Art For Art's Sake

Quote of the day:
“The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved--loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”
--Victor Hugo

Observation of the day:
From Joni Mitchell, who commented during the documentary All We Are Saying that the press had gotten stupider and shallower in the last 20 years.

Is art created for an audience, or just for itself? The reasonable answer, as always, is both.

How does this happen? Gramophone columnist Armando Iannucci makes a relevant comment in the July issue. He begins with the paintings of J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851).

Turner is best known for his distinctive landscapes and vividly rendered ships at sea. But the last paintings of his life, which were not appreciated at the time and remain under the radar today, are more exercises in color than in depiction.

They are still landscapes, but the colors have so taken over that the paintings foreshadow not just impressionism but also Rothko-style abstraction. Iannucci suggests that if you know the earlier paintings and encounter one of the very late paintings you might think that that Turner was going “mad.”

Iannucci recalled his own delight in seeing the paintings in the context of Turner’s whole career when he visited an exhibition at the Tate Museum. It seemed to him that the paintings were a logical and extraordinary culmination of an amazing creative life.

And it is at that culmination that the artist could finally just create art just for its own sake. In the process, something new is begun.

One of the musical examples Iannucci brings up is the Beethoven String Quartets. He says they are “works that are built on a lifetime of writing for these forces, and yet this time written through with a willful disobedience of the standard rules of quartet composition, whether in length, number of movements, or in development of the material.

“In the late quartets I always hear the sound of Beethoven saying ‘At last, this is really what I’ve always wanted to say.’”