I don't know if this is relevant to what you are asking , but don't
think,
that an expert in one's general skill and aesthetic tastes makes a
better
product than an expert in many general skills and aesthetic tastes.?
Specially if the product is very demanding and variable with the times.
mando
On Mar 9, 2010, at 10:39 AM, [email protected] wrote:
In a message dated 3/6/10 8:14:48 PM, [email protected] writes:
In a message dated 3/6/10 12:17:04 AM, [email protected] writes:
(I myself won't be participating because myth does not
engage me.)
what are you thinking about now?
I am having an experience that is not atypical for "artists":
deploring an
earlier creation of mine.
I have a playwright's website, with several downloadable
playscripts of
mine on it. I recently reread one after many months away from it,
and, with
the
objectivity that passing time often brings, I now judge that though
it has
some good things in it, it fails utterly as a play. So I'm
deleting the
play from the site, and rewriting the Home page and other site copy.
I have always been almost suspiciously non-brittle, so, though this
deletion amounts to rejecting the work of several years, I am
dismayed but
non-shattered. Perversely, I ponder the experience with generic
interest. I
presume
visual artists occasionally quit on a given work that isn't
"working". But
how often do they spend years on a work?
What is most interesting is contemplating the self-delusion that most
writers -- most "artists" of any genre-- are capable of. As an
editor, I saw
this
on a daily basis, and yet that did not protect me from it when I
became a
writer myself. The experience itself is comparable to what I
imagine certain
divorces are like: the divorcing spouse, while not hating the
spouse he is
divorcing, is dizzied by the realization that he once was in love
with her.
"Yes, she was good looking, but I saw much more in him than just
her looks --
I thought."
The teacher of an "art" is comparable to an editor. A goodly part
of the
time he is working as a diagnostician: sensing an ailment in a
student's work,
identifying the ailment, and suggesting the remedy. Tell me: Do
teachers of
visual art ever find their diagnostic skill/gift deserting them
when they
try to apply it to themselves?
At that point, complicating considerations arise. Just as it
doesn't take
an aesthetic sensibility in an editor to notice that the writer of
a whodunit
has failed to tell us who done it, an art teacher doesn't need much
aesthetic responsiveness to detect that the student has drawn an
arm that is
anatomically monstrous. Such mundane observations call only for
"skill", and I
can
imagine an art teacher saying that skill does not desert him in
diagnosing
his own work. So is it ever the case that a teacher can paint
something
that is "correct" in all "skill" regards, but nevertheless of no
aesthetic
reward -- which the teacher would register in a student's work but
cannot
detect in his own work?
My next test may be this: Will I be like the guy who believes he
doesn't
have to divorce his spouse -- he can change her! (Oy.)
