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From: Kha
Category: Art
Date: 25 January 2005
http://www.princes-foundation.org/Traditional%20Art%20School/traditionalarts.html
Nothing wrong with Prince Char. setting up an art school. Reactionary springs to mind, but let's leave that for the moment.
The art on show was in a number of styles, including but not definitively or perhaps accurately: indian miniature, islamic geometry, religious icon, and some sort of calligraphy. Now, is it possible that students outside of the cultural/economic exigencies and beliefs that created those styles and infused them with the beauty that draws us to them, can create significant art by trying to understand them and make work within them? Will we not just get the nostalgic imitation by the amateur, without the fierce energy and mastery of the original?
It seems tradition is a reaction to the threat of chaos and the ugliness of contemporary failure. But the nice stuff in the British Museum is carefully selected and stolen, and includes none of the real struggle the vicious editing with which history vanquishes the mediocre. Great art was sometimes made in the spirit of nostalgia, but more often cames out of the urgent demands of the present.
Forward we go, there were a few nice delicate paintings in the show.
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