If you want to be a successful artist in today’s world, that is, if you want to be a famous artist and to sell your work, it seems to me that, firstly, you must have a lot of cheek but no artistic talent whatsoever. Examples: To be found in most art schools, and amongst most of the Tate Gallery Turner Prize winners.
Or, you must create outlandish anti-art and at the same time sell whatever integrity you may possess to become the slave of curators, dealers, auctioneers, art critics, and others of that ilk. Examples: Jeff and Damien Koons.
Or, you must make exact hand drawn copies of photographs and impress the great mass of the uninformed public who believe that copies of photographic images somehow have something to do with art although they don’t really know what. Examples: Those who belong to the so-called photo/hyper-realist school.
At least the last-named have some technical proficiency… but where do you go after photo/hyper-realism? It’s a dead end art because it leads nowhere. It might almost be regarded as a form of Dadaism… it’s so useless.
In fact, now I come to think of it, perhaps all art is useless, purposeless…
I can’t think of any other options.
Can an artist ignore the world and work in a vacuum?
Practitioners of traditional landscape / marine painting are of course totally out of touch with the reality of the modern world – poor hopeless romantics.
Art in the 21st century world of social media is a complete fuck-up, a mad-house full of insane lunatics wandering the corridors of a labyrinthine asylum.
peter robinson fine art 
You’re a real artist so therefore entitled to comment.
Me, I’m a hobby artist, a category so low as not worth including among the list of fuck ups.
Still, from the earliest scratching in the sand, or scribbles in charcoal, long lost, we make art when we just do it. The rest is marketing.
When visiting the Edinburgh Art
Gallery recently, a sign directed me
toward the ‘Contemporary Art’ wing.
Moving on I thought I must have
made a wrong turn and ended up
in some primary school art & crafts
exhibition. But no, I was surrounded
by what passes as art in this post
modern age. I think social media is
just the “black mirror” that reflects
the cultural backslide of the west.
The technological tools just make
it so easy. I do like to play with the
picture apps now available. But I
know that I’m playing about, and
don’t.take it too seriously
But then, beauty is on the screen
of the keyboard beholder 😎
Great thoughts from you David… I might amend your term “cultural backslide” slightly! But apart from that really nice to hear your good voice. The world really is in a bad state and perhaps the crap art that abounds everywhere is a symptom of this malaise. (Google some New Zealand guy with the same name as me to see the shamefacedness of it all.) But then observing the so-called leaders of governments, indeed governments as a whole, law courts, media lies, incompetence, oh my goodness, I’m going into rant mode… well, it really is fecking tragic and not only art but society generally too… hooded yobs and unemployed (and probably unemployable) layabouts (pity them) who commit credit card fraud and the suchlike (I was just robbed / mugged of six hundred euro by some squirt anonyme who spent the money on crap “designer label” trainers and clothing…) Enough Peter… suffice to say, from the elites at the top to the lumpenproles at the bottom society is well and truly fucked!
The rot comes down from the top.
And now that it’s picking up speed
it ain’t ever going to stop, unless …?
Time to crop the rot at the top ✊😎