Brighton, Andrew, and Colin Painter. Contemporary Art and the Home. New York: Berg, 2002.
Page 246:
“I had a summer job working in an art shop in central London. It sold art materials and a few reproductions. A man came in and asked for a picture with snow-capped mountains. Asking for a painting by subject matter struck me as almost immoral or at least inept, a cross between admitting to a shameful desire and a naïve solecism. I asked by whom did he want the painting. He said he did not know, nor care. He wanted snow-capped mountains. Eventually he explained that he had been on holiday to Switzerland with his wife. He wanted to buy her a memento. I was subsequently to learn that buying paintings to commemorate holidays sustained an economy of small art and craft galleries and local artists in holiday areas such as the Lake District and Cornwall and that images acquired on holidays are a major source of what hangs on people’s domestic walls (see Painter 1986).Page 247:
I was curious about my surprise at the man’s request, curious about both what it said about my assumptions and what the man’s request revealed. How was one to understand how John Latham’s accumulation of objects placed in a case qualified for inclusion in MoMa, New York, but that a painting of snow-capped mountains was also valued? In other words, what were the assumptions of the art world the man had offended and what was the nature of his culture of pictures. Hand in hand with these questions went the aesthetic, ethical and political question: if they should, why should one of these be valued more than another?”
“Even if the differentiation between high and low culture has supposedly disappeared, in practice the moral and political import of these terms still remains in play. For instance, ‘commodified’, ‘institutionalized’ and ‘fetishized’ are the a priori concepts upon which much current art history builds it’s elaborations. This enemy, this spectre with many names, reappears in the rhetoric of conferring critical value upon an artist. Importance is attributed to artis’ oeuvres by demonstrating their refusal of ‘commodification’, ‘institutionalized’ and ‘fetishizing’."Page 249:
“One thing I did discover was that artists who had become popular in reproduction were often rather ashamed of it. Further, they often graduated to limited-edition reproductions or abandoned them altogether. Edward Seago, for example, had been a painter popular in reproduction and who had abandoned it long before I did my survey. He was also popular with the English establishment. He was a friend of the Duke of Edinburgh and taught the Prince of Wales watercolour painting […] When I asked popular painters what was the most important attitude painters should bring to their work, the most frequently recurring words were: sincerity, truth, honesty, search and integrity. In their more elaborated statements, these terms spoke for an unsystematic popularism. Honesty resided in truth to one’s familiar culture, sense of self, et cetera. Some made these statements in the context of a rejection of the affected values and pretensions of modern art and fashion.”Page 251:
“Essential to the way in which art history and the museums institutionalized serious modern art is what they passed over in silence. While art for the middle-class homes and inexpert purchasers is bigger business than art for serious collectors and museums, it has no history, no criticism, and no place in the museum. If it appears in the accounts of modern art, it is as an unexamined spectre of inauthenticity against which authentic art struggles. For example, Norman Rockwell is mentioned in Greenberg’s ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’ as a token for all that avant-garde painting is not. Notoriously, the nearest to a reference to a particular ‘kitsch’ painting Greenberg got was to Repin battle paintings. Repin never painted a battle. An unmapped no person’s land appears to exist between serious art and what might be called consensus art. What this hides is how serious art has shaped itself in opposition to consensus art. In the histories of modern culture conflict, we have been told little of the army against which the avant-garde has been deployed.
If taken to be important, Wyeth is particularly dangerous because his work suggests the possibility of serious art outside the art historical map. For instance, in a museum or a history that treats art as a story of historical development, the question of where his work came from and to where it led would be an issue. His technical debt to a tradition of illustration, that of his father, N.C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle, could lead to the suggestion that they too should become part of the art historical narrative. With these illustrators through the door, would that other absentee from the Whitney, Norman Rockwell, be far behind?
However, the problem with Wyeth is not just with his audience, nor the traditions from which he comes. It is with the nature of his seriousness, it is the ideology of the work. His work is a contradiction, it is serious popular painting and it is populist.
The vast majority of modern painting we know to be most popular through the sale of reproductions realizes the intelligentsia’s nightmare of banality. It is artifacts made, called and treated as art but without any developed discourse or mode of attention that attends to them as art. In such paintings, well-worn conventions evoke familiar emotions and values: the beauties of nature, appealing children, soft erotica and sympathetic animals. This is the art of peripheral vision. The values it celebrates and the emotions it excites are for the most part propagated by other more influential media. Nearly all have overtly painted surfaces, some evoke the style of past high art. There is a more conceptual area of practice, hobbyist art. Here moments of sporting drama and vintage cars, ships, boats, trains, steam engines or birds are depicted for connoisseurs of detail. Precious sentiments and values captured in oils. However, the essential optic of most popular paintings is derived from photography. There mass-media use of photography and the other lens-based means of mechanical representation provide the core of pictorial common sense. We have learnt to dream like films."
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