I think this is the last of the Mystery Blogger Award questions I will answer. It has been fun to use them as writing prompts and, as anyone who knows much about me at all knows, I love to create puns. I love to read puns. I even love it when I miss a pun that someone has made and later said, “Did you catch that?” I laugh raucously at them, sometimes to the embarrassment of those around me. But the question I am going to see if I can figure out today is:
Very few paintings by Norman Rockwell hang in the great museums. Would you rate his art as highly as you do the art of Rembrandt, Valazquez, and other old masters? Why or why not?
I looked at the other blogs that were nominated for the Mystery Blogger Award by Ben and none of them attempted it at all. I thought, “Well, that’s a fine howdy-do. I was hoping to get a clue to some of these answers. So, I guess it’s up to me to answer this.”
Except I have no clue at all of what I am talking about. One time when I worked at big-name insurance company office, they were installing a piece of art. It was a six-foot-long rug that the artist had painted on with a paint roller. The artist was there and one of the bigwigs saw me standing nearby and asked my opinion of it. I just said, “I’m sorry, sir, I ain’t educated enough to judge no art,” and made myself disappear.
I know I like Norman Rockwell’s stuff. I started to ask Der Google about the above-named artists but wound up on all kinds of rabbit trails and just decided I should not write about things I am not knowledgeable about. Except that, I do know I really like Norman Rockwell. I have not ever seen a Rockwell painting yet that I didn’t like. Although some of his later paintings about civil rights are a bit disturbing, they still convey an important message. I also like Winslow Homer’s paintings. So much so that I used one for a background for a church theme. But are they art?
The definition of art I found on both Bing and Der Google was, “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” Then I found this quote by Poe that I had heard before, “Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ‘the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.’ The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‘Artist.’”
So, the short answer is, I don’t know. The longer answer is, Look up Norman Rockwell and Winslow Homer and decide for yourself. The longest answer, is, if you want a list of crazy questions to prove how intellectual you are (or to check the intellectual level of your readers), check out, Fifty-Seven Difficult Questions.
