What have these three pictures got in common?
Nothing - except that they all exhibit the highest technical standards. This technical ability is an objective reality, independent of whether we like them or whether they correspond to our personal philosophy about art.They are all technically brillant.
These and many, many more may be seen on a wonderful new website. The Art Renewal Centre (ARC) has created a large on-line Museum, with hundreds of thousands of high quality images of all the known works of the greatest painters and sculptors, cross referenced to a an encyclopaedic online art reference library of essays, biographies and articles.
The most exciting thing - for me -about it, is that it promotes the return of “training, standards and excellence in the visual arts.”
For those of us who look at much of modern art and feel instinctively and intuitively that the cult of ugliness and degradation espoused by much of the modern art confraternity is a dead end, it is hard not to feel a great sense of encouragement when we read that ARC sees its mission:
“ To repudiate the idea that development in art requires destruction of boundaries and standards, pointless emphasis on 'newness,' or pursuit of the bizarre and ugly as ends in themselves, and to expose as artistic fraud those works conceived only to elicit outrage.”
ARC wants to return to high standards and they promote the requirement for ‘recognizable quality’ in Art.
This website is a boon for artists, art historians and teachers - but it is also a breath of fresh air for 'ordinary' people like myself - the proverbial ‘man or woman on the street’ - to find a way to articulate our true views about much so called Art which we recognise immediately as being - in reality - The Emperor’s New Clothes!
So often we feel we have to be silent in front of the vulgarity and superficiality we see in our art galleries and museums simply because we don’t know how to respond to the deliberately confusing newspeak from the so-called experts. Well, now we have some assistance in the intellectual counter-reformation which is beginning! I would encourage everyone to visit this site : http://www.artrenewal.org/index.php
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