Convention (art)

“ But this hatred of the conventional element in the personality of a poet is only possible to those who do not remember the meaning of words. Convention means only a coming together, an agreement; and as every poet must base his work upon an emotional agreement among men, so every poet must base his work upon a convention. Every art is, of course, based upon a convention, an agreement between the speaker and the listener that certain objections shall not be raised. The most realistic art in the world is open to realistic objection. ”

“ In other words, they destroyed a convention which had been generally accepted, and in securing freedom for themselves to follow their personal inclinations towards a more rational treatment of nature they gained the sympathetic support of the many art lovers who had discovered how cramping the convention was, and how seriously it stood in the way of the right kind of development and progress. ”

“ To sum up, although the work of this period may suffer in popular esteem from the drawing being conceived in an archaic convention,—a convention different to our own,—and from having suffered from restoration, the fact remains that at no time did the artist understand better the possibilities and limitations of his art and adopt a sounder technique in regard to them. ”

“ Rather are we dealing with the elaborated gain of ages of scientific knowledge, with the thoughts of a people whose very temples were oriented to particular stars, or to critical points in the journey of the sun; whose representations of Art, on frieze and pediment, in tragedy and epic, were governed by what would at first appear to be a tyrannical convention, which convention, however, so far from hampering their genius, seems, under the influence of a wholesome restraint, to have moulded their art into more beautiful, more poetic, and more sanctified forms.... ”

“ The National Sculpture Society’s ideals, to be valuable and enduring, must concern themselves with the ethical205 as well as the artistic side of various questions brought before the body. On the ethical side, it has, not without inherent difficulties, established its Code governing Competitions, the Code itself being governed by the Society’s avowed principle of fostering art with integrity. ”

“ The union with this interloping tendency, so foreign to the whole aristocratic temper of art, has produced portrait; and by the position of this hybrid, or at least far from regularly bred creature; by the amount of the real artistic quality of beauty which it is permitted to retain by the various schools of art, we can, even as by the treatment of similar social interlopers we can estimate the necessities and tendencies of various states of society, judge what are the conditions in which the various schools of art struggle for the object of their lives, which is the beautiful. ”

“ There is no thing of beauty that does not conform to a law of order and beauty—poem, story, costume, picture, statue, all fall into an ascertainable law of art. Nothing of man's making is perfect, but any creation approximates perfection in the measure that it conforms to inevitable law.
To ascertain this law, and apply it, in art or in literature, to the changing conditions of our progressive life, is the business of the artist. It is the business of the critic to mark how the performance conforms to or departs from the law evolved and transmitted in the long-experience of the race. ”

“ The third great principle of aesthetic structure is equilibrium or impartiality. This is a principle counteracting dominance. It demands, despite the subordination among the elements, that none be neglected. Each, no matter how minor its part in the whole, must have some unique value of its own, must be an end as well as a means. Dominance is the aristocratic principle in art, the rule of the best; this is the democratic principle, the demand for freedom and significance for all. ”

“ Whatever be his materials, we shall demand of the artist always the same result: that he make us see, and command our sympathy and delight for his vision. Any judgment that we make, or any standard that we set up, must proceed upon a knowledge of this master purpose and of the materials and technique of the particular art through which it is to be realized. And such standards, experimental and tentative, but nevertheless potent and directive, are capable of discovery and formulation. ”

“ It is, I understand and believe, pretty much the same in more modern institutions for the encouragement of the Fine Arts. The end is lost in the means: rules take place of nature and genius; cabal and bustle, and struggle for rank and precedence, supersede the study and the love of art. ”

“ The painter must in the end judge of painting, and the sculptor judge of sculpture. But there are two distinct sides{163} to a work of art,—to every work, for that matter: there is the relation between the worker and his work, and the relation between the completed work and the public,—the work being the intermediary between artist and people, his means of communication, his mode and manner of speech. ”

“ The picture is standardised, like a collection of laws that tell us how we should behave, and not how we behave; like rules set down defining the style of art, but not the way in which the artist elaborates his ideas of beauty; like a list of inventions, and not the way in which the individual overcomes technical difficulties that present themselves. ”

“ A final point relative to the external form of the ideal is that which concerns the relation of works of art to the public, that is to say, to the nation and epoch for which the artist or the poet composes his works. Ought the artist, when he treats a subject, to consult, above all, the spirit, taste and manners of the people whom he addresses, and conform himself to their ideas? ”

“ How much map-making ingenuity has been devoted to this task of grouping and classifying the arts: distinguishing between art and fine art, between artist, artificer and artisan; seeking to arrange a hierarchy of the arts on the basis of their relative freedom from fixed ends, their relative complexity or comprehensiveness of effect, their relative obligation to imitate or represent something that exists in nature! No one cares particularly to-day about such matters of precedence—as if the arts were walking in a carefully ordered ecclesiastical procession. ”

“ The same questions occur to us while examining into the different forms of decorative art; and we are constantly reminded that the laws which should govern them, are perhaps, infinitely larger and wider than we with our limited human capacities and experience, have hitherto been able to appreciate. ”

“ So far as rules, precepts, formulas and other communicable laws or secrets can carry the artist, so far also the spectator can account for, analyse, and, so to speak, tabulate the effects of his art. But the essential character of the artist’s operation, its very bloom and virtue, lies in those parts of it which fall outside this range of regulation on the one hand and analysis on the other. ”

“ The noisiest spokesmen of to-day claim for Art that it should be supreme and independent, and have no relation whatever to the national soul—a costly trinket to be picked up where it may be found, and idly played with ”

“ if you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it:
‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.’
And if we apply that rule strictly, we shall in the first place show the builders and such-like servants of the public what we really want, we shall create a demand for real art, as the phrase goes; ”

“ On the whole, it seems to me that there is but one presiding principle which regulates and gives stability to every art. The works, whether of poets, painters, moralists, or historians, which are built upon general nature, live for ever; while those which depend for their existence on particular customs and habits, a partial view of nature, or the fluctuation of fashion, can only be coeval with that which first raised them from obscurity. ”

“ And let me add, that as they ought not to pass their just bounds, so neither do they, in a well-regulated taste, at all prevent or weaken the influence of those general principles, which alone can give to art its true and permanent dignity. ”

“ On a higher plane in the sphere of abstract beauty must be placed harmony. In harmony we find qualitative distinctions are held together, and further held together in a totality of differentiation, such as is based on the essential nature of the fact itself. This consistency of support is derived from conformity to law, in so far as that form unfolds what is essentially uniformity, and thereby passes beyond the mere characteristics of equality and repetition. ”

“ This so-called normative—perhaps better, critical—moment in aesthetics introduces an inevitable personal element into every discussion of the subject. Even as every artist seeks to convince his public that what he offers is beautiful, so every philosopher of art undertakes to persuade of the validity of his own preferences. ”

“ What she read described the formation of the New Modernism, the Artistic Society about which so much was being said among well-informed circles of the Art World, with the reservation that nothing must be accepted as official. ”

“ I fear that I am repeating a platitude when insisting that freedom in all design, but especially that employed in decoration, must be kept within certain boundaries; otherwise it becomes lawless. Rules, like all other controlling circumstances, are of the greatest service to the artist, as they suggest what he can do, as well as decide what he ought not to attempt. ”

“ The law which we have last laid down is a law defining the relations of sculpture, painting and poetry, considered simply as arts having their foundations at any rate in reality, and drawing from the imitation of reality their indispensable elements and materials. It is a law defining the range and character Imitation by art necessarily an idealized imitation. of those elements or materials in nature which each art is best fitted, by its special means and resources, to imitate. ”

“ However, let us leave what is really a very sordid side of the subject, and return to the question of popular control in the matter of Art, by which I mean Public Opinion dictating to the artist the form which he is to use, the mode in which he is to use it, and the materials with which he is to work. ”

“ or, rather, there are no other rules than the general laws of nature, which soar above the whole field of art, and the special rules which result from the conditions appropriate to the subject of each composition. ”

“ It is the absence of composition, balance, unity, that makes ordinary photographs something other than true works of art. It is not primarily truth of representation that is necessary in a work of art, but truth of idealization ”

“ So the individual may not cut loose altogether from external standards. But these must be brought into relation to his personal needs and applied with reference to his own standard. Finally, for his own uses, the individual has the right to determine the meaning and value to him of any work of art in the measure that it links itself with his own actual or possible experience and becomes for him a revelation of fuller life. ”

“ In a summary discussion such as the present, many such questions—regarding the future of art and of culture itself, the nature and prospects of art in a democratic society, the fate of the individual today—will of necessity remain virtually untouched. ”

“ And first—for our subject is so important as to require precision—we may attempt to consider the value of our national Constitution as A WORK OF ART. This is a choice term of the day—a favorite mode of speech with all who would affect a more than ordinary elevation of thought and sentiment. Profound ideas are sought in painting, statuary, and architecture. The ages, it is said, speak through them, and in them. The individual minds and hands by which they receive their outward forms, are only representative of deeper tendencies existing in the generic humanity. ”

“ Live for your Art, not for that limited, narrow, uncharitable, scandalmongering section of the great public [Pg 350] which calls itself "Society," and which loves to patronize Art in any form at the least possible cost to itself. ”

“ They are the result solely of individual skill in the artists, and of the views, opulence, or purposes of their employers. This difference, also, extends only to the minor details of execution; in the more intellectual principles of art, all are nearly on an equality. Even the design and attitudes are wonderfully limited, the sameness being more uniform than could have been produced, except by the operation of prescriptive rules and fixed models of imitation. ”

“ It is, therefore, to be expected that another class of citizens will devote themselves wholly to this art-preparation of the raw material. I shall call this class of citizens Artists, in the widest significance of the word.
The distinction is sharply defined, and the designation in itself perfectly correct. For the former class of citizens leave nature to herself, do not prescribe to nature, but merely place her under the conditions of the application of her power. Those of that class who merely hunt up products do not even so much. ”

“ The distinction between the representative arts and the arts of form is not ultimate, nor does it exclude one class wholly from the other; it defines a general tendency and serves to mark certain differences in original motive and in the way in which the two kinds of work may be received and appreciated. ”

“ For a discussion of aesthetics, it need be agreed only that forms arranged and combined according to certain unknown and mysterious laws do move us in a particular way, and that it is the business of an artist so to combine and arrange them that they shall move us. These moving combinations and arrangements I have called, for the sake of convenience and for a reason that will appear later, "Significant Form." ”