What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion. - Marcel Duchamp We have heard the phrases uttered hundreds of times. Perhaps, you have even said one of them yourself: "Even I could paint that!" "My child could do a better job than this!" While few who make these claims boast any art historical education, most feel they do know what quantifies as art, and most notably, good art. The fallacy stems from the belief that successful art, high-art, is representational, pleasing to the eye, grand and beautiful; anything less, is simply deemed bad art, or sadly, fails to qualify as art at all. As highlighted in the above quote from Marcel Duchamp, famous Dada artist and the king of creating works deemed unworthy of the 'art' title: there is indeed bad art and good art. Nonetheless, it is still art. This brings about the reasoning for why this is the first post on The Artist's Job. First, so that you will begin to recognize art as art despite your preconceptions. Second, and most importantly, that although you may not find an artwork visually pleasing, you can appreciate why it is deemed of worth. Ultimately, artwork is deemed significant if it embodies the beliefs and ideologies of the artist. The worth of art does not lie in its ability to render the world around us to near photographic quality. Yes, art is about color and form and line, but most importantly, art is an idea made tangible. It is the execution of that ideology through the means of painting, sculpting, architecture etc., that renders a work of art successful. Sometimes the idea a work of art comes to represent, however, is far more complex than the work of art itself. One such instance is Kazimir Malevich's Suprematist painting, The Black Square from 1913. "Malevich didn’t intend for the Black Square to be a representation of a real thing, but a sign of a dawn of new age" (Holtham & Moran, 2014). Upon first glance a black square does not appear revolutionary until one understands the visual history of the Eastern Orthodox Church. For centuries, Russia's churches maintained the same interior space, one filled nearly from floor to ceiling with religious icons. Malevich was making a bold statement to the Russian ways of old when declaring that a black square, not a saint or Christ figure, was the icon of the new modern Russia. Malevich painted a black square not from an inability to render the human form, but to destroy it.
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