A Statement

There is really no such thing as Art. There are only artists...

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So begins Ernst Gombrich’s classic primer, The Story of Art, and whatever we might now think of his story, this particular assertion still rings true. 

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The artists to whom he refers, however, differ from their contemporary counterparts in significant ways. Cultural construction of the artist-figure has changed since the book's publication in 1950, a digital revolution having returned this once-elevated visionary to the cultural foothills where most contemporary practitioners happily reside within that homogenising entity, the creative sector.

 

The cultural field has changed accordingly. Now that contemporary media afford access to everyone, it is no longer the preserve of privilege. And, insofar that the old cultural hierarchies survive, their high, low, and middlebrow  registers  have blurred, one of the corollaries being that content in the visual arts assumes greater significance. 

 

​Readers of The Story of Art may recall that Gombrich himself seemed to have foreseen this possibility. In the revised edition of his book, he raises a question about content through a cartoon by Stan Hunt previously published in The New Yorker in 1958. A painter's exasperated wife -  remember, it is a cartoon of the '50s - stands amidst the abstract canvases of her husband's becluttered studio. ‘Why', she implores him, 'do you have to be a nonconformist like everyone else?’ The question still stands - what new is there to say? Which brings me to the point...

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At risk of pretension, I suggest that Hegel offered us the ghost of an answer  when he attributed to Art the capacity for insight into the Spirit of the Age, albeit of a more diffuse quality than the insights offered by Philosophy and Religion. If Hegel's prompt is heeded, the contemporary artist - in all of us - may aspire to speak of the times. 

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That, for me, is sufficient. My ambition is simple: I want to say something meaningful about the experience of ordinary life as we now live it.

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Having studied Fine Art at Bristol and Goldsmith's College, David Maddock taught Art and Design since 1984 and exhibited intermittently throughout that time. While teaching, he completed a part-time History of Art masters degree at Leeds Metropolitan University and a part-time doctoral degree at Leicester University. His book, Roger Fry, Clive Bell and American Modernism, was published by Peter Lang Ltd in 2020. He currently divides his time between painting, research, and teaching.