Ars Ingenica

[nyuanshin]

". . . boldness alone is not yet exploration unless it is coupled with a critical sense. . . . the more we learn to look at the individual and particular work of art as the work of skilled hands and great minds in response to concrete demands, the more we shall teach authority that what the artist needs is not more myth or more propaganda, but

Comments

[airstrip]

I think the best cure for the romantic ideas about art is a critical study of the art markets at those historical turning points we feel imbued the world with artistic genius. Nothing makes you appreciate the raw force of art as a vehicle of petty political squabbles and social climbing like letters in Italian that bitch about a fresco painted with a blue that cost less than four florins to the ounce or contracts specifying who paints what in a piece and then the correspondence where the duke of some shit-hole demands satisfaction because the work of a lower-ranked, but arguably better, artist has been used in some prominent place, tarnishing the duke's good name.

Peter Paul Rubens is pretty scathing, too, and reading up on the Dutch speculative art market should forever banish pretensions. And let's not forget that vast stores of "excellent, vivid and original works of great genius" are, in fact, copies produced by the artist's workshop because there are now three bishops and six parish priests in line for the same damn altarpiece. And, with Rubens again, the man was a hack. That was his genius, he was a hack. Go get a "complete works of PPR" and see for yourself: reused poses, people and everything else are everywhere because it made these massive works cheaper to produce.

Artistic genius my spotted ass. This is manufacturing process engineering in oils.

[airstrip]

Just a note, this is precisely what made me start to love Rubens.

[nyuanshin]

Hahahaha. I believe every bit of it.