Part Ⅱ Fame and Profit in the World of Calligraphy and Painting
We often see artists drifting among various circles, exhausting themselves trying to promote their own names. From the perspective of historical circumstance — both individual artists and collective systems alike — individuals naturally seek some form of recognition and positioning. Yet whether one is erased or distinguished, no one can possess absolute certainty in the present moment.
As many perceptive minds throughout history have recognized, true art history is nothing other than large-scale elimination.
Within the complex interactions of the collective, group judgment inevitably blunts and weakens every participant's subjective discernment. From the standpoint of cultural time and accumulation, the narrowness of collective judgment induces delay and stagnation. Thus, for the artist to seek recognition from the collective is ultimately a foolish and nihilistic demand.
For the individual to hope that an unconscious and potentially meaningless collective will define and validate him is not only a moral humiliation of individual existence, but a devouring obscuration of individual meaning itself. Such a condition inevitably results in the shared degeneration of both the individual and the collective sphere within which he operates.
The clearest manifestation of this reality is that both sides, without fully realizing it, continually “insult” one another. Measured against the enduring standards of art history, the absurdity of such behaviour becomes even more glaring.
Beauty has always flowed inward toward the individual soul. Between personal feeling and collective consensus, there naturally exists a barrier, through which the individual attains a kind of inner fullness and self-sufficiency. Whether for the artist or the viewer, the most essential experience arises from the union of personal emotion and reason.
Once art becomes lost in the pursuit of fame and profit, it can no longer safeguard its appeal to authentic individual feeling. Instead, it collapses into the inherent vulgarity of contemporary art circles. The greater the mixture of individual ignorance and collective unconsciousness condensed into artistic sensibility, the more likely art is to descend into emptiness and absurdity — endlessly reenacting an atmosphere of self-deceptive comedy, or perhaps tragedy.
Human will may be regarded as a special form of self-suggestive “memory.” Firmness of will can often be sustained only for very brief periods. When human beings remain immersed within a prolonged atmosphere, they are easily infected by it.
From the perspective of social order, all human relations may ultimately be reduced to relations of supply and demand. Thus, artists' self-deception often leads directly to the corruption of critics.
In my experience, most critics are little more than parasites attached to galleries and artists.
Art, whose primary spirit is beauty, ought to be a cultural existence forged from the fusion of truth and goodness within real life. Once artists abandon this essential spiritual core, a corrupt atmosphere inevitably emerges. Critics lacking firm conviction are then easily swept along into degeneration, uttering distortions that invert black and white and confuse public understanding.
Not only do they fail to provide aesthetic education to the public, but they also begin by corrupting collectors and galleries, and eventually poison the entire atmosphere of the art market. Seen broadly, the degeneration of artistic and literary culture inevitably leads to the disorder of collective social life. The two feed one another in a vicious cycle.
(In Part III, we proceed to the ultimate resolution of this predicament, asking how the relentless friction of desire may be stilled, and how fame and profit might be re-anchored to bring harmony rather than mutual destruction.)