Are Visual and Musical Art Passé?

March 26, 2007

By Tony Heath

The Greatest Artist

It occurred to me some years ago that being a big-time artist or musician in our time has lost some or all of its traditional virtue. It’s always been a narcissistic self-congratulatory process in which we essentially compete for “best artist,” but today issues call out for action that transcend the relatively narrow focus of our personal creations. Those of you who lived in Soho, my old neighborhood in New York City, might recall René’s ubiquitous graffiti claiming, “I am the Greatest Artist.” It was a wonderful parody of the art world at that time.

Today, if you are a “chosen one,” you can make thousands-folds more money than your classmates in art school or your peers during those formative years who once shared your earnest quest for recognition. Competition for acclaim and motive for colossal profit have taken on epic proportions, upstaging the “process,” as we used to say in art school.

Brice Marden, a painter I admired in art school, owns three giant homes. Hank Mobley, the great jazz saxophonist, was driving a cab when he died in obscurity in the nineteen-eighties. Commercial interests had left him with nothing. The old-fashioned idea of an artist’s devotion to his work trumping financial security has yielded to the phenomenon of the art-star towering above his peers. Art now mirrors professional sports. Could Gauguin have created his masterpieces without secluding himself in a paradise where profit was irrelevant?

Old-fashioned Values

Great artists of the past were the visionaries, going beyond—making outstanding contributions, sometimes starving for their innovations, but always moving culture forward. The grandeur of nature—grace and beauty—was traditionally the muse. Contemporary art seems obsessively preoccupied with personal angst, fashionable styles and vitriolic expressionism crying out for attention. Artists are falling into complacency, encouraged by a consumption-driven society, rather than transcending it and representing the alternative. The majority of brute creativity is devoted to the sale of goods and services—slave to the accumulation of capital.

John Lennon had the enlightenment to proclaim, “Give peace a chance.” I am saying give somebody else a chance besides Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, Michael Jackson and Madonna, a few we call artists from whom the world is getting little inspiration. I recommend the reader listen to the work of the great Brazilian songwriter Antonio Carlos Jobim—specifically, “Quiet Nights & Quiet Stars,” “Song of the Sabia,” “Two Kites,” “Passarim” (Songbird) and “Forever Green,” to name several of his most inspiring works. Listen, and contrast the beauty, and the message (a positive one), with that of the discordant drone of much of today’s pop culture.

Originality A Thing Of The Past

Few if any artists today can change the world as artists did in the past. The cave painters of Lascaux, Leonardo Da Vinci, Claude Debussy, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, to name a few, made great contributions to human perceptions and sensibilities. In some cases, they even had a positive influence on commerce, lifting the human spirit higher. Innovation has always defined important works of art. With few exceptions, it would seem that everything has been done.

Artists today are mixing styles and falsely calling the result original. Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker were innovators. The jazz pianists and composers Bill Evans and Tom Jobim wrote original compositions the likes of which the world had never heard until their time. They were also skilled craftsmen. Painters Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse and Jackson Pollack and the photographer Paul Strand are examples of original visual artists. All created a positive new direction in the arts, influencing whole generations of younger creative people in a serialized process through time. In short, they contributed something that in turn led to something else of value.

Most artists today are in fact craftsmen reshuffling the styles of past innovators. In many cases, they may be creating works of great beauty, but originality in the arts is disappearing because there is little left to innovate.

The point is, if the purpose of art is not to innovate and move culture forward, why place so much value on it? We are in a period when immediate action is required to preserve things about the world that we baby boomers as children took for granted —clean air and water, open spaces, pristine forests, living coral reefs, national parks free of man’s touch, enough land to protect large mammals, intact polar ice caps, biodiversity, the food chain, and on and on.

A New Paradigm

Crippling changes are taking place all around us as we overpopulate our planet. Art is an important phase in our singular path to self-knowledge, but it hardly seems of critical importance to the survival of the planet. Our age requires a new kind of action—not necessarily the kind that uses our sensibilities or talents in the traditional ways, but one that contributes to the preservation of discovered values and espouses conservation in an era of unprecedented change.

Great artists of past centuries taught us to see and hear things we had never before experienced. They created works of great beauty that reflected the mysteries of nature and gave us the perceptual foundation upon which to value the surrounding world and ultimately ourselves. Today, artists must accept that there are more pressing issues equal to or greater than their personal quest for adulation or self-fulfillment. A new vision does not require that they abandon their craft, but that they begin to understand that critical issues outside themselves beg for individual action.

We baby boomers embraced the arts in exceptional numbers, making our time not the Swing Era or the Information Age, but rather the Age of Self-fulfillment. We have bit-chomped our way through a horse race of winners and losers as the Earth has continued to decay under our feet. Without action, we will leave our planet “a crust of skulls and bones and dead machinery,” as Kurt Vonnegut wrote recently in, A Man without a Country.

One day soon we may be forced to admit that much of the art of our era is in fact passé. Great craftsmanship will survive and prosper, but a fresh up to date vision, preserving and honoring the Earth, will usher forth new art that is innovative in its philosophical consciousness.

Editorial and research assistance by Louise Gordon