Art of the future, that is to say, such part of art as will be chosen
from among all the art diffused among mankind, will consist, not in
transmitting feelings accessible only to members of the rich classes, as
is the case to-day, but in transmitting such feelings as embody the
highest religious perception of our times. Only those productions will
be considered art which transmit feelings drawing men together in
brotherly union, or such universal feelings as can unite all men. Only
such art will be chosen, tolerated, approved, and diffused. But art
transmitting feelings flowing from antiquated, worn-out religious
teaching,—Church art, patriotic art, voluptuous art, transmitting
feelings of superstitious fear, of pride, of vanity, of ecstatic
admiration of national heroes,—art exciting exclusive love of one’s own
people, or sensuality, will be considered bad, harmful art, and will be
censured and despised by public opinion. All the rest of art,
transmitting feelings accessible only to a section of people, will be
considered unimportant, and will be neither blamed nor praised. And the
appraisement of art in general will devolve, not, as is now the case, on
a separate class of rich people, but on the whole people; so that for a
work to be esteemed good, and to be approved of and diffused, it will
have to satisfy the demands, not of a few people living in identical and
often unnatural conditions, but it will have to satisfy the demands of
all those great masses of people who are situated in the natural
conditions of laborious life.
And the artists producing art will also not be, as now, merely a few
people selected from a small section of the nation, members of the upper
classes or their hangers-on, but will consist of all those gifted
members of the whole people who prove capable of, and are inclined
towards, artistic activity.
Artistic activity will then be accessible to all men. It will become
accessible to the whole people, because, in the first place, in the art
of the future, not only will that complex technique, which deforms the
productions of the art of to-day and requires so great an effort and
expenditure of time, not be demanded, but, on the contrary, the demand
will be for clearness, simplicity, and brevity—conditions mastered not
by mechanical exercises but by the education of taste. And secondly,
artistic activity will become accessible to all men of the people
because, instead of the present professional schools which only some can
enter, all will learn music and depictive art (singing and drawing)
equally with letters in the elementary schools, and in such a way that
every man, having received the first principles of drawing and music,
and feeling a capacity for, and a call to, one or other of the arts,
will be able to perfect himself in it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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