Big Think

James Scalone on May 21, 2009, 11:23 AM

Mr. Close:

Three ideas or concepts have been interesting to me for many years: the avant garde, evolution, and the assigning of values. [The issue of assigning value does not refer to money or how much the art will sell for. In the concept that I employ in my thinking it is about how much we need something in our lives and culture.] When I encounter something new I often try to make myself be silent until I put that new thing through those 3 concepts. (That is something of a different topic.)

I believe that this topic is about artists during a crisis and not so much artists in a crisis because of a larger crisis, yes? I am not sure I can separate the two things.

From the point of view of assigning value to art and artists, a period of crisis is somewhat like a still, boiling down the entire substrate of art to the point where people who love art give up other things to which people generally assign a high value in order to keep art in general and keep art in their lives. WWII was a strong example for you to use. The large museums and private homes in Europe were gutted both by theft and preservation efforts and people gave up their lives hiding, transporting and keeping secrets about great pieces of art.

From the point of view of the concept of evolution, when a crisis occurs some artists will be in a better position to carry on with their art than other artists for any number of reasons of economics or passion. Similarly their patrons and customers will or will not be able to buy art to (whether intended or not) support that artist and allow them to continue. The crisis acts to weed out those artists who are less passionate about continuing and who are less talented (either for art or marketing). Unfortunately it also weeds out those who are artistically talented, very passionate, but who have no talent for marketing themselves, and really wonderful things are lost. Darwin’s concept of survival of the fittest is applied.

I am not entirely sure how the concept of the avant garde applies here. My thought is that artists frequently try new ways of expressing themselves and that most of these efforts are not accepted at all or do not reflect enough of the sentiments of the general population and fall by the wayside. The ones who are more innovative or more different than others and express ideas and feelings with which people can identify better become the avant garde. In the past, before Modern Art, I believe that during and after a crisis most art of whatever kind acted as a bolster to some kind of normalcy. For humans, since we assign values to everything, the overall gestalt of normal has always included some forms of crisis. This is reflected in art from cave paintings of hunting large animals and in hundreds of medieval religious paintings and sculptures through Picasso’s Guernica through the abstract expressionists and then the explosion of current forms of artistic expression. I don’t think the avant garde effects the crisis so much as the crisis points the garde in the direction societies want to or need to look.

In the end, artists may suffer from crises but art probably benefits.