David Hockney has died, and there has died with him an artist whose work has given those of us who are not artists a very great deal of pleasure, in striking contrast to most art that wins prizes these days.
The ancient Greeks did not have a word for ‘art’. The closest they got to it was tekhnê (cf. ‘technical’), brilliantly defined by Aristotle as ‘the trained ability to produce something under the guidance of rational thought’, always difficult to discern in the work of most modern artists. So in the ancient world, the artist was on the same level as (say) a dentist – someone whose purpose it was to serve the ordinary public to the best of his technical capacity. The idea that the artist was someone before whom one felt compelled to grovel in untimely worship would have struck the ancients as laughable.
The Greek man of letters Plutarch (c. AD 50-120) hit the nail on the head: ‘No one of good breeding or high ideals feels that they must be an artist after seeing the work of Pheidias, or a poet because they get so much pleasure out of poetry. It does not follow that because a particular work of art succeeds in charming us, its creator also deserves our admiration.’
The point is that, in the ancient world, art was not the private concern of gaggles of artists. It was a public performance, not art for art’s sake, and the artist wanted public approval to get more commissions. That is how he made his mark in the world: to show off the wealth and taste of the patron who commissioned it, he devoted his career to a tradition of art well understood and appreciated by hoi polloi.
To that extent, novelty and creativity were not a priority for the ancient artist. But this did not mean art stood still. Consider the stir caused by Praxiteles’s ‘Aphrodite’, the first full-sized nude female statue (c. 330 BC). Development and innovation were welcomed and admired, but within the context of existing conventions. Such expertise resulted in continuing support from both public and patrons. Hockney would applaud.
Comments