Higher goals

Let me tell you a bit about the artist talk I attended yesterday. It was Kerry James Marshall, artist, teacher, and among other things, MacArthur Fellow. The latter is one of the nation’s (U.S.) greatest honors and awards. The fact that he is extremely articulate makes any lecture by him more than worth your time. Anyway, there has been a multitude of online and offline discussions about the state of contemporary art. Marshall has, for himself, raised the bar far above the today’s average artists’ expectations. He says that the responsibility of the artist must be to contribute to the history of not only the field (art history) but, of cultural history in general. Art, he feels, should be noticed not because of its shock value but, because it actually challenges how we view the field of art yet contributes something to it at the same time. Easy? Hell no! That reminds me of three items on a list I wrote over ten years ago about what makes truly great artwork:

1) a central aesthetic idea and the depth of that idea.

2) work that has fidelity to pre-existing aesthetics.

3) work that breaks new ground.

However, there are two other items that are essential:

4) a location and audience to engage in dialogue.

5) work that has the ability to withstand the crucible of aesthetic discourse.

There were three other items on my list that preceeded the above but, I think this is the most important part of list.