At some point, we lost not only the realism but some of the fundamentals, too. When texture and symmetry and all the other fundamentals come closer to being ends in themselves, students probably don't learn them as well. Picasso did not lose the fundamentals, but some artists who came a couple generations after him did as they absorbed the new qualities of modern art. At some point, it became about the activity of moving paint around on canvas. Meanwhile, many of those who wish to get back to representation have gravitated toward the technical in realism.
In my mind, Picasso and Chardin are doing the same thing. But maybe we've lost sight of that. In terms of design fundamentals, Pollock is closer to a Medieval illuminated manuscript, hundreds of years earlier, than Pollock is to Koons, only decades later. Meanwhile, by constructing a historical narrative of progression from Modernism to Postmodernism, we've thrown out thousands of years of art fundamentals and five hundred years of modernity with the bath water.
More specifically, what we seem to have thrown out, in these last few decades, is everything I learned those first two years of art school. Nowhere is this disregard for the fundamentals and principles of art and design more obvious to me than in the art magazines on the newsstand at my local bookstore. Here on this newsstand is the reality I had to look forward to after art school, and what has intimidated me and made me feel so alienated and unwelcome in the art world. Here we have art magazines to the left and to the right. Ironically or otherwise, the progressive magazines are on the left and the conservative ones on the right.
And what do we find? On the left is every conceivable deviation from traditional art. Anything goes. Some of it seems inhumanly tedious. Some seems mockingly sparse (but not beautifully minimalist). Little of it rewards closer inspection or repeated viewing. Most seems to function more as a signifier for a lifestyle or attitude than as something deeply poetic and transcendent. Then, over to the right, we have boats and lighthouses and horses and barns and, on a particularly depressing day, clowns or flowers. These artists, like their counterparts to the left, show a shocking disregard for color, composition, and subtlety. They couldn't design their way out of a rectangular room, obviously, and they seem to have no taste for content. Both sides appear to have thrown away the fundamentals of art for a near-religious fundamentalism that negates what I was taught to positively and actively embrace. They have also thrown away the strong conceptual and theoretical background that I enjoyed, replacing it with some pretty dubious ideas on both sides.
This is the art world I have been stressing about getting invited into. I used to think I was missing out on something. But I probably had a better strategy during my years at Tri-C and OU when I was oblivious to the art world. I am no longer oblivious to the art world. But I am no longer desirous of it, either. I am not afraid of it. I'm not worried about it. I'll put my work where people can see my work. And eventually the best people and I will connect.
