Banksy stated that the holy grail of art is to
create something that people will look at for longer than it had taken to
create.
It is a question of concept versus substance
in the context of the modern day.
How can we continue a success rate of new
talent when anybody’s audience has already been seduced by hundreds of versions
of the same idea?
An unbalanced ratio of objective (planned) obsolescence
and subjective art raises the point of illustration as a possible competitor in
the fine art sector; modern-minded individuals having less cash to spend but a
larger cultural awareness with which to window shop. Ideas are cheap and can be
just as luxurious as a sculpture cast in bronze.
Provocative art is sold for thousands; provocative
graphic art or advertising wavers on the border of being a control medium, and
as a result is disrespected for being a contributor to the global identity
crisis rather than a clever and important form of communication.
Technology used to be a design variable but is
now a seal of approval. The designer can be home-grown, home-taught and then made
globally famous.
In an interview for the Guardian in 2007
called ‘The art of the people’, illustrator John Vernon Lord made an important
point[1].
The fear resides in the postmodern idea of
identity now being manufactured and applied rather than earned and grown. The
public is robotic in its sense of taste but only because designers are
designing like machines.
John Vernon Lord maintains the belief however,
that illustration remains an aesthetic and social binding agent. So perhaps
with the aid of certain ideas, what some may describe as ‘low’ art does not
maintain such stigma anymore.
The idea of collage for example is lost in
hypotheses about craft, elitism and plagiarism; leaving a student terrified to
label their work as such a ‘style’. If the ability to idea generate alone is
now deemed equal, greater or lesser to traditional training, do the board-room
‘ideas-people’ realise that this work ethic is now being spoon-fed to children,
not trained in forty-somethings?
With the more ‘stuff’ we have, is it more ‘thinkers’ we need?
Can there be time for timelessness when time
is measured in age-groups rather than age?
[1] ‘Illustration
does not yearn for the high cultural plane. It is a modest activity and it is
not esoteric, nor is it a mere dumbing-down of art; it has its own distinct
purpose. Fine art is allowed to be obscure and bewildering, but illustration is
not; its purpose is to enlighten. It is art, but it's an accessible art. In a
nutshell, illustration is the art of the people’
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