Art Appreciation

You get more out of art the more you’re willing to put in. And I find the more you’ve got out of it, the more particular and finicky you tend to become on all sorts of levels. You will find you become very discriminating about paint. You categorize it – you see it as flatter or more disturbed, or sheer or transparent or spread out, or lumped-up or glutinous or coagulated or whatever – and you have mental frameworks for all these effects. You can read them. You don’t like everything in the same way, and maybe there’s a lot you never like at all.

. . .

In any case there are certain things that paint does that you may come across in your first encounters with the tradition and be impressed by, and the pull of this initial attraction may always remain with you. You might realise later in life that your interest is actually rather narrow. Perhaps it’s that certain way (and you want to see it again and again) that Monet and Tintoretto have of dragging an undiluted bit of oily matter across a more thinly laid-in area. For the rest of your life liking and disliking certain things will connect to this original attraction. In this way painting is trans-historical…it also kind of rises above categories generally. It is its own category. Then there’s the way that taste develops through experience. You learn to see more, so a famous painting you always knew becomes slightly different in stages, and eventually you realize it’s become quite amazingly different to how you originally saw it. Remember we are only talking about the paint here – we haven’t even mentioned what might be going on in the representation or in the story of the artist’s life or what was going on in society at the time. To find this level of painting fascinating, namely the way paint works, is to be a kind of connoisseur.

. . .

Is the painting we have today, that we see in exhibitions and in the Turner Prize for example, connected to the past in any real way? I think the answer is no. The stuff we have now is really a new kind of ideas-art, connected to the type of art that is fashionable now. Painting today defines itself not according to its own tradition but according to this new tradition, which is profoundly non-visual. Its look comes from photography and film when it’s most visual, but its main look is just a kind of convenience – whatever visual arrangement is the most convenient and clear for getting the idea over, whatever it is. Consequently painting today is mostly visually boring.

. . .

I think we need to see more clearly what we’ve become in order to change our state positively. We have to know ourselves. Obsessed to the point of illness by anti-elitism, art culture has become silly and shallow. Its products are often amusing but never genuinely playful, or genuinely free, and consequently never really serious – only either trivial or solemn or both. We now ask art to turn us on with shocks. This is our corruption as a society. But the history of painting mapped out through illustrations…gives the browser a set of shocks of a different kind. In these reproductions we see a culture of humanity and beauty that is shockingly different to today’s mainstream painting.

. . .

How do you look at the paintings of the distant past? How else but with your own eyes, with your own experience and thoughts? But you need frameworks of ideas as well, within which your intuitive perceptions can deepen. Sometimes the Old Masters have a strongly moral direction...Sometimes art from the past is pious and monumental, like the High Renaissance painting of Raphael, or pious and monumental but also explosive and dynamic, like the Baroque painting of Rubens and Caravaggio. Sometimes it’s moving because of simplicity, sometimes because of complexity.

. . .

I think the reproductions of the world’s great art…speak for themselves. If you stick with the subject of painting and its histories…you will find that painting never stands still. You only have to look at individual paintings for a short time, but if they’re good you can come back to them again and again. And they’ll always have something new to say. If this is your first encounter with some of these images then it will be a moment you’ll look on in the future and feel moved by. 

Collings, Matthew. "The Inner Life of Painting." Introduction. A Brief History of Painting. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004. Ix-Xix. Print.