So I hear that painting is an obsolete form and nobody does it that way, any more. Art has branched out, explored new territory and now can be anything. Just call it art and digitalized or hot-glued, it’s art. Actually though, really, it’s sorta all the same. It’s pretty much gotten necessary to know if the artist is just a student or hugely famous before it’s possible to tell if it’s, whatever, any good or not.
Not so long ago, actually half a century, popular music was squeezed through the taste lowering filter of commercial radio and the product wasn’t the best. An ever aggressive market had manipulated soulless technology to demean the public taste for financial advantage. Well, it might have gone on forever but along came Bob Dylan, and everything changed. The public discovered it liked being taken seriously.
The form he chose to cut through the ‘wall of sound’ recordings of the high-powered studios wasn’t just old fashioned – it was ancient. The tradition of troubadours, from Homer down through the middle ages, had almost withered away when young Bob started perform using only his own instrument and voice. Somehow he was heard through all that well established media machinery using simple tools, being direct, commandeering a commercialized, trivialized medium to speak mind to mind.
So, all I’m saying is painting has been around a while, too. Painting in oils gave artists the ability to create a field of believability potent enough to transfer thought and emotion in a stable and enduring form, and that unique feature of visual art has more value now in an increasingly temporary reality. Painting didn’t die. Painting was sick and neglected but is starting to recover now. A serious painting stands as a beacon on a rock when the digital sea is blowing whitecaps and we find ourselves drowning in froth, just as any original art at all can be a life preserver.
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