Hello!
This website just opened, and this blog is offering me the possibility to engage
in a dialog.
I’ll start with one question: what’s so great about being “contemporary”?
What’s in today is out tomorrow.
Linking art with a moment is simply nonsense; it is only academic art that
attempts to groove with the prevailing rules of a given period.
Great art, I always felt, transcends time.
Costumes and décor, in the art of the past, generally turn me off. That’s almost
all I see in what’s being shown nowadays under the heading of “contemporary”.
In contrast, a nude is a nude, is a nude… from Willendorf to Freud.
So, I tell myself, let them have fun and fame with their fifteen minutes…
Of course, to transcend time one has to be grounded in the present, but only to
expand it, to somehow grow out of it.
Just as one can aim for the universal through a focus on the specific.
Otherwise, a mirror will always be better than a painting.
More next time!
Grégoire