Product Description
Some critics declared the death of art in the seventies and eighties. While shocking their statement was nevertheless right on the mark. Art had indeed lost the societal functionality that had driven it from its early beginnings till sometime after the 2nd World War or over 99.9% of its time-span. Art has always been instrumental at defusing the wisdom of the men of knowledge at the attention of all their fellow citizens. Societies need cohesion to survive and, having a far deeper impact on humans than words and theories, visual signs imposed themselves as privileged instruments in the hands of the men of power in order to glue their subjects into the societies that they governed.
By the end of the nineteenth century the men of knowledge had lost the support of the men of power and had thus to compete with all kinds of charlatans for gaining the ears of their fellow citizens. This relativization of knowledge eliminated the traditional imposition on the painters of the messages to be illustrated in their works. In this process the painters gained total freedom to paint whatever they wanted. In a first stage science and technology helped them abandoning the traditional painting subjects (cubism, surrealism, ...) but sometime after mid-twentieth century they had lost themselves into "whatever is art". The confusion that ensued gave the marketeers and the bureaucrats free-hands to dictate what works would be retained by the market as well as their valuation. That's when art effectively died.
As a consequence of this confusion about the societal functionality of fine-arts the ever increasing pace of scientific change and of economic globalization took place in a vacuum of accepted values which resulted in a feeling of deep emptiness for most individuals. Most westerners are now yearning for sense but in their atomizing societal environment most of them are blinded to the knowledge of their day and in consequence many now look to past knowledges with the hope to be "saved". But past knowledges are of no help in making sense out of contemporary realities...
At this present and very peculiar cross-point of human history the functionality of fine-arts appears to be more essential than it has ever been. Societal necessity obliging; the first lines of the sketch of an artistic awakening are starting to appear on the drawing boards... This book is about a second Renaissance in painting that will be driven as an answer to the deepening societal need described here above. But here is a hitch, for, it is knowledge that will drive this Renaissance, it is knowledge that has to guide painters' brushes.
Our late modern times are characterized by a visual-arts' drama that is two-fold: - Visual artists who studied their craft in academies have been trained in the subtleties of their technique but left completely ignorant of what is going on in their societies. They can thus technically finish an image or a visual sign but they are unable to translate a sensical understanding of the reality of their times in their visual signs which gives of them the idea given by Duchamp as "being dumb as a painter"... - Visual artists who did not study their craft in academies are often gratified with poor technical skills and the representation of their ideas about the reality of their times is thus most often fatally flawed technically.
WITHOUT TECHNIQUE WHAT WE EXPRESS SEEMS UNFINISHED AND WITHOUT INTELLECTUAL CONTENT IT IS AS IF WHAT WE EXPRESS WERE SHALLOW.
Painters can't thus limit their skills to being solely image technicians as was the case in the past... painters now need to acquire knowledge about what is going on around them, for, without such knowledge they just could not create visual signs illustrating the understanding developing today that will appear to be accepted by all within some decades... The only contemporary works of art that will be retained in the future will indeed be those that succeed to give visual signs of the worldview that will be shared in the future if not by all then at least by most.
From the Author
t took me all the years between 1986 and 2000 to digest that cultural shock. It's difficult to lay out in a few words the impact of such a shock. I had already experienced 2 earlier cultural shocks through immigration and than through education but nothing compares with the immersion of a young European in the daily Chinese realities for a period of 15 years.
Along that uneven road, I have experienced the need to go back to my received ideas they were indeed not satisfying me any longer.
Two fields absorbed my interest and all my time: - the formation of capitalism because modernity is ultimately nothing more than one stage of development along its history. - the build-up of culture and the formation of civilizations and more particularly the history of the Chinese civilization and the content and formation of its value system.
After fifteen years of extensive reading my ideas were starting to come together and I felt the time had come for me to try my hands at painting again.
