I’d be the first to recognise that the audience provides at least fifty percent of the meaning of a work but questions of beauty, not being given to sentimentality personally, is enough to give you a headache.
But why a dominance of women? To loosely quote Yuval Noah Harari, if you put 1000 chimpanzees in a room [our nearest evolutionary ancestors] you get chaos. If you put 1000 male artists in a room more than likely it will end up as war. 10,000 artists, on an internet site though, most of them women, and the mythical glue of creativity takes over in an atmosphere of communal conviviality. Art as self-expression? Art as therapy? Art as a social imperative? Art as a reiteration of hunter-gatherer society and the control of magic and ritual? Perhaps. The collective power that erected pyramids was the result of a collective belief and sense of community purpose but the uptake of a current course on Abstract paint application may leave no such legacy but you can’t deny that one exists.
…….the plethora of social media sites offering lessons in Abstract painting [with guaranteed success]. Learn to paint like Pollock, or de Kooning, or Picasso or Hoffman in six easy lessons and take on the art world.
In my own case, I worry about lack of development in that I don’t have a string or wives or mistresses; I don’t have major changes of style every few years; I don’t have a philosophy based upon grandiose ideas or a philosophy based on philosophy such as that of Wittgenstein or Sartre.
Gino Severino the Italian Futurist wrote in 1946
‘ It cannot even be said that peace has come after the war……few people…have faith in their fellow man…ill-will and superficiality are so widespread…that disbelief in men seems justified and the truth is so twisted by private interests that one can hardly believe in truth….’
Plato, that man of words who dreamed of an ideal society had no use for poets or artists. Banning them from Utopia was high on his social agenda.