"I always suspect the artist who is successful before he is dead."
John Murray Gibbon, Pagan Love, 1922
Gibbon was a
wordsmith and successful in his time,although not well-known today. He
was author of The Rise And Fall of the Roman Empire, and
it made him a wealthy man. It seems he was not visually oriented!
Fortunately this has never been the mark of a cultivated man.
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While refinement, culture and breeding are in no way arguments for
artistic result, it is also no reproach to the most finished
gentleman in the land that he be absolutely without eye for painting or
ear for music..
James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) |
Art
should be independent of all claptrap —should stand alone ... and
appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this
with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love,
patriotism and the like. Again, Whistler.
This idea, l'art pour l'art caught on creating a much less commercial product and attempts to decommodify the fine art of painting.
Hans Abbing, himself an artist and author of Why Are Artists Poor?
(Amsterdam Press) has noted that “artists are
inclined to taking risks” and “poverty is built into the
arts.”
"The idea that making
money and retaining integrity are mutually exclusive is unique to the
arts. This suits the art industry very well and as long as artists
foster this attitude the joke is on them." (blog symposium, 2008).
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The business of making pictures seems to have magico-religious significance at the beginnings of human history. Artists
benefitted quite nicely from their seeming ability to bring down
game and protect crops using sympathetic magic. Some of the most
adept practitioners became priest-kings thus gaining wealth and power.
Being politicians as well as magicians they were of course vulnerable
to the inevitable occasional failure of the food-supply. Primtive art
was probably commercial as well as a matter of self expression. These
aims are not mutually exclusive although one aim can get in the way of
the othe
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