4 - The Artist as Creator

Summary

In his celebrated Las Meninas, Diego Velázquez portrays himself with brush in hand at his easel, his brother Don José Nieto Velázquez in the distant doorway, Phillip IV of Spain and Queen Mariana reflected in a mirror and the central figure, the Infanta Margarita in the foreground, accompanied by attendants, the dwarfs Maribarbola and Nicolas Pertusato and a hound. Las Meninas shows Velázquez reflecting on his role in Court, and in doing so inviting us to confront the profound question of the relationship between the painter and the king, artist and politics. Are painters no more than the dwarfs and hounds, tolerated only for the amusement and entertainment they provide? Perhaps they’re another useful resource at the disposal of power, celebrating, memorialising and thereby enhancing their patron's grandeur? Or are painters, indeed all artists, creative geniuses whose works disclose their uncanny abilities and profound insights, demonstrating their inherent parity if not superiority to kings and queens, so that they are philosopher kings?

Is the modern artist the most successful resolution of the paradox of the philosopher king? In our attempt to explore this possibility, we inevitably confront one of the most complex and contested threshold questions of ‘what is art’. Art seems to comprehend an extraordinary range of things, from the familiar forms of painting, music, writing, dance and statues to modern forms ranging from extreme and confronting performance art displays that involve surgery and bodily mutilations, to Marcel Duchamp's 1917 readymade sculpture La Fountaine consisting of a porcelain urinal signed ‘R. Mutt’, Damien Hirst's 1991 The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living consisting of a preserved tiger shark submerged in formaldehyde in a glass-panel display case, Tracey Emin's 1998 My Bed consisting of her bed with bedroom objects in a dishevelled state, Maurizio Cattelan's 2019 Comedian created in an edition of three that appears as a fresh banana affixed to a wall with duct tape, and even silence in the form of John Cage's 1952 three-movement musical composition 4’33” where the score instructs performers not to play their instruments during the entire duration of the piece.