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Paradoxes of painting
Yet still it is a marvellous time to be a painter. ... four claims about painting today: ... its public standing ... the painting as object ... painters themselves ... painting's meaning and consequences. "
[One:] "painting is now the least popular of the arts ... [at big art shows] there are more people gathered around the signs and labels than the pictures. ... The visual arts have a lot to contend with: looking comes naturally to us but seeing does not. ... The big event in the modern history of visual art was the invention of photography. ... photography will always drive out painting, not because it is truer but because it is cheaper."
[Two:] "A painting or sculpture is an energy source ... It absorbs energy from the artist and radiates it back to the looker. ... no great photograph has ever had anything like the power of a great painting. ... you cannot ... load up a photograph with enough energy to make it great art. ... the energy of an artwork reflects in some way the intensity of the artist's effort. ... The obvious question is, where is the art? Where is it hiding? If the image in the mirror is identical to the mask we started with, what has the artist done? The answer is: he has added energy. ... he has taken an object and pumped up its energy level"
[Three:] " ... when we say that an artist is often someone who works relentlessly, we are also describing a personality type: a perfectionist, an obsessive. ... A perfectionist is a dissatisfactionist. The same force that drives artists to work relentlessly on their artworks, to load them up with energy, makes them unlikely ever to be wholly content with what they have done. ... something fundamental about art. ... superhuman accomplishments require superhuman talent, or a superhuman capacity for unhappiness with your work, or both. ... 'When I paint,' Matisse said, 'I am giving plastic expression to objects in my mind. When I close my eyes, I can see things better than with my eyes open... This is what I paint.' ... at the bottom of the art of painting there is a mismatch between mind and hand. ... no artist can ever hope to realise more than the tiniest fraction of what he imagines. ... The thing is to keep trying."
[Four:] " ... art doesn't progress, any more than human nature does. ... an artist merely does his best to convert mental images into physical ones. Many great artists had no direct pictorial influence on anyone. ... They had spiritual influence, of course, but that is not the sort of thing art historians usually have in mind when they speak of influence. ... Influence can be dangerous. ... On intellectual (as opposed to artistic) grounds, cubism is a racket: a catch-all for sorts of styles in which the picture space is not quite flat, the image is not quite abstract, and the nervous juddering ostinato lines have a wound-up, caffeine energy that is exhilarating for short periods and impossible to sustain. ... the aspects of an artist's style that other artists can imitate, that are the most "influential," are exactly the ones that are most generic and least valuable."
Science is a crescendo. Art is an expanding circle.
"why have recent decades been ideal for painters? ... no artist who tries to please a crowd of more than one is likely to do anything of value. ... the act of painting is boiled down to its essence, sheer obstinate compulsion. ... Painting changes and a painter has to be part of his times. ... Picasso said, 'art that is not in the present will never be.' A painter must know and feel what is going on around him. ... the art world's "nostalgia for the days when art was not riddled with postmodernism's adolescent smirk." ... Today the art world ridicules art pure and simple with naked contempt and a mirthless nihilism that is chilling. ... There is a new, dissident art today-"post-ironic art." It is rarely charming and is sometimes violent or ugly." ... [more]
12:46:34 PM 
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