One of my
artist friends commented one day, "There is so much ugly art around,
and people seem to be buying it!" There was confusion in her voice.
Getting past the old cliché about beauty being in the eye of the
beholder, I knew what she meant. If being unaware of the existence
of racism, a kind of innocence if you will, is a contributing factor
to racism, the same parallel can be drawn to sweet art, be it
subject or technique.
When I see a piece of art that I really like, that's not pretty, I
say jokingly, "It's just ugly enough to be good art!" We just don't
live in sweet times. There is a fine line between beauty that
endures and sweet.
"Bad art falsifies the world so as to pretend there is no
defeat." (110) Iris Murdock
"It would
be a mistake to consider Miro's work all gentle humor and whimsy. He
was eaten alive by his visions - a man who saw deep into human
nature and was often appalled by what he saw. Terror and ferocity,
anguish and foreboding are never absent from his work for long, and
the plight of the individual in the twentieth century has found few
chroniclers as resourceful as he." (111)
Rosamond Bernier
"If my own personnages have become increasingly grotesque, it is
because we are living in a monstrous epoch. I am more and more
revolted by the world as it is." (112)
Miro
"Monsters are swarming from the studios of many painters and
sculptors... Monsters can be bred the cheap or the hard way. Only a
few of them count. The father of the cheap monster is the doodler...
It takes only a stroke of the pen to make an arm grow out of a
mouth... Only when the desperate awareness of a disfigured world
forces the artist to construct a truthful image that reflects the
absurd contradictions and dysfunctions from which he and others
suffer - only then is a monster bred the hard way." (113)
Rudolf Arnheim
110. Jan Garden Castro, The Art & Life of Georgia O'Keeffe, (New
York, Crown Publishers Inc., 1985), p.173
111. Rosamond Bernier, Matisse, Picasso, Miro, As I knew Them, (New
York, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1991)p.p. 240, 243
112. ibid., p.270
113. Rudolf Arnheim, Toward A Psychology of Art, (Berkeley and
L.A. Cal., University of California Press, 1966), p.256
