The Paris Salon

So I'm reading these books called "Getting to know the world's greatest artists" by Mike Venezia. It's a series children's biographies on the great artists.

I'm just finishing up the Impressionists.

Each biography of an Impressionist tells about how the absurdly elitist Paris Salon art show wouldn't take their paintings. They wouldn't take them because the painting were thought to be done "wrong". It was all blotchy, less pictures of objects and more impressions of objects. Silly art show, don't they know any better.

But one thing I just noticed now was the reasons he gave for why certain artists are good, despite what the Salon might think. And his reasons are almost always "He used bright colors." Also, any artist he DOESN'T say this about, he ALWAYS finds some complement about the color they used.

When you think about this, this is really the same as the Salon. He has his own views as to what is right, and what is wrong, art. Yet even though he is the same, he must refute the elitism of the Salon, because that's the historical dogma of today.

It's a nifty example of a thought I've had for some time. That is that society doesn't betters itself over time. It never breaks free from tradition and other so called "hindrances to free thought". These only change form.

Ethan posted another example of this on his blog some time back. It was mostly based off of Professor Peter Saccio lecture series... something or other.

http://stormman.blogspot.com/2007/02/dating.html

This all, in turn, places a huge impact on the argument we sometimes hear that goes something like, "Well, they were just brainwashed back then."

"Brainwashed" meaning being heavily influenced by whatever it is that influenced people at that period in history.

We look at them and see their hopeless, brainwashed state, and we feel proud of ourselves that we're out of that philosophically dark era, and into the light of the presence. But we don't see that we are just as foolish and influenced as they were.

Nothing ever changes. They were all brainwashed then, and we're all brainwashed now. I know I'm brainwashed, and I'm proud of it. :-D