Sometimes just existing in the art world can take a lot of patience. There are no rules on how anyone may enter into the world of art and call themselves an “artist.” There is no baseline of talent required. From much of what I see, role playing as an artists is much more popular than trying to actually be an accomplished artist. I mostly blame the late 20th century university system on that dynamic.
First the Dadaists essentially murdered art in front of the world to make their great existential statement. That opened the door to Modern Art which eventually led to the dawn of Pop Art and the subsequent cult of personality that grew out of it. Thus, inspiring tens of thousands of college sophomores to begin to fancy themselves artists. Not because they could draw, paint, or sculpt, but because they were shown one only needs to pee in a jar or spill some paint to earn the title, and only then does their work begin to convince the world around them through dressing up and affecting all the right mannerisms that show how misunderstood they are that, because, you know, they’re an artist!
Sure, there are professional artists who illustrate for a living and lots of incredibly talented artists who show work in galleries and produce stunning work in animation, comic books, children’s storybooks, book covers, album covers, and on and on. But the academic art world has found a way to discredit nearly every one of them. God forbid drawing skills or craftsmanship be required to attain credibility. If we required that who would pay for the millions of useless liberal arts degrees that get handed out to the future jobless “artists” of society? Surely, if someone wants to be a real artist they should not rely on mundane things like drawing ability, or advanced visual craftsmanship. How pedestrian is that? We don’t want to shame that kid in the coffee shop with the goth makeup wearing a beret while drinking his double Frappuccino now, do we? Just because he has no sense of composition and can barely draw a stick figure doesn’t mean he’s not an artist. No, he doesn’t play a music instrument either, but he buys all the best records and reads the Village Voice. He’s even learned how to pronounce names like Ingres, Daumier, and Velásquez. He prefers to do “abstract paintings” over the tedious styles that trained artists have dedicated thousands of hours to over the centuries. We have cameras now if we want to see images that look like something. Besides, the great masters have already painted all the good stuff, so let’s be creative and express ourselves without judgement.
Okay, I’ll end the sarcastic rant, but this is a real thing. However, do not confuse what I’m saying as praise for the likes of Thomas Kinkade! I’ll take Frappuccino boy’s shitty stick figures over a Kinkade any day. I spent the first 8 years of my professional artist career doing crappy carney art. Thousands of caricatures, quick chalk portraits, copper etchings, paper silhouettes, blown glass, wooden signs, and finally tens of thousands of airbrushed t-shirts. So, I know what low brow, fast money art is all about. It takes one to know one, and I know that Thomas Kinkade is a carney artist. Bless his heart.
Now back to why I blame academia on turning its back on gifted artists who know how to draw. In his book “Mainstreams of Modern Art” John Canaday writes about the nineteenth century painter Ernest Meissonier. Meissonier was an incredibly meticulous painter who mostly painted Napoleonic military scenes. He was heavily praised by the snooty Salon elites at the height of his career and could arguably draw better than most any known painter in his day. About Meissonier Canaday writes:
One of the most successful painters of the day, Meissonier is the subject of more detailed comments later on in this book. He was a painter without technical limitations and equally without depth or sensitivity. (p 126)
Meissonier offered the new picture-buying public exactly what it wanted. In the first place, his pictures told little stories; they were easy to “understand.” And the little figures enacting these stories were laboriously and accurately detailed. The public demanded that a painting be something which had quite obviously been difficult to do, like a cathedral built from toothpicks. Not only did Meissonier put every tiniest highlight on every button, but it was even possible to identify a soldiers regiment from some of these buttons. What Meissonier lacked in imagination (which is to say, everything) he would have made up in meticulous execution, if such a void could have been filled by a device so meaningless. (p 143)
Before I go further let me say I don’t necessarily disagree with Canaday on his assessments of Meissonier. I think we could say that Meissonier was perhaps the Thomas Kinkade of his time. Meissonier by all historical accounts was an insufferable snob who bathed brazenly in his own celebrity, but let’s consider what happens when a well known art critic verbally destroys an artist for being “easy to understand,” or whose work is “quite obviously difficult to do” in a textbook. Canaday is not actually advocating bad drawing here, or even saying when something is drawn well that it sucks, and while he is demanding that better art be more imaginative he has opened the door for us to look down our noses at well drawn art. Which inevitably gives lazy wanna be artists all the excuse they need to piss in a jar and call it art.
Note: I didn’t know Mr. Kinkade. Though I don’t like his work he may or may not have been an insufferable snob, yet he was arguably a brilliant businessman, or as I say, carney.
Artists love to argue over stuff. Before the age of lithographic printing and illustration the nineteenth century Romantics loved to hate on the Neo-Classicists, the old fashioned Salon snobs loved to hate the Impressionists and the Impressionists loved to hate the Pre-Raphaelites. By the twentieth century so-called fine artists learned to hate the illustrators. NC Wyeth, JC Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell and the like were relegated to the world of picture books and pulp, never to be taken seriously by the emerging artist elite that considered illustration a sell-out and a lower art form. By the mid-century the chasm grew wider. By the 60s and 70s the Arte Contemporanea elite had all but purged the talented artists from their ranks, replacing them with one charlatan after the next.
Meanwhile, in the real world real artists persisted. Not just as illustrators, animators, cartoonists and the like, but also as fine artists. A rebirth of the atelier form of art instruction has come back around with incredible schools like the Florence Academy of Art, established in 1991, along with many other serious schools like the Academy of Realist Art Boston, Barcelona Academy of Art, and dozens more. All of these schools teach things you would never come across in university level instruction. And while our little Frappuccino drinking coffee shop groupie might do well to consider one of those fine schools, I kind of doubt he would make it past the second semester. Besides why work that hard to call your self an artist when you can just skate through with a liberal arts degree and wait tables for a living.
Postscript: This rant was brought on by looking through comments in an Artist Group on Facebook. I’ve been in a few of them, but usually leave after I’ve had enough. Invariably someone will post a very naive piece of art that shows they clearly need instruction and ask for the group to give them pointers. Then out of the woodwork comes scores of “experts” who post bad advice and often show their own dreadful work as examples. Even worse someone will post a beautiful piece of art and once again the self proclaimed art teachers chime in giving advice to someone who is clearly more advanced than they are. Recently a discussion broke out in this group over what makes a “real” artist. All I know is the designation “artist,” or “real artist” is worth less than a shitty Frappuccino.
For a comprehensive list of the best ateliers around the world see this list from The Art Renewal Center: https://www.artrenewal.org/Atelier/Search
Letters From Nod 