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Showing posts from April, 2011

Art on the Defensive

I heard a pretty interesting comment today from my painting teacher at Western Carolina University. He said that there was something strange about how artists (and I’m talking about painters here) have to be able to defend their position for making art and what subject matter they choose. Yet no one is asking a writer to paint a painting in defense of his writing. I understand this is an illogical supposition, but one that is somewhat truthful. What it proposes is that art is not valid until it has gone through a focus group type review (a critique) and that artists should therefore become even better communicators than they are artists, because it takes quite a skillful wordsmith to write up a meaningful artist statement. The more one thinks about this, even more issues spring up. For example, no one is asking a baseball player to defend what he does, or the WWF wrestler to write a statement explaining his attempts at leaping at his opponent in skin tight spandex. There is an ar