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Alex is trolling again, this time in the Temple. I've put the following post up for deletion.
([+] [-] Text is here for reference. I have a friend who grouses that the history of the arts, particularly of filmmaking and the fine arts, is a Secret History of Rich Kids.
I appreciate this isn't presented as a statement of fact, but still, I suspect he or she's talking about the (not-so) secret present of filmaking and the fine arts, all the same.
In the secret history of the past though; was Billy Wilder a rich kid? Was Marilyn Monroe, was Francis Bacon? Was Andy Warhol even? And what about Da Vinci, or Van Gogh? Mozart, it's clear now, was just having a laugh when he went begging for money to put on 'The Magic Flute'. Frida Khalo was posh, and in no real pain at all, subsequent to the accident. Jack Kerouac joined the merchant navy for his own amusement.
It strikes me as the most bird-witted analysis of the history of art possible, to put it all down to the question of family money. Of course, it's very difficult to do anything if you're down to subsistence level, if you're right at the bottom of the heap, but then things can't have been easy for Tricky or Tracey Emin - I dare say she wasn't the right sort when she started out, but none of her contemporaries (Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Chris Ofili) seem to have anything against her, and I doubt they ever did - and yet they all seem to have managed somehow.
In England, anyway, it's going to be more difficult to be an artist of whatever stripe to 'get on' these days, because of the cost of the education - how can you justify being fifteen grand in debt when you graduate if you're going to be a painter, and your father/mother isn't doing pretty well?
But let's consider who's really responsible. You, perhaps, for being so self-indulgent as to expect state-funding for your art career when there are people dying on foreign soils?
When your own government is largely responsible for shooting, and/or starving them?
I suppose you could always get a job as a war artist, but then in that case you'd really have to pay for your own materials, morphine, film, a quick flight home, that would in no sense immediately arrive.
--Alex's Grandma ) |
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