A good friend and fellow artist has loaned me a book, with his recommendation. It is What Happened to Art? by Lanny May Freedman, and I suppose its purpose could be summarised as a survey of the changes that have happened to western art since the Great War, and especially since 1945. Although I am only into the third chapter at the moment, already my antennae of suspicion are twitching vigorously. What set them in motion was the author’s tendency to capitalise the word “Art”. What is the purpose of this? If anything it reminds me of the insistence of religious people to insist on capitalising “God”.
This is what I believe would be called an “auratic” view of art …. it is (at least metaphorically) surrounded by an aura which, like the halo used to signify saints in the western tradition of Christian art, means that it is somehow set apart from the profane world in which most of us live for most of the time. It goes along often with the idea that artists are somehow a special kind of people, marked out by their possession of “inspiration”.
Driving over to the Peak District for my regular weekly climbing session today, I fell to thinking about this, and the first thing that came into my mind was the belief that the capability of either producing or enjoying things or experiences we might want to label as “art” is certainly not confined to a small elite of gifted individuals. My wife enjoys knitting, and has a sense of colour that leaves me, quite frankly, envious. Her daughter sent her a card recently which she herself had drawn …. a landscape of a part of Scotland close to where she lives. It is beautifully composed, has a sense of pictorial depth, and is executed with great delicacy. Not long ago I was given a painted dish by our grandson. (I use it almost every morning at breakfast.) The design is lively and colourful. None of these individuals would describe themselves as “artists”, and probably would be embarrassed by the suggestion that what they had produced was “art”. My point is that the propensity to produce, as well as to enjoy art, is a human faculty in general.
It does seem to be the case that throughout human history the production of art-work has been concentrated to a certain extent in the hands of specialists. It has never been confined exclusively to such people, however, and they represent the more-developed end of a continuum that runs throughout our species.
I shall read on with interest, but already art with a capital “A” has put me on my guard.