Response...

My own musings inspired by Jen’s post about “hard art”…

I'm not really sure where I stand in the "hard" art debate. I agree that Art needs to take a new direction and possibly reevaluate the “anything goes” mentality. Viewing traditional European portrait artists as the epitome of good art, however, just doesn’t sit well with me. Yes, the artists were highly talented, yet many of them simply painted what they knew and in the tradition they were taught. Surely the many, many portraits produced back then were sometimes done without thought, the artists employing painterly “tricks” to achieve certain effects… could some of these paintings – even this “hard/ real/ true” art – be composed merely of cliché devices? I do not deny the talent of artists such as da Vinci, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Ingres, David, etc, etc... I just don't see a problem with the path that art has taken. Each generation of artists grows tired with what the previous generation has created and endeavors to break with the old, attempting to produce something revolutionary. Artists must do this in order to be remembered, actually. In art history books we read about this certain artist because “his messy brushwork stood in contrast to the smoothness seen everywhere else” or about that certain artist because “he was the first artist to reach total abstraction”. Usually the reason a specific artist is remembered at all is simply because he did something different than what everyone else was doing. Van Gogh's pieces aren't really unique now when we look at them, but at the time he broke all the rules and ushered the way into Expressionism. That's why we remember him. I think this is why many of the truly revolutionary artists are scorned in their own time - too new - but then accepted later as other artists emulate their work and the movement becomes “normal”. So one generation revolts against the former... the generation after revolts against that generation.... the pendulum of taste swings back and forth. Realism is popular, people grow tired of that... abstraction reigns. That becomes hackneyed and so the next generation incorporates more realism. This, of course, is a greatly simplified view of Art. Too much so? I don’t know.
Maybe the pull that some people feel toward "hard" art comes from a revolt against the Postmodern art that was formerly so innovative – “idea over form / anything goes” – but now is incredibly worn-out. The desire for "hard" art is simply the longing for something fresh. Art has been about "idea taking precedence over craft" for so long that maybe it's time for craft and beauty to take the forefront.
This idea of each generation’s work being a response against the last generation’s work can also be seen in music history -
1. Classical music (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven) focused upon "form"
2. then Romantic era (Chopin, Bizet, Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saens, etc.) broke away from this and was more inventive with harmonies, disregarding Classical forms and placing precedence on dramatic sounds
3. 20th century – atonal music - scorned sappy Romantic melodies in favor of rigid mathematical forms
4. late 20th century and 21st century composers are returning to more understandable, tonally “traditional” sounds.
And in each generation, there were a couple of composers who took the first step and set the change in motion. Those are the composers we remember. For example, Beethoven was the bridge from Classical to Romantic / Berg and Schoenberg first explored atonality, though Debussy is remembered for his tonally-ambiguous chords..on the way to atonalism, etc. Other composers in their generations may have produced great music, but it was music that followed rather than created new. We don't revere those composers as much usually.

Hm… I'm not sure what more to say. I feel like I might be simplifying Art and Music history too much. I like to think that the changes in creativity fit into this “one generation pitted against the next” formula… but I might be completely off base on this. Any thoughts?