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Working with artists
Artists are a separately
identifiable group of workers. Society awards them respect for their role
without having a clear idea of what it is they do.
They themselves will express as many interpretations of this as there
are artists. The ‘personal’ is an important concept here.
There are professional qualifications, for example, university degrees
but these are no indication of quality, they do indicate that an individual
has spent at least three years thinking about it. This can of course be
a stunning period of development, but then so can life, many artists just
grow in the stew of human existance.
As a profession art is unlike any other, there is no common agreement
on aims and professional conduct as, for example, in the health profession.
You can join the arts profession by saying ‘I am an artist’
nobody will say no your not because in a broad sense we all are, on the
other hand, if your work is without distinction you may be ignored or
ridiculed.
Badly done art has an unfortunate similarity to highly adulated acts of
genius where novelty, gimmick and pretence prevail. There is a whole meta-profession
of critics, writers, gallyerists, curators, keepers, academics, teachers
whose job it is apparently to seek and explain the relative importance
of all this. The old concept of an ‘artist’ being a god-like
combination of great sensibility and taste coupled with fabulous skill
is now gone, skill seems despised by artists as elitist and non-democratic,
which of course it is, but it is also brilliant.
So how does a non-artist get a handle on all this?... And, if as I hope,
the case is made for the arts in society, how do we get this curious group
to go to work?
Well we have of course one immediate thing going for us, they are desparate
to work, and especially proper work for money.
The rest we have to define ourselves. Some information here about the
development of the role of arts, very short, because In my role as university
tutor, I can, to quote my daughter ‘go off on one’ (whatever
that means!)
In medieval times artists were like any other worker and made figurative
representations of the values of others, and of course themselves, as
they were all one under god. In the renaissance artists became great thinkers,
proto-scientists, technologists and philosophers they developed ‘special
case’ self esteem.
Through the age of reason they moved from the scolastic, through neo-classisism
to the development of the romantic notion of artist as individual bearer
of the social concience, the medium through which society related to the
great platonic truths.
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