What do we admire artists for?

Posted on by cmarthoughts
The image shows three images of a clown's head photographed in bird's view. The heads are overpainted in shades of red and yellow; the paint seems to be splashed on top of the image. The works are art works by Daniel Spivakov.
Daniel Spivakov, Untitled #4, #2 and #6 (over Wladimir Rehbinder, Fratellini), 2023, oil on inkjet print on paper, 42 x 30 cm.. Private collection. Courtesy of the artist.

Artists, once established, are admired and respected; rightly so. But what does it actually mean to create, and to keep on doing it? AKA: what do we admire artists for ?

To make art means to fully dedicate yourself, get obsessed with questions and subjects that have no primary or practical meaning for the world.[1]
Yet, in doing so, artists capture something essential about the world.
Artists radically lay open their feelings and beings, disguise them in form.
They show doubt (Cy Twombly, Daniel Spivakov) and vulnerability (Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin).
And yet, they ruthlessly, stubbornly, egoistically pursue their vision.
Artists don’t accept a world order established by practicality and need/use. Their life and work styles are alternative models to a rigid, standardized, and alien labour and life system.
Lacking practicality or an evident use, all their motivation and activity has to come from within.
In this rejection lies something innocent, childlike, and primal. The essential will to hope.
Artists continue despite their doubts and desperation, putting them into form, trans-forming them.

Creating matter and ideas for an ungraspable truth.

[1] E.g. Philip Guston trying to find an integration between Piero della Francesca and Cubism, around 1941. See Guston, Philip. 2022. I Paint What I Want to See. London: Penguin Books. P. 80.

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