’s else word as to how good these Artists are…
but the question does arise as to why, why can’t we moderns create great ART…
one might hold that a Da Vinci only comes around every so often, or that
a Goethe comes around every so often…we might offer up the possibility
that great ART comes from a society that values ART and we clearly don’t value
ART in any way, shape or form in this modern world…
how are we to achieve Great ART when every thing we have is mass produced in
some factory in China? I hold that we cannot produce great ART because we
are to beholden to the concept of a consumer/producer/ worker society…
the creation of ART is less important then the production of goods, cheaply made
goods that can be created by mass production and consumed by people at a relatively
low price… in other words, the question of quality never arises…why would
we create something of quality when we can make money by building crap?
Who needs ART when the goal is to make money/profits…ART has no value
in a society that is engaged in the search for profits…and a society engaged
in just meeting its basic needs of food, water, shelter, education and health care…
the basics necessities of what a human needs… that society, our society has no
need for ART when the goal is to “put food on the table” as we do today, 24/7…
if the modern engagement is with making money, that leaves no room for such
things as ART…
so how would you return us to the creation of ART? But Kropotkin,
creating ART won’t put food on my table… yes, exactly…
but look about us… we are leading lives of “quiet desperation” and I hold
that is, in part, because we do on some level, miss and crave ART and its
being created.
Because we have walked away from ART, we are less the complete
as human beings… in fact, I would suggest that the creation of ART is
one of the criteria of being human… in losing ART, we are losing who we are…
for ART seek what is possible in being human… ART is a listing of what is
possible for us as human beings…ART is an engagement with our
human possibilities…A book like ''Crime and Punishment" is a
book about our possibilities as a human being…we, as human beings,
can kill and this book tells us what possibilities can occur when we do so…
ART tells us what is possible for us as human beings…and specific
areas of ART, for example science fiction list our future possibilities given
certain technology and certain events…we can learn from sci-fi
what it means to be human under certain conditions…
that we can be great in the future given the possibilities of space travel…
sci-fi list the possibilities for us in the future…
think of ART as a ‘‘how to be human’’ given certain conditions like sci-fi
or in novels like ‘‘War and Peace’’
but we don’t have that in modern ART…and we
are reduced as human beings because of that
Kropotkin