I like Perl's critique of the current Laissez-Faire situation in the artworld. The fulcrum of his outlook divides the high from the low. That's what I like about his criticism.
I am sick, sick, sick of the 'low' culture avalanche -- like the flotsam from the Japanese tsunami -- that has washed over culture for nearly my whole career. Witty irony doesn't elevate low culture values to high culture status. When I was a beginning artist in the 1950s there were many opportunities for talented artists in 'commercial' art -- the land of popular culture and of ever coarsening low culture. In those days there was a great divide. One could take the easy path or the killer path. It was a choice between aiming to serve popular low culture or to serve the gods. One could learn how to paint glib illustrations for magazine short stories, enhance images of products, draw raunchy cartoons, paint signs, you name it. I didn't want to do any of that. It was too easy and too little, too banal, too trite, like aiming for an assembly line job. I thought art should be on a par with innovative medicine, law, scholarship, poetry, literature, science, music, all the hard stuff, the really hard almost impossible stuff. I still feel the same way and now it's certain that I'll go to my grave still trying to make a goddamn good painting that might earn a friendly, heavenly handshake from a few patient ghosts who have haunted my studio. After all, I paint for them and not for you or even me. I'm probably a member of the last generation of artists who was shaped by the best ideals of high art. Almost everything I know and have learned is saturated by that. It's the true sublime. ________________________________ From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Mon, February 4, 2013 4:21:16 AM Subject: "Laissez-Faire Aesthetics" http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/laissez-faire_aesthetics_20130130/
