Philosophy of Art - Art of Philosophy

(Francisco de Goya) "Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels."

(Pablo Picasso, 1952) "From the moment that art ceases to be food that feeds the best minds, the artist can use his talents to perform all the tricks of the intellectual charlatan. Most people can today no longer expect to receive consolation and exaltation from art. The 'refined,' the rich, the professional 'do-nothings', the distillers of quintessence desire only the peculiar, the sensational, the eccentric, the scandalous in today's art. I myself, since the advent of Cubism, have fed these fellows what they wanted and satisfied these critics with all the ridiculous ideas that have passed through my mind. The less they understood them, the more they admired me. Through amusing myself with all these absurd farces, I became celebrated, and very rapidly. For a painter, celebrity means sales and consequent affluence. Today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown - a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest."

Introduction to Philosophy of Art

Philosophy is the Art of determining the Truth (which requires many years of study of the great minds of human history) such that we may apply this Truth to life. Likewise, the greatest Art is founded on profound Truths that express the wonder and beauty of our relationship to the universe. As Marcel Proust and Henri Matisse write;
"Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature." (Marcel Proust)

"When we speak of Nature it is wrong to forget that we are ourselves a part of Nature. We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe." (Henri Matisse)

Our modern worldview, with its obsessive focus on Market Economics, Agriculture, and the Ego has allowed us to become isolated from our true connection with Nature, the Cosmos and our place in the Universe. That the majority of humans do not recognize themselves as a part of Nature (nor consider how they have evolved to live) is a disturbing thought for the future survival of all life on Earth (and likewise the disturbing state of contemporary art).

Though there have been many great artists and inspiring works of art throughout human history, no art has ever been founded on what truly exists, as this knowledge had not been known. The Postmodern belief in no Absolute Truth has detrimentally affected modern Art, resulting in artistic confusion, lack of meaning and decay.

'Art historians speak of modern art as concerned primarily with essential qualities of colour and flatness and as exhibiting over time a reduction of interest in subject matter.' (Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe, Roots of Modernism)