Berlin Art II: How artist overrate themselves
By Manuel Bonik
Eds note: In his first part Berlin Art, longtime Berlin veteran artist and musician Manuel Bonik looked at how many artists in the city soured on the scene as the 90s art boom failed to deliver financially, then went home to get real jobs.
The rest stayed here and continued to occupy themselves with art. That has made the situation an odd mixture of consolidation and a new form of crisis that exists only because after a decade of a mood of breaking out and starting something new, there is now something to lose and the discovery was made that it really could be lost. Evaluation cycles can be both manic and depressing.
Left behind is an attitude of artists, and not just Berliners, that grew up in what can only be recognized in hindsight as the city's boom years. It is based on an overestimation and an underestimation. Overvalued was the importance of individuality, underestimated the difficulty of complexity. Complexity isn't given out for free either in art, especially art, and then in a short period of time.
As I have indicated, I am somewhat skeptical toward the concept of the individual in art. Often it is only propped up by lack of knowledge, ignorance or even a targeted compartmentalization. Historically speaking, individuality in art is a creation of modern times; until the Middle Ages ended everything was so terribly dark that one couldn't even recognize individuals in the collective, which for example built the cathedrals.
Ernst H. Gombrich writes in his in popular "Geschichte der Kunst (History of Art)":
"Naturally masters of art lived earlier who were held in high esteem and recommended from monastery to monastery or Bishop to bishop, but it wasn't considered necessary to pass these names along to future generations. The artists themselves weren't much inclined to become known or famous. They were looked at in the same as we see a good tailor or carpenter today. Often they didn't sign their work. We don't know the names of the Master of Chartres, Strasbourg or Naumberg. They were certainly appreciated in their time, but they left the recognition and the honor to the cathedrals they helped create."
The situation didn't change until the start of the 14th century. With Giotto di Bondone (ca. 1267-1337) and his Padua frescos a NAME surfaced for the first time, an "artist star," who was awarded individual fame and whose private life interested the public. At the end of the century in Prague, the Dombau master Peter Parler the Younger (1330-1399) became perhaps the first artist to leave behind a self portrait. In the new light and times of the Renaissance, more and more individuals emerged--the artists had enough of being considered a craftsman or even tradesman like a furniture maker or tailor. They fought to escape the confines of the guilds, where they sometimes were placed among the weapons makers, sometimes the doctors and pharmacists, sometimes the plate makers and pottery makers. The calculated drive to climb socially and gain economic advantages played an essential role.
Tradesmen in general were limited to artes mechanicae, the study of practical abilities which the Greeks called techné. The drive of painters and sculptors to be seen as artists was consistently aimed at occupying the higher prestige of artes liberales or to carve out a similar status. Today's individual artist therefore came out of a movement in which the painter clearly held it for necessary to distance himself from the techné or artes mechanicae of the tradesman and craftsman. The individualization of the modern artist was paid for with a resentment against the technical and natural sciences that in many ways is still with us today.
We find the first artists in the modern sense as employees of the courts, who had to create new forms of legitimization for themselves and their work. Before that all pictures were standardized as tradesman products and the themes drawn mostly from Church folklore were determined by the employer. The worth of the pictures were essentially measured by the cost of materials. The painter wanted to escape that system, not the gold price and the standard price should determine the worth of their work, instead the creativity and originality and not least of all, the renown of the painter and sculptor. They learned to stage manage themselves, to surround themselves with an aura of secrecy. The star system and the PR of the self emerged as an important factor in the history of art.
By the end of the 15th century, the artist had freed himself from the darkness, the oblivion of the Middle Age Dombau-collective and earned himself a "name." When Michelangelo, for example, received a letter addressed to the "sculptor Michelangelo," he wrote: "Tell him, that he shouldn't address his letters to the sculptor Michelangelo, because here I am only known as Michelangelo Buonarroti."
Following that came several centuries of the history of the individual artist, including the cult of genius, painter nobility and art wars, with such lovely highlights as transforming a bottle dryer into a work of art bearing Marcel Duchamp's signature. Most names, however, have survived because in reality the signatures were company logos, brands that demanded the sweat of an entire workroom, or even a factory, like the body associated to one of these brands later named his.
There were few factories, however, founded in Berlin in the 90s. The one that had an impact was the HdK (Hochschule der Künste), renamed the UdK (Universität der Künste), and its product in the 21st century are graduated artists with diplomas. Graduated with an overestimation of the Importance and Individuality of their work like no other occupation. A central point of this hubris is the belief that there is a noble path to art, that there is an ad hoc way to produce a complex work of art, without having to take an implicit or explicit complex way to get there.
Our thanks to Kunst-Blog http://kunst-blog.com
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