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PICASSO, THE MARKET, AND CELEBRITY VIRUS
Never before has the public been so confused about art. Good art is based on an objective standard of excellence and high achievement, and we, the artists of today, must fight to re-establish that. Only when that is done will the art market return to health. Art today is in the grip of an Avant Garde hegemony, and they have promoted primitivism, which is low achieving art, and added to it the cult of personality. Artistic genius is now a quasi god like state. Picasso gained that status through the mass media and its manipulation by a nihilist intelligentsia. Today anything from Picasso¹s hand, no matter how trivial, is worth staggering sums of money and subjected to a reverential mesmeric awe on the part of the public. This is the phenomenon I call Celebrity Virus and it is utterly destructive of art as we have known it throughout history.
Picasso was capable of high achieving art. He was a child prodigy and the star pupil of the Barcelona and Madrid academies. These were relatively minor academies in European terms. Nonetheless by the age of sixteen he had produced good academic works, Science and Charity and First Communion. He experimented with Impressionism, but soon abandoned it for the more subtle and psychologically effective language of classicism. His Blue Period and Rose Period are well within the academic tradition which ranged from Classical to Romantic. Classical has a more specific meaning within Classical art in general. Ingres represents the Classical where form was defined in pure abstraction while Delacroix represents the Romantic which was looser and more expressive. Picasso¹s La Vie and The Family of Saltimbanques are expressive and use classicism to great psychological effect. Picasso also worked in the purer classical form. There are many drawings, the work of an academic master. There are academic drawings of his wife Olga and, surprisingly enough, of Dora Maar (1927). Dora Maar is the weeping woman in Picasso¹s cubist painting. There is also a painting of Olga in an Armchair, reminiscent of the style of Ingres. Picasso does deserve a place within the academic tradition of his period, but he shares that place with others. He does not stand head and shoulders above them.
Picasso is heralded as the greatest artist of the Twentieth Century by the Avant Garde. It was not because of his work in the academic tradition but because of Cubism. He is seen as an innovator, one who significantly advanced the progress of art and by implication enriched our culture and civilisation. On that score alone Picasso made the greatest mistake in Twentieth Century art. Our culture has not been enriched by Cubism and the movements that followed it.
I am going to use the word primitivism instead of Cubism, because Picasso¹s innovations are a regression to primitivism and have quite the opposite effect to progress and enrichment. Primitivism is low achieving and low demanding art. To the classically trained artist it is little more than a doodle or crude caricature. Picasso, like all other artists, enjoyed caricature, he was somewhat of a genius at it, his portrait of Gertrude Stein is quite a cruel caricature. but no artist in his day would have placed caricature above the high art founded on Classicism. Cubism is a deeper regression than caricature. Anyone can also see that Buste de Femme of Dora Maar is primitive cubist caricature, tossed off rapidly, yet this so called painting was sold at Christies in London last February for £3,083,750 pounds, approximately $3,600,000.
I must make clear that caricature for fun and for satire is very much part of the classical tradition. It involves deconstruction, going down the scale of accomplishment. Bouguereau or Leighton might have drawn suchlike on the menu over dinner to amuse their friends. There is lots of evidence of this kind of work in artists¹ memorabilia. When the academic artist draws primitively, it is always distinguishable from the beginner. This is what gives Picasso¹s primitivism its cleverness. We must guard against letting this mesmerise us. What Picasso did was not difficult for a talented academic artist of his time. Today when the whole fabric of the academic training system has been destroyed it would be difficult.
Picasso¹s most telling legacy has been the utter destruction of the great institutions that taught the academic method. Picture if you will the vast university education system we have in the sciences, it is truly impressive, it channels the energy of the best brains in our society, its teaching system is really efficient. its results really impressive. Well, when Picasso was born an equivalent system for the visual arts existed all over Europe and America. It had professors, it had anatomists, it had accumulated and systematised great knowledge, the knowledge of two millennia and developed an efficient training system. - the academic method.
On Picasso¹s death in 1977 these institutions were completely in the hands of the Avant Garde. Academic teaching had completely stopped, and students wasted their energies in futile experimentation in primitivism. Academic knowledge was forbidden as ideological heresy. Instead of studying art they wrote theses on the whacky philosophy of Du Champs and Greenberg. I do not think the general public have any idea of the extent of this revolution. It was a destruction of historic knowledge. Its effects have been devastating. Picasso, the century¹s greatest innovative artist, showed us the way to this great bonfire of cultural learning.
However one cannot lay the movement to primitivism in art completely at Picasso¹s feet. He was championed because he reflected a deeper movement in the collective soul of western civilisation and culture. I cannot begin to analyse it fully, and indeed great minds have put themselves to the task. Something big happened, like a seismic shift. I see it in terms of a social pathological regression from which we have not yet recovered. I see the revival of the classical arts as an essential part of a future recovery.
The Twentieth Century saw a collapse in the belief system of Christian and Renaissance culture. The philosopher Rousseau posed the idea of the noble savage, and from that, the idea that civilisation corrupts. We had the French Revolution, then the great utopian social theories of the Nineteenth Century. The whole area is a fascinating study and well beyond the scope of this essay. Picasso was involved in the intellectual milieu of his day. He was a Communist and a revolutionary. His art was a new art for a new age. It was taken up as such by the intelligentsia. It was part of the great experiment of Modernism.
Now, less than one hundred years later, we can see the results of that experiment. It continues to amaze me how great institutions like the Academies could so successfully be taken over by the Avant Garde and how effective was the destruction of ancient knowledge; as well they became the custodians and acknowledged experts for the old art, even though they had not studied it and become virtuoso in its techniques. This amounts to a take over by the ignorant.
One of my main themes, which I will return to again and again because it is so important, is this destruction of ancient knowledge. It has put us in a very vulnerable position, because the very people, our new generation of artists, who could assess our art tradition, who could subject it to critical analysis and judge its quality and excellence, have been denied the education that would enable them to do so. Moreover, in its place, the intelligentsia have created an elaborate conceit in their art criticism, an elaborate pretence that the regression to primitivism is in fact great art. Modernism is an indoctrination in this foolishness.
The academic training created an experience in the artist which I call enhanced seeing. I find this point very difficult to argue because it is not commonly shared among the art community today. What is not experienced in the senses does not exist in the senses and just telling others about it does not get you very far. I also want to point out that a lack of this experience does not prevent the ordinary art lover from getting the full message of art. Seventy per cent of our communication is in non-verbal body language and the classical arts excel here. However, enhanced seeing is essential if the artist is going to be in control of his medium. It is also essential for critical analysis and judgement of excellence.
For example, at an exhibition of modern figurative painting recently, I was impressed by the way the artist had realised certain parts of the body, but his realisation did not extent to the whole body. This artist was moving towards excellence but is still several years from it. I was looking at the neck and clavicles and mentioned to my colleague, a respected portrait painter, that the exhibiting artist has not got the structure right. My colleague looked at me askance. What was I taking about? His own knowledge of the head ended at the chin, he could not see the structural problem. He could not see what he did not know.
I am continually shocked by this lack of seeing in today¹s would be realist or traditional artists. Its lack is common place among Avant Garde artists, among curators and art administrators. I would also say among restorers and in all areas of official Museum and Gallery expertise. I can say categorically that today¹s art experts, who come from the art education created under Modernism, can no longer see art the way art experts did in the past. That is a shocking statement and I know I will be vigourously attacked for it. The only way I could prove this would be to get a number of students and start training them in the academic method, and indeed I have started already, in a small way, and have been surprised by the positive results.
Avant Garde so called innovations have caused a serious distortion of the art market. Not only are Modernists judging art by an intellectual conceit, but they have convinced the market that such art is an investment. More and more this art is becoming pure intellectual conceit with no craft or skill content at all. A true objective art criticism is essential for the proper functioning of an economy which provides a living for those working in the arts and crafts.
In such an economy there are a whole range of crafts which are interdependent. These form a hierarchy, and at each level there is an objective standard. It is like a pyramid with the classical arts at the apex. Standards in Medieval times were maintained by guilds which later evolved into the Nineteenth century academies. We need to rebuild this structure if classical art is to re-emerge; that in itself will create the expertise that can judge good art.
I must emphasise that renewal will be slow because the regression to primitivism has effected everything. For example, I am considering getting my sculpture of The Kiss carved in marble. To do that, I would need craftsmen skilled in marble carving. It is not just a matter of slavish copying of my work, they have to know the shapes they are carving. In the old system apprentices would have learnt these shapes, but in Twenty First century Italy, the home of marble carving, there are no apprentices. Such skilled carvers as there are, are in their sixties, and even they do not get the necessary practice in virtuoso carving. My fear would be, that I would get insensitive work. It would not be up to my standards. and fall far short of the standard of sixty years ago.
With the mechanisation of the crafts, that body of knowledge began to dissipate. Photography can be seen as mechanising traditional art by creating realism without the need for academic skills. However analysis is necessary if the artist is to make realism. He has to know about the zygomatic arch, the frontal eminence, the cartilage structure of the ear, to name but three. I would say there are probably several hundred concepts in all, if not thousands, and all would have to be known by the classical artist. The ordinary person recognises a photograph in an entirely different way; but to paint or sculpt a portrait you have to analyse, and by analysis and practice you gain the classically trained eye.
Classicism gave our culture a visual language of staggering power; one that was invented gradually over two and a half thousand years. The camera cannot replace this, as its visual communication is an Œindex¹ and limited to the human actors who perform before it. The classically trained artists knew the body so well that they could go beyond the Œactor¹ and express visual communication through images they had created. This can easily be seen in a painting by say, Bouguereau who speaks to our emotions and feelings far beyond the level of the photographic image. Modernism was in large part a reaction to the success of photography. It was claimed that Picasso¹s Cubism, Guernica, for instance, could say what the camera could not say. Artists were thus relieved of the duty to represent but found a higher calling in the insightful psychological and metaphoric art of primitive abstraction. This idea has proved to be false. Abstraction fits the reductionist view of science which has been powerful in our age. Scientific philosophy has also been reductionist, but human behaviour and meaning cannot be reduced to abstract concepts. This is too niggardly a view of the soul compared to the inspired revelation of the world¹s higher religions.
Thus the mechanisation of the crafts has caused a whole visual culture to disappear. Machine tools have moved into masonry, printing, carving, etc. Other manufacture, that required a high degree of skilled craft, has been exported to countries where labour is cheap. For example in England a major manufacturer of ceramic figurines recently moved wholesale to Malaysia and their skilled workforce was left unemployed. One can now order granite shapes carved by hand in China and have them delivered them to Ireland more cheaply than they can be made in Ireland.
What our culture neglects is the state of altered consciousness and meaning that comes from high achieving work in the crafts. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains this brilliantly in his book Flow - The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It is a powerful argument for the stabilising effect of such work.
We have to rebuild our visual culture and its infrastructure. This can be done by creating a micro economy; I am not suggesting that we give up using mass produced consumer goods and return to crafts. We must remember the Acropolis of Athens was probably made by a community of less than 50,000 artists and artisans So there is still hope of great art. Even supporting an artistic community of 100,000 would be nothing in a modern economy. However in a misdirected art market how can that be done? For example for $3,600,000, the price of Picasso¹s Buste de Femme, I could support an artistic community of thirty people for two or three years, and we would all have a reasonable standard of living. I could include maintenance of premises and the training of apprentices within that figure. The money to support a micro economy already exists; but how are we going to move it from a phoney art market into a true art market?
From the 60¹s on Picasso was able to use the new media publicity machine to become a mega star. Picasso the celebrity was born. Celebrities are the phenomena of our age, and one that Camille Paglia has called the new Olympians. Let me run a parody of mythology here somewhat tongue in cheek.
The pagan gods and goddesses have been reborn in human form and live in Hollywood or some other chic spot. Fame brings immortality. Film stars, sportsmen, artists; all share this Parnassus or Valhalla of heightened living. We, the ordinary people, live vicariously in their glory; and that is the way they like it. We can own a fragment of their fame by buying possessions associated with them, (massed produced goods with a logo on them). Picasso, now among the gods, is honoured as Œthe great shaman¹. He confers with Loki the trickster and Pluto the god of wealth. His talismans (Cubism etc.) still work their ancient power on earth, worshipped by a public who idolise genius and are dazzled by the money (art as a good investment). Occasionally a plutocrat (devotee of Pluto) primes the market with a landmark price. Mammon and mystification go hand in hand. Loki and Pluto ensure that their confidence trick remains secure, and their subjects remain enslaved in Hades (realm of Pluto)
In his old age Picasso became a figure out of Greek Tragedy; an old man, pathologically scared of dying and surrounded by discord, suicide and madness. His estate was worth $260 million when he died in 1977. There is further ironic twist to the story. His grandson Claude has registered the Picasso signature as a trademark in 140 countries and licences official merchandising. His biggest coup to date has been selling the Picasso signature to Citroen for its Xsara. The extra price per car is in the region of $1600, but Citroen has not disclosed the royalty details. I won¹t be buying one. It seems to me poetic justice that Picasso¹s signature has become the ultimate logo.