We’ve been doing school this morning with four more students than usual, tripling my reading audience for the First Years. I finally directed them to a drawing project which should distract them for a few minutes, and came to hide in the bookroom with a light snack. My elevenses, if you will. The Head Girl poked her head in the doorway and directed my attention to a worldmagblog entry this morning. “You should read it,” she said. “It’s great. You’ll love it.” She was right. Indeed, I usually do find their blog edifying, and if World Magazine is not on your daily, or at least weekly, reading schedule, you have been remiss. The Headmistress respectfully suggests that you will be glad to correct this deficiency.
Here’s today’s gem:
From “Picasso on Modern Art, Including His:”
“In art the mass of people no longer seeks consolation and exaltation, but those who are refined, rich, unoccupied, who are distillers of quintessences, seek what is new, strange, extravagant, scandalous. I myself, since Cubism and before, have satisfied these masters and critics with all the changing oddities which pass through my head, and the less they understood me, the more they admired me. . . . Fame for a painter means sales, gains, fortune, riches. And today, as you know. I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone with myself, I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term. Giotto, Titan, Rembrandt were great painters. I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and exploited as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries.”
This goes along with Pipsqueak’s post about abstract, modern art, and the news article that revealed that critics in the field cannot tell the difference between art work done by 4 y.o. children and that done by genuine, realio, trulio, really live artists. Actually, I suspect they could tell the difference, because they generally thought the art done by 4 y.o. children was better, and they were quite right.
See Pipsqueak’s post here.
One Comment
Wow! Extremely verbal person that I am, it strikes me that even his speech is discontected and unsettling. Amazing.
And yes, I do indeed believe that most 4 year olds can do better art than the ‘artists’of tday, because they are actually portraying the world to the best of their ability, and any absurdities are not forced.