XVI. What is truth in painting? Do you agree that there are still more Cezannes to come? truth in painting

Painting is no longer about representation, it is about inspiration. However, painting today is too focused on the creation of the "new" rather than the creation of the "true". The 20th century was infatuated with new painting styles and materials, which has led to a focus on the mode and medium of expression rather than the message being expressed. After one-and-a-half centuries of innovation, with so many art taboos shattered, with so much of the field colonized and long-inhabited, the search for the new is becoming increasingly shallow and repetitive. Creating the new, purely for newness' sake, can bring academic significance but offers little long-term weight. Truth and beauty, on the other hand, have longevity -- they affect the viewer and the resonance of that experience lingers for a long time. All three need to be combined to create art that has impact as well as freshness.

What is truth? Like everything in art, the concept of truth is completely subjective. People define their own truth. A person might wax eloquent on the truth embedded in Mondrian's simplicity. I, on the other hand, only see sterile intellectual concepts placed on canvas. We both believe that we are right.

I view truth not simply as honesty, but as emotion or expression that has a deeper, more powerful effect on the viewer. Satire and deconstruction are objects of fashion; this kind of art is easily forgotten. Comments on the human condition have the strongest impact. The viewer can relate to the canvas, both today and – since the human condition stays consistent through the centuries regardless of how our environment changes -- in the future. Truth about humanity does not need to focus solely on subject matter. Cezanne's and Basquiat's truth can be found in their paint handling. Their uncompromising passion leaps out of the canvas. Cezanne is more popular because he balanced the trinity of truth, beauty and innovation.

This year's Whitney Biennial, a survey of American art from the past two years, is largely flat. Coverage is limited, naturally, to those artists who have fallen within the limited spotlight of curators and dealers. Much of the work is attractive, but few pieces have an impact. Shirin Neshat's short film is an exception, because it combines beauty with a powerful statement on the human condition. Others, like Vic Munoz's copy of The Raft of the Medusa in syrup, have wonderful wit but do not stay with you long. Munoz's images are striking because craft and technique seem so rare in today's art world, but craft alone does not give a piece of art truth. So many works I see today are trying hard to be innovative. They are desperately fresh, and inescapably derivative. They are "neat" and "funky" rather than emotional and hard-hitting.

Why not live in the moment with disposable art to match our plastic wares and TV game shows? Certainly many artists in the latter 20th century pursued that theme. Sarcasm and kitsch are easier than emotional honesty. More difficult is the struggle to create something greater than ourselves, something that can outlast ourselves. Most human beings don't want to be unexceptional. We want to be special, to have some nugget of brilliance in our own way. It might be fixing cars. It might be working a sable brush at 3am as lack of sleep wears on your eyes but the imperative of being better, making better, expressing better drives you on. And just as we hope for brilliance in ourselves, we like to touch it as well, whether in a conversation, reading a novel or staring at a canvas.

There are still more Cezannes, more Dostoevskys, to come. We will spot them more by their truth and their beauty than their hipness.

(Giff Constable, May 20, 2000)

XVII. There are some famous aphorisms by O. Wilde, about art and artists. Comment on them and say whether you agree or disagree with them. Which of them are close to your view point?

How is the formula art for art’s sake (art is important simply because it is art, and not because it makes money or has any particular use) attached to O. Wilde’s works and creative activity?

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

When art is more varied nature will, no doubt, be more varied also.

Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think one becomes all nose or forehead or something horrid.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

All art is immoral.

It is thought art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art, and through art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.

Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and having done so passes on to other things. Nature, on the other hand, forgetting that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating the effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.

A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent.

In art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.

(Афоризмы Оскара Уайльда)

Project work

Choose among given topics for discussion the one you are interested in most of all. Explain your choice. Carry out your project work and make its presentation (pair, group or individual work).

Topics for discussion

1. Art in my life.

2. Art and beauty will save the world.

3. My favourite painter and painting.

4. Art and the future.

5. Modern trends in art.

6. Art and fashion.

Tomorrow will come if you value beauty!!!

TRAIN A-TRAVELIN’

There’s an iron train a-travelin’ that’s been a rollin’ through the years,

With a firebox of hatred and a furnace full of fears.

If you ever heard its sound or seen its blood-red broken frame,

Then you heard my voice a-singin’ and you know my name.

Did you ever stop to wonder ‘bout the hatred that it holds?

Did you ever see its passengers, its crazy mixed-up souls?

Did you ever start a-thinkin’ that you gotta stop that train?

Then you heard my voice a-singin’ and you know my name.

Do you ever get tired of the preachin’sounds of fear

When they’re hammered at your head and pounded in your ear?

Have you ever asked about it and not been answered plain?

Then you heard my voice a-singin’ and you know my name.

I’m a wonderin’ if the leaders of the nations understand

This murder-minded world that they’re leavin’ in my hands.

Have you ever laid awake at night and wondered ‘bout the same?

Then you’ve heard my voice a-singin’ and you know my name.

Have you ever had it on your lips or said it in your head

That the person standin’ next to you just might be misled?

Does the raving of the maniacs make your insides go insane?

Then you’re heard my voice a-singin’ and you know my name.

Do the kill-crazy bandits and the haters get you down?

Does the preachin’ and the politics spin your head around?

Does the burning of the buses give your heart a pain?

Then you’re heard my voice a-singin’ and know my name.

Bob Dylan

THE H-BOMB’S THUNDER

Don’t you hear the H-bomb’s thunder

Echo like the crack of doom?

While they rend the skies asunder,

Fall-out makes the earth a tomb.

Do you want your homes to tumble,

Rise in smoke towards the sky?

Will you let your cities crumble,

Will you see your children die?

Must you put mankind in danger,

Murder folk in distant lands?

Will you bring death to a stranger,

Have his blood upon your hands?

Shall we lay the world in ruin?

Only you can make a choice.

Stop and think of what you’re doing,

Join the march and raise you voice.

Time is short, we must be speedy.

We can see the hungry filled,

House the homeless, help the needy.

Shall we blast, or shall we build?

John Brunner