Since the
divorce of artist and public art has been chaotic and convulsive.
That this divorce between the artist and his public--this dislocation of
the right and natural relations between them--has taken place is
certain. The causes of it are many and deep-lying in our modern
civilization, and I can point out only a few of the more obvious ones.
The first of these is the emergence of a new public. The art of past
ages had been distinctively an aristocratic art, created for kings and
princes, for the free citizens of slave-holding republics, for the
spiritual and intellectual aristocracy of the church, or for a luxurious
and frivolous nobility. As the aim of the Revolution was the
destruction of aristocratic privilege, it is not surprising that a
revolutionary like David should have felt it necessary to destroy the
traditions of an art created for the aristocracy. In his own art of
painting he succeeded so thoroughly that the painters of the next
generation found themselves with no traditions at all. They had not only
to work for a public of enriched bourgeois or proletarians who had never
cared for art, but they had to create over again the art with which they
endeavored to interest this public. How could they succeed? The rift
between artist and public had begun, and it has been widening ever
since.
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