CLEVE GRAY
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calling painting "the highest of the arts," and saying, "It contains
a divine force." It was at the time of the Renaissance that
painting, sculpture, architecture were allowed into the pantheon
of the liberal arts. But three hundred years had yet to pass before
the painter himself achieved the romanticized status which he
was accorded in the nineteenth century. By the end of that cen–
tury artists accepted those hard-won gains as gifts from their
Muse, and my intentions are simply to remind you of the long
road to those gains. But young artists today don't relate to the con–
cept of an inspiring and protecting muse; indeed, one of the strik–
ing aspects of the contemporary art scene is the enormous arro–
gance of the successful, contemporary young painters and
sculptors emboldened by quickly acquired praise. A prominent
young artist is quoted in a Saatchi Collection catalogue as saying:
''I'm just kicking the great big, corpulent, cellulitic body of art as
it lies there in its deathbed."
This attitude marks a new aesthetic conception. The artists of
the Orient, for example, believed that the source of their art came,
after long meditation, from beyond the self. The Chinese ap–
proach to art was essentially pantheistic. The Greek approach, on
the other hand, was anthropomorphic. But both recognized a
source of inspiration beyond the self and actively sought it. It's
true that Western post-Enlightenment intellectuals were highly
secularized and that the avant-garde movement in the arts in–
creasingly drifted over the years towards rational formalism; but
one has only to recall the mystical direction of Kandinsky's ,
Klee's, or Mondrian's writing, for example, to know that belief in
transcendent forces survived in a significant part of the avant–
garde, however secularized its environment.
To relate these reflections to the 1980s, there is no question
that our culture, despite the unusually high percentage of
church-goers and spiritual searchers in the United States, is an
increasingly temporal and materialistic one. Those with
children born after, say, 1960 are aware of the appetites of that
generation; the hunger for a quick accumulation of money and
material objects, for rapid social position and public recognition.
In this decade, the brief idealism of those who came of age in the
sixties has disappeared. The joy of working at a task which
challenges and enchants is not now a sufficient reward; this
generation tends to desire and expect immediate payment in
