However, in order to perceive and appreciate at all, you need to be receptive to the specific affective or intellectual stimulus of the particular art form. Two-dimensional visual art will not necessarily appeal to the same sensibility as does music or literature. Essentially it’s a question of a favourable physiological constitution, a naturally developed mental or emotive penchant and the presence or lack of an appropriate initiation/education. Once favourably equipped, the question of whether “art” is present or not in a proposed work is quickly settled.

In the drab human everyday reality of factual subsistence, social organisation and material preoccupancy, art helps us to stay in line and to get along. More desirable than the real world, more beautiful, more righteous, the world of art forms a barrier against sordidness.

Art is essential to human existence, the market isn’t. The art market may go bust; art keeps its pre-eminent place in the human adventure. The market is justly based on value and any value can be monetized. Short of discrimination, the art market, as any market, follows the eternal laws of offer and demand. What is monetary successful will be purported as art and marketed regardless of the actual intrinsic quality. This is the world we live in.

Art grows on us. A painting might well be an instantaneous love affair; still it’s with time that you’ll know if the communion is worthwhile. I sometimes buy paintings impulsively, just to discover after a couple of weeks that there are false vibrations, no shared wavelength and that first impressions were false. Some pieces in my collection still stir me as they did 20 years ago. These works are as close as kins and unsupportable is the thought of separation. The paintings that become dumb I sell as quickly as I can; there is perhaps another more fit to take up the broken intercourse.

The pieces that remain, those that stay with me and settle with me, are my daily joy. They come ever closer, their meaning elucidates and their power grows. Art is life, a roaring thunder in the lame duck’s pool of actual life.

Now that art definitely is becoming tart, what with that old museum inventory? Well, even if not yet treated as tart, the old art is efficiently monetized by our tart-loving market forces. In this respect it is very instructive to read eminent art critic Souren Melikian’s article on ‘the divergent fates of works that benefit from celebrity and masterpieces that have only their quality in their favor.’ The art market has become very much like the real estate market, the commodities market or the stock exchange; pure pecuniary speculation detached from any artistic merit. And it works to an astonishing degree.

But who are all these people buying those massive amounts of tart? Well, people interested in making money on the short term. As the whole interest of buying tart is in the subsequent selling, stimulating the fable that tart is art is necessary for healthy resale profits. At the moment there are buyers everywhere thanks to the buoyant economies of emerging nations with cheap labour cashing in on the ongoing globalisation. It is perfectly clear to everyone that this golden period will come to an end and that the herds of ‘newly rich’ one day will discover that their so called art is…simple tart. But who cares? It’s only the very last in the chain of suckers that will be ripped off… The crash is inevitable, but not yet in sight and this explains the frenetic activity these days at Sotheby’s and Christie’s.

Is tart-collecting worth our contempt? Not really, today everything is equal and money-making is the corner-stone of our society. But please, give us a break with the word ‘art’, name a tart a tart and art art.

It seems that when painting migrated from its original mural setting, the most practical surface to transpose to was the rectangle. This was obviously the most convenient shape when assembling planks or when later building frames for canvasses. This might be less evident for modern boards but tradition is strong and one can still imagine the rectangular shape as advantageous in manufacture, handling and transport. We find similar reasoning for the window in architecture where the shape was commanded by analogous pragmatic thinking. In fact, the idea of the independent painting (not fixed permanently into or unto a wall) as a window, allowing a peek into a different reality, has permeated the history of painting. The rectangular shape is of course not unique to paintings or to windows; the book has it, the computer screen, the post card, the poster, the letter-paper, the stamp. It’s a basic shape in our shaped world.

A flat and rectangular surface is thus the torrid scene on which the painter performs his magic. On this thightly delimited space he records reality, leads us into illusion; transmits impressions, passes on sentiments or simply lets his work touch us independently of intention. All these possibilities neatly sum up the subsequent stages and the chronological order that painting passed through over the last centuries. The artist’s working means are line, shadow, colour, texture, mass, contrast, shape. With these ever same ingredients he will create images that may or may not appeal to us, disturb us, pass unnoticed by us or at best fascinate us. What it is exactly that we see in a painting is often not clear to us as a whole registry of sentiments and emotions is at play.

The interesting thing is not so much the choice of the support’s geometrical shape but that of its ineluctably limited space. The practical considerations have of late gone as far as to standardizing art exhibit surface measures to fit the norms of modern day flats and apartments. The convention of framing accentuates this ongoing limitation and encircles the scenic setting yet more strongly.

From the very beginning the painter has been forced to live with limitations, on the one hand with the missing third dimension, on the other with the imposed rectangle. The history of modern painting is for a great part a history of attempts to overcome these limitations. However, there is a much more formidable constraint for the modern painter, a terrible impediment to the exercise of his art imposed by society and of such far-going consequences that the doctrine has actually put a temporary end to painting as an art form: the pretended unacceptability of returning to earlier exploits.

The false idea that evolution in art is linear has made that the ‘space of painting’, the traditional flat rectangle, has become ‘used up’. That there is no more originality to squeeze out of this vehicle has led modern artists to abandon the canvas for other ‘art’ forms.

What hasn’t been understood in the process is that, in essence, Art is forged by limitation and not by freedom. We’ll come back to this notion in another post.

However, modern times tend to confine the adjective ‘European’ to its geographical content, at the expense of the more subtle and historical connotation of ‘cultural diversity sprung from a common ground’. The ‘ground’ in question would be the values that shaped the western world over the last millennia, the ‘diversity’ the result of the relative isolation in which the different geographical parts evolved.

The idea of a possible extinction of the latter sense of ‘European’ took form in the 1960’s and it has gained momentum ever since. We may consider that this semantic evolution has entered its terminal phase as we advance into a largely standardized 21st century. Media, flux and migrations increasingly make the world a mono-cultural society where geographical origin ceases to be a diversifying factor. In fact we are inevitably moving ahead, not only towards the end of European diversity, but towards the end of cultural diversity in general. This evolution is certain to be accomplished during the decades to come.

We can remain neutral as to the worth of this evolution and yet clamour with reason that our interest in art, as expression of human perception and sensibility, is diminishing as standardization, reproduction, simplification and streamlining take hold.

This makes pre-1960’s art all the more interesting. Not from a nostalgic viewpoint but simply for its variety. In these works we are facing a familiar yet puzzling manner of viewing the world whose diversity is still astonishing and above all stimulating. From that point onwards, the art world seems for a large part to have fallen into repetition, make-believe and navel-staring.

For European painting, the subtleness of viewpoint, coming from a geographically small but still highly dismembered whole, created optimal conditions for innovation and creativity. Encounters with differently formed sensibilities brought dynamism to individual work, akin to the beneficial ‘melting pot effect’ that New York City enjoyed in the last decades of the 20th century thanks to a highly multicultural population.

An international style has emerged, supplanting the old concepts of regional schools and national manners. As everything went global, so did inevitably painting. In the recent revival of painting as art form this evolution is especially striking. Nothing in contemporary painting will make a particular cultural reference evident. For some time already, the adjective ‘European’ as a cultural precision has become meaningless.

Let’s not pretend that art is what the greatest number thinks it is. Not everyone can appreciate art, nor be an artist. Art is by essence elitist. Attempts to vulgarize, or to make art a pastime as any other, are doomed to fail, as are all onslaughts on human nature. No education, be it voluntary or enforced, will ever streamline the innumerable disparities of the human mind.

There is art and there is egocentricity. Let’s avoid the tendency of confounding art with self idolatry and murky ideas. Even if art is not for everyone, it is necessarily shared by some. If there is no communion between the artist and his audience, there is no sharing present; neither is there a work of art.

Art is intuitively felt and shared. When art is in need of explanation, you can be sure that there is no Art present. Most of the movements that have dominated the realm of gratuitous creativity these last decades we can thus safely and painlessly forget.

What we stamp “art” is as elusive as ‘being’. Not being able to explain the concept doesn’t mean that we can dispense of its reality or its use. As well as we know that we, ourselves, are, and that art is, we know that there is Art.

This certainty on art can conveniently be called classicist, as it permeates all ages. It was present two thousand years ago and it is present today, it’s a constant. A contemporary art, regardless of its age, is doing nothing else than positioning itself against the classical undercurrent, always present. The quirks, more or less ephemeral, are the signs of the epoch, of the Zeitgeist. The remarkable thing about art is that it bears witness.

The ability to discern and appreciate art is a human constituent and a timeless one. A shared perception of art has prevailed through centuries, through millennia, and is today as present as ever. This classicist view of art should not be confounded with having a preference for the Greek or Roman era. We use ‘classicist’ to mark timeless, that is, what has been intuitively shared since time immemorial. The best works of the modern art movement are as classical as a Michelangelo; they are simply adapting the eternally same to current ideas and circumstances. As we go forward, any art pleading the most fervent avant-gardism will inevitably one day be time-stamped, dated, and, if authentically belonging to the realm of art, enter the unstoppable stream of classicism.