What is the role of an artist?

Since no-one has replied to this thread - and maybe it seems that I was being pretentious - I just wanted to ask other posters what they though was the role of the modern artist? Is it still to shock, inform and inspire, or is it merely to be fashionable and stylish? [%sig%]

Thanks for trying to answer a question I never really managed to pin down. I think I just meant should we attempt to tell it like it is and damn the consequences. Now I remember why i stopped drinking :)

I think it's just that this question has been attempted to be answered for centuries Mykle, and you are asking it a bit late at night... Andrew might feel up to tackling it in the morning. I think my essential reaction is to say, bugger the 'role' this debases the authenticity of an artist who should be undefinable, evasive and elusive, but always engaging.

This is a quote from the forums of resonance fm, the london arts radio station. pigeon: “I would like you all to meet Art who used to work behind in front of the bar of the Houndry in Baskerville where everything was ambiguous. Art refuses to be pinned down or categorised, queering his her own pitch, agreeing and disagreeing with most propositions except those which are irrational and or require no further explanation. In all honesty she he is a pathological liar, a successful victim of her his own success, needing attention whilst being anti-social, needy and aggressive, passively and passionately amoral, has no need of anyone except an audience. In one hand he she offers a reward, whilst simultaneously begging with the other. Accept this but give me more.”

Thanks Faithless (Faithful?) that clarifies everything :)

Thanks, Emma! I think I just posed the question badly - I'll try again, later, when I'm (hopefully) sober ;o)

I wanted to make my question plain in my poem - obviously I failed miserably (what's new?). What I meant to ask is - is it still the role of the artist to challenge? I was not really asking about all the other things an artist can be because I’m sure it’s almost limitless. But many of my favourite artists challenged the official view of the times and often suffered for their art. It was this aspect of being an artist - to challenge the accepted view and induce opposition, or even to challenge the accepted paradigm that interested me. Terry Pratchett‘s “In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded” sums it up for me.

Can I have a cheese and pickle, easy on the pickle. Thanks. [%sig%]

But what's cheese and pickle got to do with the weather today, Jeff... did you see those massive hailstones last week, bloody hell?

role/roll oh, just got it, hahahahahah *rolls about laughing* It's about to piss it down here, but our apple blossom looks magnificent.

.

. to you too

Haven't cut the grass since I moved into my new house two weeks' ago. The previous incumbent hadn't bothered either. Due to the wet weather I've had to find other things to do (like my last assignment). I think if you look carefully you can see a mini David Bellamy up to his neck in it. Will have to start hacking at it with a bread knife soon.

Jeff, I've just noticed your profile pic collage, you don't look anything like I imagined, want to know more, lol?

Go on then. I do like a good collage every now and again don't you?

Well, in my mind you were a tall man with a dark pointy beard, a large flapping black macintosh and one of those deerstalker hats with a mini umbrella stuck on top.

Did you think I was a Goth? hahahahahahahahahahahahaha and so on.

Yes, sort of a bit Transylvanian, it's the name, and also it conjured up images of Machiavelli... hehehe I hope you aren't related to a woman called Donna...

Judging by your picture you need to grow up a bit, Em... ;o)

btw I've just found this brilliant 3D picture of Dovedale to prove that it's not always raining in Derbyshire: [%sig%]

oooooh, that's done nothing for my headache looking at that Jeff, lol. English Teacher, which school? I do supply around South Yorks and Derbyshire. I also have friends who teach in Derbyshire.

Blimey i'm dizzy now,Jeff the chap with the blue bag...is he having a pee?

No he's having a giant bag of salt and shake, silly.

I don't think i want to know what that means.

Smiths salt and shake, you get your own bag of salt...still buy em, cos I like crisps less salty. fussy me

There are a lot of schools of thought on this issue, and I'm afraid as an inveterate (inverterbrate?) fence-sitter, I come down to the view that art is many things to many people and there is no sense trying to fix it down to one particular thing. Art can be for the purpose of entertainment, mild diversion, humour, distraction, a tiny moment of spark that captures the imagination. Or art can try to reveal or illuminate the human condition (though I'm never quite sure why such a thing is necessary - as Joyce showed in Ulysses, even a thousand pages of close inspection of a character on one day can't really get close to what it might be like to be that person) Art can draw attention to social ills and try to act as a catalyst for change. It can be a cathartic thing for the artist, being for their benefit rather than that of an intended audience. Or it can be art for art's sake - there is something innate in humans that wants to create, to innovate. You may not agree that all art is moving FORWARD, but you have to agree that generally it moves somewhere (albeit occasionally at the speed of glass, which does move, you can see it in the thickening at the bottom of church stained-glass windows). We don't write the same sort of novels as Thackeray and Dickens, although people still devour the screen adaptations - art alters and is slippery. I've never in my life tried to write anything other than as an entertainment; the things I have learned in my life about the human condition I'd rather keep to myself as they tend to be about how unpleasant humans can behave when placed under pressure. The question, though mildly interesting, is almost so big that it becomes meaningless. There's no way to answer it other than in the most superficial sense. As to 'suffer for their art' - yes, a great many writers and artists did, but I think it is a fallacy to believe that you can't produce great art without suffering. I'd rather read Steinbeck than Hemingway. By the way, it is a long-term habit of mine to point out to anyone using the word 'paradigm' that it ill becomes them to do so. It is a word which has been robbed of the slender meaning it had once by management consultants, students and people who want to look clever. There's no need to use the word, in any circumstances. (Just an opinion, but one of the few things I will climb off the fence for - the word is an abhorrence)

to be free.................

(And actually, yes, in my opinion it is too pretentious to say that we are artists.) Helen Fielding who wrote Bridget Jones Diary is a good competent writer, who has had two best-selling books, made into a movie, and brought pleasure and happiness to thousands of people, but she is NOT an artist. Neither are hundreds of other published writers. To complete a piece of work that is an artistic art-FORM does not mean that the work is a work of art, or that the creator is an artist. I don't think I could name more than five writers working today that I'd class as an artist - Martin Amis isn't one, though he's at least striving to be one. Heston Blumenthal is more of an artist than any modern writer that I can think of. So I suppose by that definition, I am saying that I expect more from art than mere entertainment. Hmm. But then, I am someone who when asked to name geniuses, generally replies that there have only been two in the history of the world. Everyone else has just been smart or talented.

You know, now I'm getting my thinking cap on I think Goethe had a lot to say about this sort of thing. And, the issue of what constitutes art has a lot to do with the use of symbolism. Would you say Winterson was an artist, Andrew? I think I would, and Woolf too. Goethe: difference between allegory and symbol - The allegory transforms the phenomenon into a concept, and the concept into an image, but in such a manner that the concept can only be stated, confirmed or expressed in the image in a way that is always limited and incomplete. The symbol transforms the phenomenon into an idea, and the idea into an image, and does this in such a way that the idea in the image has infinite repercussions and remains intangible; even when experessed in every language it will always remain unexpressed. This stuff helps one understand the work of the symbolists, such as Rimbaud, Debussy, Poe. I love the symbolist movement.

I think the trick might be to remember that art has no purpose whatsoever and therefore knowing the difference between art and arse isn't easy, given that only a thin crack separates the two. [%sig%]

No Flashy, he's just been to the gift shop, which is 54 miles further up the dale. Just walking back to the car park (12 miles away) I guess. Emma, the best crisps at the moment are the Snack a Jacks but with Spuds somewhere in the title. Instead of being rice based (which makes me retch a bit) they are potato based and also healthy. Go on treat yourself today and buy some!! [%sig%]