Picasso: Capitulating to the Critics, posted by Jay QuineYour Gifts, Your Values -- QuineExamining these gifts challenges us to discover who we are as God has gifted us. We then need the courage to employ them. Whether a natural or spiritual gift, the challenge is to live for the glory of God rather than for the service of self or in an attempt to satisfy the world. Read the sad yet revealing words of a famous artist, who lived his life pleasing the world.
From the moment that art ceases to be the food that feeds the best minds, the artist can use his talents to perform all the tricks of an intellectual charlatan. Most people today can 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, sensational, the eccentric, the scandalous in today’s art. And I myself, since the advent of cubism, have fed these fellows what they wanted, and satisfied these critics with all the ridiculous ideas that passed through my head. The less they understood them the more they admired me. Through amusing myself with all these 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 have not the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titan, Rembrandt, Goya, who were great painters. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity and the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine; more painful than it may seem. But it at least and at last does have the merit of being honest.[1]
In contrast to the wasted talents of Picasso, a desire to first serve and please God should be our motive. The words of Daniel Webster are fitting: “The most important thought to ever occupy my mind was that of my responsibility to God.”
[1]From an interview with Picasso in Il Libro Nero by Giovanni Papini (1951), translated in Robertson Davies, What's Bred in the Bone, New York, Penguin, 1986, pp. 406-407.
