The Arts Are For Everyone PDF Download

Excerpt from Art Is for Everyone The English critic Clive Bell once remarked somewhere that though most people readily admit that they understand very little about music, nearly everybody considers himself entitled to an Opinion about art. And a very generally held opinion about the art of the past fifty years is that it is, as a whole, cryptic, perverse, modern, and very confusing. This, of course, is not at all surprising. A great many things have happened to art during the first half Of our century, and the enormous variety of techniques developed by artists during this period - the apparently endless and conflicting avenues through which they have approached their aesthetic problems - are apt to strike the average man, who gives a hurried look at the end product, as bewildering indeed. Yet if one takes the trouble to find out what the artist is doing and to ask one self a few really searching questions about what aspects of art one really values, it turns out that the confusion is not in the mind of today's artist but in the mind of today's layman, who has simply not thought enough about art to distinguish that which is aesthetically meaningful from that which is more or less irrelevant to aesthetic enjoyment. Actually, it ixtakes a great deal of looking and a great deal of thinking be fore the average person is prepared to make these distinctions and to qualify as one who really understands art. Prejudices must be broken down; new ways of seeing must be cultivated. The process is one of mental and Spiritual enrichment. But to carry it out, a guiding hand is needed. In this book, Martha Simpson, herself a distinguished American painter, has provided such a guiding hand. And though her reasoning reflects both a profound knowledge of art and much patient analysis of her craft, it is expressed with such clarity that almost anyone can understand and profit by what she has to say. Art today probably reflects a broader and more comprehensive view of aesthetics than has ever before existed in history. Modern historical scholarship has acquainted us with the artistic products of many civilizations and eras which our forefathers ignored. Modern anthropology and psychology, the invention Of the camera, the changing function of art in relation to human needs, have all profoundly affected the work of the artist. Yet they have not really af fected the fundamental meaning, or message, of art, which remains universal and has been expressed quite similarly by artists as far apart in history as those of modern France, those of the Italian Renaissance, and those who painted the neo lithic animals on the cave walls of prehistoric Dordogne. To appreciate this message demands, for most of us, a process of reeducation in which we throw aside our provincial pre conceptions and seek an understanding of the basic values that are common to all art. In so doing, we enter a new world of visual experience which, though new to us, is really one of the oldest and most universal areas in which men have communicated their ideas and emotions. I h0pe that many readers will find in this volume a doorway into this world. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.