A Portrait of the Artist

Abstract

There are many public conceptions of what an Artist might be, as there are many — generally accepted — fine Artworks populating our museums and galleries. That a “work” of the process art might become accepted by an appropriate Artworld as (inter alia): poetry, text, painting, sculpture, or performance and so on, suggests that it is an almost futile task to attempt to produce a generic “portrait” of the artist. For that matter, what of the faux artiste also? However, in leaving aside such pragmatics, the approach in deriving CTA and its Art-aesthetic precepts of the sublime and attractive beauty has been necessarily theoretic. Thus, in considering the role of the artist in the process of art I do not, therefore, refer to the aesthetic categories of the sublime and beauty in their generally perceived autonomous sense, but in the sense that the sublime is the object of an art that allows — through a disinterested engagement with an attractive beauty — the meaning of an absent “other” to be communicated. This prompts the question “what can we learn about the real work of the Artist engaged in CTA?”

What is the popular conception of the Artist? Gather a thousand descriptions: the resulting composite is the portrait of a moron. He is held to be childish, irresponsible, and ignorant and stupid in everyday affairs.

Mark Rothko⁷⁹