My very good friend came up with this title one day when I was having a serious conversation with him about icons, idols, and so on.

And as we were probably also discussing how crooked some business can be, the parallel to art is too appropriate not to use it here.

A lot of us take our art seriously, and it comes as a big shock when we find out that there are crooked artists... which begs the question where the name `con artist' originated, and realize it probably had something to do with making fake plates to print money.


 

"Feeling obliged to find something `positive' to say amid the deluge of mediocrity - to keep the economic wheels turning- commentators have glorified decoration as Pattern Painting, illustration as New Realism, simple quirkiness as `individual
vision.'" (239)
Thomas Albright


"A specialist", John D. Graham wrote in his `System and Dialectics of Art', "is a man trained to perform a profession conscientiously but not necessarily honestly. Conscientiousness is a conventional way to escape the responsibility of an all-encompassing honesty. Honesty implies the responsibility of choice." (240)

239. Thomas Albright, On Art and Artists, (U.S.A., The Chronicle Publishing Co.,1989), p. 172

240. ibid., p. 179