Barbara in her studio. Photo: Izzy Nova

*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

For the young James Joyce, true art is “static,” while false art, which I will here call artifice, is “kinetic.”  These qualifiers, static and kinetic, refer to the effect of the work on the percipient, not to any property of the work itself.  Proper art stills us, evoking an emotional state in which “the mind is arrested and raised above desiring and loathing.”  Improper art does the opposite, aiming to make the percipient act, think, or feel in a certain prescribed manner.  Artifice foregoes the revelatory power that is art’s prerogative in order to impart information, be it a message, an opinion, a judgment, a physiological stimulus, or a command.  Whether the information is good or bad, true or false, pleasant or not is unimportant:  artifice isn’t improper because it is immoral but because it hitches the aesthetic on intentions originating outside the aesthetic realm.  In other words, where art inheres in autoletic expression (expression for its own sake), artifice inheres in practical communication. Proper art moves us, while artifice tries to make us move.   

J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice:  A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action 

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