For thousands of years, artists have been described as people who make
art. In the last century, however, the role of the artist has grown to such
disproportionate prominence that the direction of the definition has been
reversed and now a work of art is viewed as anything an artist makes.
Artists don’t even need to create objects in order to appropriate them
into their oeuvres: like the original Creator, merely naming something
art is enough to transform its substance. With the artist occupying the
center of attention, biographies have become more important than muse-
ums since they house the source of the art rather than isolated emana-
tions of that source. This impulse leads to an aesthetic equivalent of the
Kama Sutrain which novelty distorts the basic impulse towards com-
munication to ever more exotic lengths. Far from leading the troops, the
avant-garde movement was more concerned with separating itself from
the pack. Like Little Jack Horner, modern artists pulled plums from their
Christmas pies for no other reason than to declare, “O, what a clever lad
am I!” If the work takes a secondary place to the reputation of whoever
created it, those viewing the work are demoted even further. When noth-
ing more is expected from an audience than veneration, it’s a long
evening.
A survey of all the twentieth century’s major trends in the visual arts
reveals time and again this shift in focus from the act to the actor.
Cubism, perhaps the era’s most notorious stylistic approach, is a case in
point. Heralded as a break with the past in which all perspectives are
given equal prominence instead of the old privileging of a single per-
spective, one can legitimately ask what this supposedly contributes. Do
the resulting canvases enhance our understanding of the bodies and
bowls of fruit they portray? Does viewing a portrait filled with multiple
planes deepen our sense of the sitter? Is the multiplicity of life even the
theme of these pictures? The answer to all of the above is “No.” Far from
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More Matter and Less Art:
The Pernicious Role of the Artist in
Twentieth-Century Visual Art
GEOFFREYBENT
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