Art and the Homeless

Think of Bernard Buffet as an artist and a comedian. He joins the ranks of the great comedians Charlie Chaplin, Jerry Lewis, and Liberace. Marcel Marceau should be included in this category, the quintessentially French pantomime artist, whom everyone loves -even without fluency in French. Similarly, Bernard Buffet is the entertainer of painting.  Comedy is an art, just as the art of Bernard Buffet is comedy. It is this aspect of the art of Bernard Buffet that his critics misunderstand. Comedy is not his intention. Nonetheless, he is a natural, a born comedian. His critics are to Buffet's paintings as the theater audience which expects drama, but gets farce, instead. Find, if possible, and view the 6-minute video of Marcel Marceau performing "The Painter" (1975). I am not suggesting Buffet is a pantomime artist. I suggest his paintings can be seen as painted pantomimes. The comparison may help explain Buffet's awkward figures, his work's most distinctive feature. T...

About Bernard Buffet's Rolls Royce: "It is a striking coincidence: in the very year that brought the first expressions, in esoteric circles, of a new current in art that was committed to the reality of the new consumer world,(20) the media savaged a painting that had had the audacity to take a commodity fetish and use it plainly as the subject for a picture." The difference is that Warhol, et al, satirized commercial imagery, while  publishers of magazines and street posters exploited the commercialized style of Buffet. The irony is that advertising cannot exploit Pop Art. It would look like a parody of itself. Buffet parodies nothing. He editorializes. Nothing is unworthy of his attention, or escapes his notice, or is beneath his contempt -like a journalist. See his many illustrations featured on the cover of European mass-subscription magazine covers.  It has been objected that Buffet painted over 2,000 pieces in ten years. That is productive -if not creative. By the s...

Bernard Buffet's art career was a portent of the artistically vacuous Pop Art of the 60s, and after. The cheap, off-set printing imagery of American Pop Art was a commentary on American bad taste. For Buffet, bad taste was a calling. The prototype of the Pop artist-as-celebrity was a predictable extension of post-World War Modernism, and not any mere celebrity, but Superstar celebrity.  With Modernism, the artist's personality is inseparable from his art. With Bernard Buffet, fame went beyond art. Picasso, by contrast, was famous because of his art. Somehow, Buffet became famous despite his art. Some cynic said you can't underestimate the public's bad taste. Buffet is proof. Bernard Buffet was an art box office sensation. As criteria, that's neither an artistic matter, nor is it a personal matter. It is a matter of publicity, a matter of the vicissitude of public approval. Numbers have nothing, essentially, to do with art. The public made Buffet the phenomenon he w...

A comment of Aristotle's that it's pointless to praise inanimate objects, better by far to praise persons, when applied to the Internet, had me looking for whom to praise when learning things I would not have known without Internet. If the Internet is not the defining moment of my generation, to give credit where credit is due, my generation's defining moment would not likely be realized without it.  One of the defining circumstances of the Internet is its anonymity. Attribution can be uncertain. Who said what first, either for praise, or to blame? Random search guided only by interest tends to lead to unexpected conclusions. Past a certain point in the search you are on your own. It was a point of honor to be a skeptic, before the Internet. Knowledge ever shines a spotlight of truth on superstition, exposing it. The fast and easy access to knowledge should quickly put to rest all doubts. The problem is, the Internet is the largest knowledge database ever. It's easy to ...

In April of 2022 a resurgence of the Covid 19 epidemic is taking place in China: "The lockdown was supposed to end yesterday, but has been extended indefinitely until authorities have had an opportunity to 'review the data', as China Daily reported." Having recently emerged from authoritarian measures of our own, in the U.S.A., my heart goes out to the Chinese people. The frustration resulting from the ineffectiveness of all measures to stop the virus has had one benign effect, that of uniting us. To be sure, the political leadership in China is doing its utmost to remedy the situation. Nonetheless, a social fatigue is setting in, a secondary reaction on the heels of the initial problem. It is straining nerves: "Many have accused the CCP of violating its contract with the people. And in one particularly memorable scene, thousands of Shanghaiers took to their balconies to chant in protest, in defiance of the CCP's lockdown strictures." Please believe it i...

From the Perseus online library edition of The Art of Poetry by Horace, "Ut pictura poesis..." "As is painting, so is poetry: some pieces will strike you more if you stand near, and some, if you are at a greater distance: one loves the dark; another, which is not afraid of the critic's subtle judgment, chooses to be seen in the light; the one has pleased once, the other will give pleasure if ten times repeated." These lines by Horace demonstrating his appreciation for some of the fine points of painting are encouraging support for my contention that art criticism is a species of Satire. Horace was forced to defend his satirical writing as a unique genre of literature, not the failure to compose epic, tragic, lyric, or otherwise "serious" poetry. Although by no means the first to write ad hominem taunts against those who reviled him, and his writing, Horace could be said to be the first to self-consciously write satire. I would think to be singled-out...