It’s the reaction to the artwork that gives rise to all these theories. Artists themselves can be just as deluded concerning their own motives and methods.

We all know that correlation is not causation, yet so easily conflate the artist with the art.

Obviously Pollock’s lifestyle/persona was part of his appeal, but that’s not to say that all paint splatterers are equal in their splattering merits. The romantic lives a lie about the importance and uniqueness of his individuality as such, but he does so in an attempt to resist the forces of a market society that seem to threaten to reduce him to some automaton. And by resisting the market he may indeed create a real value in the market, the work that for a moment upholds the promise of a distinctiveness that is not like all the others. So I am impressed by my mother’s story, not that i spend my time studying Pollocks or such.

The reason I think we will return to an idea of craftsmanship is that the era of the artist making, or being the focus of, fundamental discoveries about humanity seems to have played itself out. Whatever the limits of romanticism, modernism, postmodernism, there is nonetheless something essential that they taught us about our humanity. But it seems today that the esthetic experiment is playing itself out, at least in some disciplines (though some, like film, remain strong). There was a time when great thinkers aspired to write novels – Chesterton, Camus, dare I say Sartre – but today the most ambitious, it seems to me, limit themselves, like bloggers, to commentary, and maybe poetry, where the literary cutting edge in human self-understanding seems to be.

The reason for this is ethical. The romantic artist makes a great claim on the public attention – unlike the craftsman – for his purported discovery of some new and fundamental aspect of humanity in history. Not only does this attract the possibility of more resentment than it can handle, it relies on certain sacrificial gestures which we can no longer take as seriously as the artiste of old would like us to (because the seriousness of national high culture is tied, historically, to the great violence of the 20thC). A work of art is defined in large part by the means of its closure, while the intellectual commentary which is essentially ethical and not esthetic, is part of a ongoing conversation which we can all join and take up in defining what our times say about the unfolding possibilities inherent in human origins.

The romantic attracts more resentment today than he recycles back into the market system. SO we turn increasingly towards the craftsman who has a less problematic relationship to the marketplace. We value the work ethic behind his learned skill and because we can no longer value the artiste’s pretension to unique individuality unless it is in a field where no one performance excludes the possibility of another’s. Body modification is exemplary of this. Salieri would like our time.

All of this is to point out why I disagree with this statement of WOlfe’s:

“The moment that art is made subservient to some ethical or political purpose, it ceases to be art and becomes propaganda. Art seems to require an inviolable freedom to seek the good of the artifact, without either overt or covert messages being forced into it. And history demonstrates that it is simply a statement of fact (to paraphrase Aquinas) that rectitude of the appetites is not a prerequisite for the ability to make beautiful objects. Thus our poisoner with his exquisite prose. Or Picasso brutalizing the women in his life. Or the legion of artists and scientists who drank or drugged themselves to death.”

I think, rather, that art is always ethical and political (though it may not be subservient to established political purposes – his meaning here is unclear), and it is precisely the ethical limits of romanticism that are the reason for our present return to craftsmanship.

On the more representational end I’m partial to landscapes and never tire of looking at Bierstadt or any from the Hudson River School.