i am a contemporary artist by david arthur walters

8/9/2019 I Am a Contemporary Artist by David Arthur Walters

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/i-am-a-contemporary-artist-by-david-arthur-walters 1/5

¶Truth running out of time·, by Darwin Leon, www.darwinleon.com



reading and writing skills than drawing skills, wherefore their judgments are often

absurd and as superficially silly as the philosophical pronouncements of a dozen

contemporary fashion designers.

Contemporary art lays claim to conceptual art, but conceptual art is not unique to our

age. Conceptual art arises in every period of artistic change. In Greece it was replaced

by perceptual and perspective art during the age of Pericles. Conceptual art was

dominant in Egypt and other lands in pre-Greek times. Modern conceptual art will be

replaced as well, and sooner than most judges think, for our contemporary conceptual

art now lacks cogent concepts, the essence of any useful logic. Conceptual artists

really do not know what they are talking about, and art functionaries given to

explaining nonsense are, like John D. Rockefeller's dad, selling snake oil. Since

"Contemporary" artists cannot conceive of anything in particular and have even

eschewed representation, they can only unwittingly represent the complete breakdownof high culture. If the truth were told, if we were not so afraid of the opinion of our

contemporaries, most of us appreciate prehistoric cave art more than contemporary-

contemporary art, not to mention other masterpieces since then.

The only legitimate art at the moment, at least in the Contemporary artist's subjective

opinion, is his sort of art, originally a presumably original, revolutionary, avant-garde,

leading-edge, neoteric and the like sort of art, yet today, in objective effect, since the

death of the modern movement's intellectuals, all too often democratic and banal,

anti-artistic and profane. Any other art, namely non-contemporary art, is reactionary.It necessarily smacks of infidelity; to wit, fidelity to artistic standards now deemed

classical.

"Contemporary" art has thrown out the baby, or the world, with the bathwater. May

heaven forbid that any work of art skillfully represents anything at all, and then too

artfully, for then it will be adjudged as too "graphic" or "realistic" or "unoriginal."

Victory must go to artists without objective standards, in a sort of popularity contest

where the value of a work depends not on its own merits but on associations: on who

is a cool art personality, for instance. Senseless, meaningless works are highly praised

and appraised by market manipulators, thus robbing the public by rendering it blind.

Anyone who dares mention any standards at all is deemed intolerant by his intolerant

contemporaries, and is roundly castigated as a fascist. Such fear of fascism is justified

in Russia, once the most significant revolutionary cradle of Contemporary art; but



now Contemporary artists are perceived by reactionaries as an insult to art and

country, degenerates who deserve stiff fines and even imprisonment for corrupting

Russia's finer artistic sensibility. Yet reactionary artists in the United States, although

somewhat dismayed, appalled, and even embittered by the rise of an unmerited art

aristocracy supported by the nouveau riche, are content to let history take its spiraledcourse; they would allow in that course an honored place for anti-art if only fine art

had its place in the Sun instead of mausoleums.

The revolution against artistic authority has been overwrought and has almost

destroyed itself. The original negation of traditional art promised artistic freedom for

anyone who wanted to call himself an artist. But revolutions that destroy the cultural

infrastructure, having nothing humane to replace it with, are doomed to eventual

desolation, for civilization itself is an art. Commerce has commercialized what was

once the anti-commercial-art movement, turning it into a profitable caricature of itself. We have inherited a Frankenstein monster; a patchwork of good intentions

gone awry; a veritable junkyard of junk for the sake of junk, a cultural wasteland. The

old money stooped to conquer and picked up trash for further profit; but the newly

rich do not know the difference, and now adorn their walls with such junk as a newly

painted, crumpled front end of an automobile, and compliment themselves for

owning and displaying such a cool smash hit above the Art-Deco couch in their

enormous living room.

Sometimes in desperation we need to wipe the slate clean and start afresh with noveltechniques and various modes of expression, but natural law may not be avoided

short of death. In death and life we discover the laws of dissolution and

recomposition, and realize that our elders did many things rightly in pursuit of

happiness.

Verily one must die to live again. The revolutionary modern artists did not regress far

enough. Smashing all objects save one, the illusive subjective object, is insufficient.

The devoted iconoclast smashes everything in sight, and what is left, seemingly

nothing, is good enough to be smashed as well; thus, with faith in Nothing, he goes

much farther than a white square on white, or a white kite or satellite orbiting the

creative narcissist; and with the annihilation of his triangular ego, he is one with

Nothing, and he only exists, in the black anarchic abyss, if Nothing exists.



Only then shall Osiris return, whole again, with his romantic member intact, and the

arts of Isis and her kin everywhere shall blanket the Earth. In being without existence,

the artist, unconscious of it all, receives all; and in being with existence he expresses

its general truth, goodness, and beauty in various ways, in accord with the natural laws

of the human race, one law being that of reason, which sets the ape on his feet withhead in the heavens, giving him sufficient cause to strive for divine harmony, that the

matters below may correspond ever so pleasingly with the intangibles felt above.

As the renaissance of the evolutionary principles of beauty gradually reemerges from

the tombs, Contemporary art, in the popular or impoverished sense of our time, shall

in fact succumb to reactionary art, at which time conceptual artists will have to take

up sketching and writing with a vengeance in order to recover their sanity. Talented

installation artists will find jobs in show business and the rest will have to take up the

installation of Venetian blinds, carpets, drapery, cable, and shapely urinals to eke out aliving.

i am a contemporary artist by david arthur walters

Documents