portents in life and art

There has been a lot of talk about recession in the media lately. Housing crisis and war spending and tax breaks and I honestly don’t know what any of it means. Things seem more expensive, and I feel like I have less money, but then I am an artist and a teacher and I don’t have a lot of money and when you are broke, everything seems expensive.

I remember my high school debate coach telling his class one day that there was a theory that stock markets could be predicted by the rise and fall of the hem of women’s skirts. When things are going well, and there is a perception that people are making money, skirt lines go up, when recessions sink in, hem lines go down. I don’t know what kind of predictor this is, but I haven’t seen too many women in full length dresses yet, so maybe it isn’t all bad yet.

I think there is an equivalent in art, an agent of predictability of the times. This isn’t news. When things are going well, when people have lots of surplus income, they are going to spend it on themselves, on fashion and decoration and, in short, on art. No what I was thinking about were larger trends that seem to be hidden within art that may have something to do with economic prosperity, but also seem connected to shifts in moral, spiritual and political values as well.

What am I talking about? Well, take for example ancient Greece. The Archaic period of Greece goes from about 800 BC to 500 BC. Times were tough. The previous 400 years had been something of a dark age for much of Greece. Lands were divided into tribal factions, there was a great deal of infighting between these groups, and there was little in the way of civic or artistic development during this period. But all this changed around 800 BC, and would continue to change for the next 600 years.

First came the rise of the city-states, Athens and Sparta, for instance. Where the cities were first ruled by monarchs and tyrants and later by elected officials. These city-states cooperated with one another to some degree and became more successful. Art flourished. Ceramics, metal work, frescos and sculpture, notably sculpted human forms, appeared.

Success in the wars against the Persians galvanized Greek spirit. This became a golden age of Greek art. Philosophy, Literature, Art and architecture all thrived in this period. Man was the center of reason, and reason was the measure of all things. Idealized forms of nature were perfected in art. Proportion, scale, and perspective were all utilized to describe the perfect world in which we lived.

Greek culture extended out into the world with the aid of the might of Alexander. The known world was Hellenized as Greek thought was disseminated into the world giving rise to the Hellenistic period of Greek art. Influenced by art from newly conquered territories, human expression, theatricality and emotion began to appear in Greek art. Abstraction rather than perfection was the key to this style.

Unfortunately it was not to last. Alexander died and rival generals divided his territories. The rise of Roman power in the west sounded the death knell of the Greek culture, and it hadn’t been for a passionate love of all things Greek by the roman, there role in the history of art might have ended there. But was it roman might that ended the progression of Greek art. Or was the abstraction, the theatricality and emotion portrayed in the art the sign that things had run their course?

We see this pattern over and over again and again, from the proto-renaissance to the high renaissance, from studies of math and perspective to the eventual inclusion of theatricality, emotion and abstraction this pattern seems to occur over and over again and again in art, from neoclassicism to romanticism possibly to the beginnings of modern art we see this evolution of thought and expression over and over again and again, only to dies out and ultimately be reborn somewhere else in some new manner. If modern art is the final stage in this latest evolution of art, perhaps the recession is on the final signal in a trend that has been building for hundreds of years, one that we have been happily oblivious to as we enjoyed the theater of great art, in music, in the movies, and on T.V.