The historian Paul Johnson has written on just about every subject, with wisdom, perspective, and passion. His latest book, Art.A New History is no exception.
While his conclusion focuses on the fine/fashion arts, one may substitute any art – theater, film, music, dance – and find some truth concerning the current situation:
The most worrying aspect of art at the beginning of the twenty-first century was not its increasing commercialisation, for art has always had to live with commerce. It was the decline, and in some cases the disappearance, of effective training in art skills. It is not as though art education as a whole is suffering. Quite the contrary: in the United States and Britain, for example, more secondary school pupils take art history as an examination subject than ever before; the number of men and women taking degrees in art has multiplied a hundredfold since 1945; and Ph.D. students in arts subjects are also at their highest level. What is lacking are opportunities for would-be painters and sculptors to acquire first-class training. Many art schools do not actually teach pupils how to draw or paint. Teaching of sculpture in its traditional forms, as opposed to unskilled constructions, is even harder to obtain. More seriously, few established artists now take pupils. The studio chain, stretching back to the early Middle Ages, along which knowledge was passed from master to assistant or apprentice over countless generations, has been broken. At the heart of the process whereby beautiful objects are produced there is an abyss.
But there is no long-term cause for despondency. More people now love art, or what they think is art, than ever before. More of them see it regularly. More art is on display, all over the world, than in the whole of history. There are more books on art too: good books, with excellent illustrations. More young people than ever before want to create art, if only they knew how. The human need for art is greater than ever, for the world is more chaotic, and the demand for the ordering process which art supplies is rising. All the mistakes made in the last century can be corrected. In many ways the process has already started. The human race is in its infancy. The story of art has only just begun. Human life is short but the life of art is long and the best is yet to come.[i]
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