{"id":141,"date":"2011-05-20T17:48:03","date_gmt":"2011-05-20T17:48:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.internationaldiplomat.com\/?p=141"},"modified":"2011-05-20T17:48:03","modified_gmt":"2011-05-20T17:48:03","slug":"can-imagine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/12h71.com\/?p=141","title":{"rendered":"Can you imagine?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"marit3-1fc52\"<\/a>Can you imagine\u00a0? A colleague of mine in the \u201cGauche caviar\u201d (a reference to the leftist intellectual and artistic circles in Paris) once told me that I am not an artist, because I did not attend art school\u00a0! Many famous artists did not go to college before becoming painters or writers. Some did for sure, but not everybody. You can attend all the art classes in the whole world and still not become a famous artist\u00a0; you are either born one or you are not, or so it is said.
\nNot too long ago, I observed a gathering of students enrolled in a writing class at a New York University. There were quite a variety of people, both in age, background and culture, but all seemed to share a common goal. They dreamed of becoming famous writers one day. If fame and glory is all they dream about, however, where is the art\u00a0?
\nDave Hickey, a famous American art critic, said recently in an interview that\u00a0: \u201cthe art world tends to be driven by its market, and throughout the \u201950s and the \u201960s it was a relatively small art world with dealers and collectors and one or two small museums. It was during that period that the most powerful and permanent American art in this century was made\u2014from Abstract Expressionism and Pop, to Minimalism and Post-Minimalism.\u201d In the late 1960s, however, there was a shift in the cultural authority and, all of a sudden, \u201crather than an art world made up of critics and dealers, collectors and artists, you have curators, you have tenured theory professors, a public funding bureaucracy\u2014you have all of these hierarchical authority figures selling a non-hierarchical ideology in a very hierarchical way. This really destroyed the dynamic of the art world in my view, simply because like most conservative reactions to the \u201960s it was aimed specifically at the destruction of sibling society\u2014the society of contemporaries.\u201d According to Hickey, you don\u2019t need to know anything to understand good art.
\n\u201cI write because I have to.\u201d These words came from a writer I met some time ago, and there was no reference made to fame and glory, but more to the need for expression of his thoughts and feelings. Pablo Picasso put it this way\u00a0: The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place\u2014from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider\u2019s web.
\nSo finally, what is the definition of an artist\u00a0? I must admit that I have never given the subject much thought, but perhaps Ralph Waldo Emerson is right when he said \u201cThe true artist has the planet for his pedestal\u00a0; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes\u201d. Be that as it may, aren\u2019t we all artists then\u00a0? Arnold Bennett put it this way\u00a0: \u201cThe artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash, and where previously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth\u00a0! At moments we are all artists.\u201d
\nArt is also in a unique position to assume a more special function\u2014an excellent means of communication, promoting ideas, and creating public awareness. Only one humane, political work of art in the last fifty years has achieved real fame\u2014Picasso\u2019s \u201cGuernica\u201d, which was inspired by an act of war, the bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War. \u201cGuernica\u201d was also the last modern painting of major importance that took its subject from politics with the intention of changing the way large numbers of people thought and felt about power.
\nHow do we encourage art and artists to spread peace\u00a0? A new international and non-profit organization, World Culture Open, working to promote reconciliation through art, held its inaugural conference in September at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Explaining why the group sought to hold its first meeting at the UN, World Culture Open spokesman Michael Shank said the aim was to encourage governments to \u00ab\u00a0promote and integrate art and cultural traditions that have existed for 10,000 years into the realm of political discourse.\u00a0\u00bb
\nWe here at DIVA can only welcome this initiative, and we hope that it will become a huge success, because we truly believe that it\u2019s through the values of cultural diversity, tolerance and respect that we can get a better world for us all.
\nMarit<\/strong>
\nDIVA n 18<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Can you imagine\u00a0? A colleague of mine in the \u201cGauche caviar\u201d (a reference to the leftist intellectual and artistic circles in Paris) once told me that I am not an artist, because I did not attend art school\u00a0! Many famous artists did not go to college before becoming painters or writers. Some did for sure,
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