Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/12/09
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]The only problem with your take on this, Peter, is that it appears to have been written in a vacuum; everything today is filtered through media of various forms, and blown way out of proportion. Sure, artists today promote themselves in different ways and to different extents than did artists in the past - but so do writers, so do corporate executives, so to chefs, so do contractors and dentists. Times change, and views of what is necessary and acceptable self-promotion change as well. Remember when it was considered the height of unethical conduct for lawyers to advertise? :-) For pharma companies to advertise directly to patients? I said what I said and I'm sticking to it - the artists who achieved fame and riches in their life always were, and still are, expert self-promoters. ;-) - -----Original Message----- From: owner-leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us [mailto:owner-leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us] On Behalf Of Peter Klein Sent: Monday, December 08, 2003 11:32 PM To: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us Subject: RE: [Leica] #$@%$^ art photographers At 06:29 PM 12/8/03 -0800, "B. D. Colen" <bdcolen@earthlink.net> opined: >Allow me to throw a rotten tomato into this discussion and suggest that >self-promotion has been an important aspect of the successful artists >repertoire not for the last several decades, but rather for the last >millennium. Do you really think that the successful artists of the >renaissance weren't inveterate self-promoters? Obviously the >self-promotion took different forms - sucking up to rich princes, No thanks. Besides, I don't think today's corporate CEO is the equivalent of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Perhaps of the Borgias or the Medicis, but minus the patronage. These guys don't build monuments to their greatness. They just stash the cash offshore. >sleeping with rich princesses, etc., *Now* you tell me!!! >but it's always been part of the >game. Virtually any artist who wanted to sell work in his or her >life-time, rather than wait to be discovered after death, had to be a >self-promoter. True, but I'm not sure the self-promotion took quite the degree of flamboyance and self-indulgence that it does these days. In most eras, art served God or society, self-expression was filtered through fairly strong conventions, and new techniques were based on the desire to find better and broader ways to order things to express how we perceived the world. The idea of the artist as revolutionary, and the idea of emotional self-expression as an end unto itself is a 19th-century Romantic concept. Some of today's so-called artists are the heirs of Romanticism--but their antics are amplified by the power of media and the science of mass influence into something much more. Add to that the desire to sweep away all convention and regarding any sense of order as the enemy--these are things that the turn of the 20th century started, and the post World War I era cemented. We end up with something that, yes, evolved from the sucking up to princes and sleeping with princesses; but has metamorphasized into something very different. And in many cases it has replaced or supplanted the art itself. Franz Liszt was in many ways the 19th Century equivalent of a rock star. But he was also one of the finest composers and performers of his time. The music came first, and the self-promotion served the music. Today the music (or art) often serves the self-promotion, if it survives at all. The revolutionaries of the early-mid 20th century knew what they were rebelling against. I'm not sure many post-1960s artists do. It is one thing (and, I think a good thing) to say that content dictates form. It is quite another to say that lack of form dictates content. It is a good thing to do something new and different. It is quite another to do something completely incoherent, guided only by libido, ego and self-indulgence, and claim that anyone who doesn't like it is an ignorant Phillistine. OK, I'll shut up now. . . - --Peter Klein Seattle, WA - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html