The Restless Spirit

Salon style art exhibits — why do they seem to work in Lascaux, but not in modern times? Is it that the framing of paintings, as well as rooms, makes too much of the repetition of the right angle? Is it that the proliferation of painting styles has less unity than the millennia-constant style of the ancient cave dweller?

Or is there something else, more pernicious to art styles and more stimulative to experimentation present in the salon style show? What, after all, happens when we assemble a wall of paintings by different hands in a large gallery? Our eyes begin a natural critique which speeds through our nervous system far in advance of any words we can conjure to describe it. The result can easily be a malaise, caused by the feeling that one or another painting subverts the high opinion we hitherto had of another that hangs next to them. Alone without companions nearby, that painting had once held you enthralled, but now, what tinsel and trifle is it when compared directly to a masterpiece next to it? And that masterpiece then falls by comparison to another painting above it? Horrors — soon an entire century of painting comes into question. 

It is perhaps this natural result of collective comparison and contrast — this free market in aesthetic criticism — that gave rise to modern painting in the first place. Perhaps without the 19th century's love of public displays of art filled rooms, without its Lascaux-like hallucinogen of nudes and drama and still lives and landscapes, without the exuberant wish to top plenty with even more plenty, without the never enough willpower of impressing to the maximum, without these drives, perhaps our young artists would never have cracked the code of their own discontent with what had already been done in art. 

It is exciting to think that more fascinating comparisons are in store for us, if we ever subject the twentieth and now the twenty-first century's art to a similar treatment, cheek and jowl, up there salon style, to encourage or irritate as the case may be. Perhaps the great reassessment of art and art history never really happened in the 1950s as we are told, but that the earthquake of reassessment happened a hundred years earlier.  

Un-compared, untested, unquestioned modern masterworks hang in isolation rooms, either enormously large to fill the eye and deny any room for comparison, or separate from the questioning appearance of any other styles of painting. Where in this have we really embraced critical thought, granted appreciation freely and autonomously instead of been forced by a megalomaniacal cult of one artist at a time being placed in the temple of our eye? 

Art history is perhaps only this worship and its discontent. The comparison will come along from time to time. The results will be creative and unpredictable. And all of it is exciting, for we are seen in our art and need it for steering. Don't ask me how or why, but this seems one of the existential truths of the human condition.

John Sevcik