Thoughts on art, poetry, and the cosmos:
Knowledge is material and finite: Therefore, it exists in limited quantities and cannot be divided equally or infinitely among individuals. Knowledge helps us recognize the movement and distribution of matter.
Wisdom, on the other had is immaterial and infinite. It may be shared equally by all.
Truth, earnestness and sincerity have been systematically eliminated from mainstream ‘high’ art. This began with Rauschenberg, Johns, Dine, and Warhol and took several different paths according to the intellectual bend of the artist and his support group. By 1970, cleverness (vain intelligence) began to be valued more than earnestness. Classical notions of truth and/or high moral aspiration began to be seen as symptoms of the “Imperial” state of mind. Not to mention, countless artists between 1900 and 1960 had already clearly demonstrated that ‘sincerity’ and ‘earnestness’ are almost impossible for the average art collector to recognize. Therefore, what was now required was an art which would allow its virtues to be demonstrated and explained – one person to another.
It is interesting to note, that the art which proceeded Warhol and Johns, the work of artists like Pollack, Reinhardt, Newman, and Rothko was valued on three primary conditions: strong, emblematic, iconic, individuality (originality), and sincereity. The most valued coins of the abstract painter’s realm were earnestness and (in most cases) classical form. Classical form (i.e. the Cartesian) typically alludes to strength, endurance, and power - and by association with Greece and Rome, The Imperial Way.
Allusions (in art) to cosmology, soul, mind or consciousness have been systematically replaced by oblique references to ideas that are current and fashionable (and ‘correct’) among social, cultural and economic scholars – mainly in Western Europe.
Like all generations of artists (following Manet) the artists of the second half of the 20th century grappled (each in their own way) with a need to rethink the possibilities of what art can be. “Be” in the sense of what the artist, the viewer, and the collector agree …….