New Art!

One of the finest feelings for the man of taste is to disover a new artist. The indiscriminate can find something to enjoy in any work of art, such insidious relativism is not only corrosive to the true meaning of art, in all its' manifestations, but also to the basis of a constructive (or destructive?) society such as we enjoy in the West. As the saying became known in the early 1990's, art history is dead, with art having gone full circle in the West, from the childish scrawlings on cave walls of our ancient ancestors, through the greatest refinements of Baroque taste, and back down through a time of realism so soon made somewhat obsolete by the perfectible, and manipulable technique of photography. Then, men sought to draw as children, as our ancestors drew and we were back at a sort of square one. Anyone producing such primitivist works in our time is simply wasting theirs, however the example, drawn as validly from Picasso as from the anonymous men at Lascaux, must inform the future direction of art. With all that off of Pierrot's chest, I must admit that I can neither draw, nor paint, nor sculpt, nor perform any arts - save poetry of which I will say more later - but find that I love the arts I cannot do as fully as I disdain the one I am so gifted in. And when I find an artist who can captivate my attention in a new way, who can compel me to put my useless hands to canvas, an obsession is born. Neither am I less than picky, I look over art, whether plastic or otherwise, with the same discerning eye as Napoleon, of whom it is said always brought a full carriage of books with him on all his campaigns and was wont to discard a book onto whatever road of europe his hooves brought le tricolore after only a few artless sentences, or perhaps a misplaced word or poorly developed thought. Please, enjoy the latest of Pierrot's non-physical infatuations (of which there are also many.) On the left, observe Vasily Perov's 1867 painting 'The drowned'. The virginal stillness of the recently deceased reminds me of a model another painter once found on the banks of the Tiber, a prostitute killed for political imposture by Catavaggio's patrons or at least those in their circle, and thrown in the Tiber, where that great artist found in her untouchable corpse the image of the dead mother of Christ. Above her, in the silence of gull wings, floats a mist of souls above the dawning river. And looking over her corpse (I ask, is this Perov, or Caravaggio even), a boatman pulling on his pipe, sits somewhat stoically, and perhaps without thought, though certainly not without a kind of gaunt feeling.