Why Artists Should Not Have to Explain:

I think it this is a really great article on the beauty of silence and not talking about art, just experiencing it.  After all, it is a visual form, not a written one.  

Explanations are the traitor of art

Serious art defies easy interpretation, and artists should resist the call to explain themselves

July 15, 2008 10:00 AM

by Jonathan Jones for The Guardian

It is a vice of second-rate art to come with its own eloquent explanation attached. If an artist can translate the meaning and purpose of a work into easily understandable words, it means one of two things. Either the artist is lying, in order to ease the way with patrons and funders; or the artist is a fool. And if dishonesty is the reason, that too is something that vitiates art. No serious art is easy to interpret. Nor is there ever a single valid interpretation of art. If art is good, there are many things to be said about it and much that will remain unsayable.

Yet, there are more and more pressures today on artists to explain themselves. Once, an artist was allowed to hide behind a vague and mysterious aura. The American abstract expressionist painters made grand pronouncements about their work that are so enigmatic they give away no hostages - nor do the kinds ofepigrammatic comments made by Francis Bacon. Yet artists in Britain today are always offering explanations for what they do.

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Comments

[nerdychick]

very interesting post...but if the explanations are to fall by the wayside, what will all those MFAs do if they can't use their gradiose and un-intelligible explanations?