The Wedding Feast by Tintoretto

The 2003 Stuckist Summer Show

What is the modern equivalent of Renaissance artisitic production? Painting alternately conjures up images from sunday watercolourists, to backward looking artists such as the Stuckists, to forward thinking visual philosophers and creatives who operate in a hazy area beyond most people’s economic barriers all the way to producers of saccarine sweet images for locally owned private galleries. But more than any other image the Renaissance master craftsman predominates as most people’s perception of a painter.

What is today’s equivalent of the classic image makers whose creations have become common cultural currency? Media moguls? Artisan craftsmen? Film director? Advertising executives? Models? Games programmers?

The Urbino Venus by Titian

Contemporary high-artistic production is a philosophical, navel-gazing enterprise. This, of course, wasn’t always the case. Titian’s beautiful works were, for example, produced on an almost industrial basis using teams of assistants and re-using motifs and techniques. The distinguishing aspect of these works is greater than mere technique, greater than message or critique – Titian’s works’ longevities point to something deeper in all of us. We can connect with these works beyond their initial impact. They are the sum of their parts – the objectification of the painter’s skill, visual sensitivity and intellect.

Painting itself grew from a craft-based undertaking to a medium of self-expression and introspective investigation. The method of production followed guild practice guidelines and training.

The display practices varied from exhibitions of propagandistic bombast (Caravaggios in churches) to privately-owned tableaux (Mona Lisa) to institutional public ownership.

The Calling of Saint Matthew by Caravaggio

Mona Lisa by Leonardo DaVinci

Patronage and the Diminishing Impact of Single Images

Artists were primarily in the employ of the very wealthy, landed classes, a status quo that has remained to this day. However, in the 19th century the less affluent became connoisseurs (van gogh example). Art works have since become commissioned by more public institutions replaceing the closed hierarchies of churches. Where prizes are now offered for open-ended explorations (example) previously very specific pieces were the standard commission (L’Origine du monde by Courbet and commissioned by a collection of ‘niche’ works)

Origin of the World by Gustav Courbet

It was after the rise of the merchant classes in Industrial Europe that painting, and to a lesser extent sculpture, became commodotised. Art works were exhibited in national salons and traded privately through dealers and galleries more democratically than ever previously.

The Old Mill by Van Gogh

Image making became more accessible with the advent of photography, more generally lessening the impact of images and in turn resulting in artists’ explorations away from representation. Consider the impact a massive altarpiece of a tortured saint realisitcally depicted would have had on church-goers before images became ubiquitous in newspapers (which also grew to massive popularity in the nineteenth century) and in advertising.

While classical art may never have been public enough to enjoy unanimous appeal, the more general paucity of imagery centuries ago would have meant that any representation would have been noticable at the very least. These days we can tune so much out by changing channel, deleting, closing windows, overlooking or simply ignoring, that cinema (and theatre to a lesser extent) has broken the mould by having the masses actually pay to be enveloped.

Campbells Tomato Soup by Andy Warhol

A Girl by Ron Mueck

Image makers have since had to work harder to achieve the truly iconic. We can look to cultural subversion (Serrano’s Piss Christ), the elevation of the familiar and commonplace (Warhol’s Soup), visual trickery (Ron Mueck’s experiments in scale); The viewer is left asking if static images now convey the all-encompassing nature of the massive renaissance altarpieces, ceilings and sculptures?

Piss Christ by Andres Serrano

Hollywood

To fully recreate the impact of post-renaissance masterpieces perhaps we must turn to the spectacle of Hollywood (link to transformers) and in particular to cutting edge computer graphics.

Cinema (read: Hollwood) almost universally delivers a direct message. The tone is lecturing. This is probably closest to many of the great historical works of art – they were intended to inform and instruct in a beautiful manner, not normally to create much ambiguity. Films are commissioned and funded privately to be forever linked with the producers’ names. Cinema gives us teams of assistants working communally on one image. It fosters great ‘craft’. It creates icons and memorable images – Rocky running up the steps, ET and the flying bikes, the entire Casablanca and so on ad nauseum…

The day of the single image having bombastic effect are gone but the leopard has changed it spots; Sol LeWitt’s minimal works will remain quiet minimalist contemplations beyond the next century, but what will become of Warhol’s ouevre when Campbells no longer make soup and Marilyn Monroe becomes a quaint historical footnote?

Sol LeWitt work being made by an assistant

Bibliography
Anthony Van Dyck: A Life, Robin Blake, Rowman & Littlefield, 2000
Titian: The Last Days, Mark Hudson, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009
The Pursuit of Painting, Stephen McKenna, Lund Humphries/IMMA, 1993
Painting at the Edge of the World, Douglas Fogle, Walker Art Center, 2001
Art at the Turn of the Century, Ed. Burkhard Riemschneider & Uta Grosenick, Taschen, 1999
Art Crazy Nation, Matthew Collings, 21, 2001
Art of the Twentieth Century, Ruhrberg & Schneckenberger & Fricke & Honnet, Taschen, 2000

Original content created by: The Inquisition