Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Art mastery - Future Tense




Because my mother was deeply interested in art, i was always encouraged to support art and over the years, like many, i have collected the odd piece.  Nothing too wonderful, but do have several CW Anderson originals in particular which is highly unusual as he apparently never sold originals.  What makes him stand out is pure mastery of his art.

I also came to appreciate the difficulties facing anyone making his way into art in general and have known many struggling artists whose work will never see the light of day.  I often tried to discover a business model that could solidify demand for their work as well.

Today most artists are naturally drawn into computer graphics and animation which is wonderful as it has actually provided a commercial basis for their lives.  Yet this inevitably takes away from the creation of stand alone masterworks whose market is naturally ephemeral.

It struck me recently that there is a way past all this.  We do have artists able to actually fabricate great masters.  Why not recognize this as a valuable skill and train artists to do exactly this?  Today they are bad mouthed.

The Mona Lisa is unique.  Yet crafting an exact copy would be a massive challenge that can even be graded by experts.  This allows a skilled artist to mature his talents and to be graded say Master class Davinci Grade A+ through C-.  Way more important his own talent is also naturally graded and recognized and new work will be easily recognized and marketed as such.

After that it is all about subject and taste.  An artist master class Rubins A+ then producing a portrait of yourself is automatically respected and adds reputational value above and beyond and even makes the item salable later on.  I would be happy to acquire a portrait of yourself painted by a master class Rubins B+. In short, not all pieces need to be copies of the great masters to attract a market.  They need to strongly reflect the hand of that great master.

This would also drive present aspiring artists to develop master class skills as well which is long overdue as we strayed from that in the twentieth century.  I always start there  when i look at a piece and am usually disappointed. 

After all we do exactly this in sculpture.  How many Davids and Athenas have been sculpted? 
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