On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 1:05 PM, joseph berg <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 4:50 AM, William Conger > <[email protected]>wrote: > >> >> Nearby the National Gallery Rothkos is a small -- not bigger than 3 feet >> -- >> Bradley Walker Tomlin, tacked to the wall too near a doorway, as if it was >> crowded into position by a sympathetic curator. It's an astonishing >> painting, >> full of risk, wild technical abandon and yet so beautifully composed, as >> if it >> is paint caught in the wind and rain at the most perfect moment. Of >> course I've >> always loved Tomlin's work since I first saw one of his paintings back >> around >> 1948 in the Encyclopaedia Britannica Collection. I have no idea what his >> work >> sells for now but I'd bet that it's well within the comfort zone of >> prices we'd >> expect to pay tor, say, a pricey sedan -- something sensible in the >> public mind >> for a fine work of art. I can appreciate the Tomlin. I can experience >> it as an >> artwork, a source of aesthetic pleasure and a demanding intellectual and >> painterly object that has no other purpose. I don't think about its >> monetary >> value at all. But the poor Rothkos and their cohort, now turned to pure >> suffocating gold, have lost their vitality and their art forever, or >> until the >> bubble bursts or the world sinks into catalytic horror. Go look at a >> Tomlin. Go >> look at any of the art that can still be seen as art. That's where the >> future >> is, if there is to be a future... > > > - Good art weathers the ages because once in so often a man of > intelligence commands the mass to adore it. > > Ezra Pound > That's why I previously asked: - Can art continue to exist without authority? Otherwise, won't the following result?: - ...When there is no impartial arbiter, one must consider the final result. (Machiavelli) And isn't the "final result" the size of price tag?
