The Ultimate Sin by Robert Dale Williams

The Ultimate Sin

By Robert Dale Williams

When students studied with masters like Rembrandt and Rubens, it was to their advantage that their work echoed traits of the master – it was expected by prospective patrons. In the case of the former, the master actually let his pupils become Rembrandt, adding some final touches before signing his name to paintings from his workshop. Today, students can work for Jeff Koons and have a hand in the creation of oversized toy dogs, and the like. If that student goes on to make his own oversized toy dogs, however, they had better have some kind of “original stamp” put onto them.

The mechanism of art has made this much clear; if you admire the Old Masters, refine your technique, and paint sentimental kitsch, you have taken the proverbial pistol of art, put it to your temple, and pulled the trigger.

Everything I value equates to sin in the art world, and that has been made abundantly clear to me through rejections, and the critical mechanism of the art scene itself. Hatred for kitsch is obvious through the critical trampling of anything remotely sentimental – a recent ARTnews magazine cover article was as much a condemnation of Andrew Wyeth as it was an acknowledgment of his talent. “He has never developed as an artist,” Robert Storr says in an excerpt from the article. “He looks like a painter of high seriousness, with all of the trappings of Old Master painting.” However, I see contradictions in what is preached by art educators the world over. How can it be that a kitsch painter is seen as disgusting or perverted if he or she uses their craft to depict defecation or urination when Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal that had actually been pissed on, and the result was a “tremendous breakthrough” for art? I believe this “breakthrough” was also the final separation of the dignified painter and the philosopher that has become the artist.

How different the Old Masters are from the sneering sarcasm of modernism. How different Rembrandt was from the self righteous educators of today who pry the enthusiasm from ambitious young draughtsman with demands for originality and “out of the box” thinking. How different the world has become when the power has gone from the individual viewer to the critics and curators, leaving the painter vulnerable to their whims and taste. Yet, how the same mankind is, with his longing for the sensual and the eternal. How the same his experience of love, beauty, and death is. The art mechanism would have us believe that because the use of paint can change, life experience has changed. Our connection with the sentimental in every other creative form but the “visual arts” shows me that that is not the case. Until artists and critics can shrug off their own deaths with a sense of emotionally disconnected irony, I will continue to see their mantra as manufactured lunacy.

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