The dynamics of the artist-audience relationship has always interested me.
Open Questions:
1) How much of an artist's work is actually an honest reflection his or her own inner self and how much of it is tailored, albeit marginally, to win over an audience?
2) Does art need an encouraging medium to exist or is it an end in itself?
3) Can an artist produce art knowing fully well that it will never see the light of the day?
4) Does making art more accessible to the admirer undermine its value or the virtuosity of the artist?
5) Who judges the worth of a piece of art? The audience, the connoisseurs or the artist himself?
6) What determines the value of a piece of art? Beauty, creativity or intricacy?
7) Define 'value' with respect to art.
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5 comments:
Hey Rudra,
An attempt at answering a couple of your questions:
1. Art at some fundamental level is entertainment and entertainment is wooing the audience. It is the attempt to woo the audience with blatant disregard to what you had like to be doing, that leads to the prostitution of art.
5. Art that reaches an uniniated audience, exactly the way the artist wants it to, is definitely the worthiest.
I think the highest form of art would be the expression of one's true self. It would be art for art's sake...where both the artist and the audience take a backseat. Such an art would transcend all value judgements!
Amused,
The idea you describe sounds theoretically sound at first but there is a fundamaental flaw in your reasoning.
What if one's true self is lacking in character and substance. Its reflection in art would hardly be of any significance save perhaps for the artist himself. But we have already undermined his credibility. So what is produced is a piece of trash.
One can, of course,argue that value judgements are subjective and that the noone is qualified to judge the strength or weakness of another's character. This again raises the issue of the inherent 'value' of art and its significance as a form of expression.
well, one needs to enquire into one's true self first...it's beyond all subjectivity!
The degree of audience appreciation and inner freedom vary, I think, depending on the social effectiveness of the piece of art, the general mood in society and the tendencies of the artist himself.
He could be a rebel and be realised as worthwhile much after his passing (Van Gogh)
a hypocrite (self-styled yet pandering to emotional needs of rich sponsors) yet win ardent followers in his own lifetime like Gauguin.
Financial gain,those who dealt in commercialized art,painting in churches-Sistine Chapel (Da vinci, Raphael)
Lastly,those who wanted to be famous for the genre they created (not so much of their works) Impressionists-Degas,Renoir,Monet
They were all masters, so called for their sizeable contributions to art, critics, brokers and the then prevalent mood of the nation-state
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