The widely recognised failure of the major parties in the UK to offer significant change to to our increasingly broken system is well recognised. Alternative voices struggle to be heard.
All the major traditional vehicles for the expression of opinions play to the status quo. This includes the BBC (see George Monbiot's analysis in today's Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/20/broadcasters-mouthpieces-of-elite-balanced-news-journalists
The world economic and media systems remorselessly favour:
power for the powerful;
privilege for the privileged;
property for the propertied;
education for the educated;
culture for the cultured;
voices for the voiced;
money for the monied;
food for the well-fed.
Please add to the list.
I am of course part of this system, like most of my few readers I imagine.
Some internet voices provide alternative ways of being heard - Avaaz, 38 Degrees, Change, Greenpeace, Compassion in World Farming... The are not the big answer, but they do provide a way for like-minded people whose voices are lost in the present system to come together and to erode the pernicious power of intersecting establishments.
I have joined the Green Party, not because I agree with all their policies, but because in the current state of flux they can provide a focus for those who regard UKIP as poisonous, and the other parties as failing to provide alternatives.
anything and everything, from the standpoint of a historian of visual things.
Wednesday 21 January 2015
Tuesday 6 January 2015
Another survey history of art?
This blog is not so much intermittent as worse than occasional. Sorry.
I always intend to respond to events in the news. But rarely do so in time.
This one is unashamedly advertising my new book.
This month (Jan 2015) sees the publication of Art in History as a print book (for £8.99!)
http://www.profilebooks.com/isbn/9781781253366/
and an animated e-book (2 devoted to the technical issues of space and colour, and 3 with a cartoon Kemp pontificating). I will post the link to the e-book when it becomes available. I discourage potential purchasers from using Amazon, which I am boycotting because of their employment and tax policies.
Below is the intro. to the book, to give an idea of how I have tackled the barmy task of treating 26 centuries in 40,000 words. This came about as the result of an invitation from Michael Bhaskar of Profile Books. There are no works discussed in detail that are not illustrated, and each illustrated work is given a kind of traditional ekphrasis - a set-piece of word painting in the Ancient and Renaissance manner.
I wonder if overarching surveys still have a role to play. I hope so. In any event, I'm doing the round of the Lit Fests, including Hay, Edinburgh and Oxford.
_________________________________________________________
The artists and works of art in this book have transformed how art
affects us. Over the ages, painters and sculptors have invited us to do
radically new things.
I always intend to respond to events in the news. But rarely do so in time.
This one is unashamedly advertising my new book.
This month (Jan 2015) sees the publication of Art in History as a print book (for £8.99!)
http://www.profilebooks.com/isbn/9781781253366/
and an animated e-book (2 devoted to the technical issues of space and colour, and 3 with a cartoon Kemp pontificating). I will post the link to the e-book when it becomes available. I discourage potential purchasers from using Amazon, which I am boycotting because of their employment and tax policies.
Below is the intro. to the book, to give an idea of how I have tackled the barmy task of treating 26 centuries in 40,000 words. This came about as the result of an invitation from Michael Bhaskar of Profile Books. There are no works discussed in detail that are not illustrated, and each illustrated work is given a kind of traditional ekphrasis - a set-piece of word painting in the Ancient and Renaissance manner.
I wonder if overarching surveys still have a role to play. I hope so. In any event, I'm doing the round of the Lit Fests, including Hay, Edinburgh and Oxford.
_________________________________________________________
Introduction
To take just one example, we do not know how the
first viewers of Diego Velásquez’s Las Meninas reacted to his mighty
canvas, but we can be sure that they had seen nothing like it before. It is
recognisable as a group portrait, but does not conform to the norm. The artist is
there, but we see only a portion of the back of his painting. The young
princess and her entourage have assembled in the grand room. But at whom are
they looking? At someone more important than us, we imagine. The king and queen
are visible in the mirror. But where are they? They are the absent subject of
the picture. Velásquez, in common with other great artists, presents us with a
field for interpretation in which we can all play our part.
Art in History concentrates on
the triangular relationship between art, artist and spectator – frequently in
the context of God and nature. This is how the present book differs from the numerous
previous histories of ‘Western Art’. It looks at the varied
historical notions of art and artists as categories within which art is
produced and consumed. What art required of the spectator and what the
spectator required of art changed radically over the ages. We will see the artist
emerge as an individual who makes a distinct contribution to the development of
art in ancient Greece and again later in the Renaissance. Subsequent centuries
witness the evolution of the categories until they assume their modern
meanings. The developments often embody the idea of ‘progress’, a powerful
concept in the forging of modern economic and political systems. Indeed, every
aspect of the rise of art and artists is deeply involved in material and
conceptual shifts in society.
In setting art in history, a big question looms into
view: is the maker of artefacts a subservient agent or an autonomous hero of
creativity? Or to frame more subtle questions: how far is the art work first
and foremost an expression of a series of social imperatives; and how far does it
depend on the direct and timeless communication of human values from one
individual to another? Can it be both of these things? I will argue that the
power of images depends on both, in a wholly integrated manner.
How a work of
art is embedded in history varies as widely as the works and the artists vary.
A medieval Madonna and Child is directly concerned with a kind of spiritual
beauty that lies beyond this world, while Goya’s painting of a contemporary
massacre speaks of violent contention. What we call the ‘style’ of the work is
integral to its effect. The suave grace and high polish of the Madonna would
not serve Goya well. The violent colour contrasts and incendiary brushwork of
Goya would not exercise the right effect on a medieval worshipper. All the
works here demonstrate a compelling unity of style and content. Each of them
posits their own special relationship with the spectator in the context of the
society from which they emerged, and they ‘speak’ to us in a period voice.
Although we can still hear them speak, we gain enormously from attuning our
ears to their very varied accents.
We will be
encountering our key works in a broadly chronological order, because what each
artist does is articulated in relation to what went before, and affects our
view of the past. As the great poet T. S. Eliot wrote in 1921, ‘what
happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens
simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it’.
Until
comparatively recently, works of art that have emerged from the changing
frameworks tell the story of big blokes – whether artists or their funders –
and play to what is a familiar story of canonical masterpieces that stood at
the centre of new developments in European and North American art. There are of
course other stories, but the narrative I follow, looking at European and North
American art, is a real and massive one, not least in terms of where the international
art world is now, in China no less than in the USA. It is also the story that I
am best equipped to tell but I don’t claim that it is definitely what the
history of art is about. As one of the possible stories, not the least of its
attractions is its focus on some of the most enriching works human beings have
produced. It is also closely related to what we experience when we step into
major galleries and museums.
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