Following yesterday’s post in which I put together some rather hostile thoughts about art critics. To my surprise, when looking through the quarterly newsletter of the Estorick Collection today, I encountered the following statement. “Regard art critics as useless and dangerous.” The source? This is a quotation from the Futurist Manifesto, that appeared in the Paris paper Le Figaro. (I gather that Futurism is 110 years old this year.) This is not company I normally think of myself as keeping, but I guess I’m happy about our shared sympathies..
The Estorick newsletter was interesting for another event that is relevant to my current concerns. They are launching a series of events under the title Who’s afraid of drawing? with the intention of offering participants the chance to develop their appreciation of drawing as an essential element in art, as well as an opportunity to enhance their own skills. I think that is great, as I share the view that drawing is the key skill of any branch of art. That is why I still attend a life-drawing class every week. I do feel that the tide is turning in relation to this essential skill. As I have mentioned before, at the moment I am reading Julian Spalding’s The Eclipse of Art, and I was interested to encounter his observation that these days the art curriculum has seen drawing displaced by techniques such as vacuum forming and photographic silk-screen printing. Things are now (I’m told) beginning to move in the counter-direction.