Jeremias (Jeremiah) 10:14
"Every man is become a fool for knowledge, every artist is confounded in his graven idol: for what he hath cast is false, and there is no spirit in them."
"From the moment that art ceases to be food that feeds the best minds,
the artist can use his talents to perform all the tricks of the
intellectual charlatan. Most people can today 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, the sensational, the eccentric, the scandalous in today's
art.
I myself, since the advent of Cubism, have fed these fellows what they
wanted and satisfied these critics with all the ridiculous ideas that
have passed through my mind. The less they understood them, the more they
admired me. Through amusing myself with all these absurd 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 do not have the effrontery to consider myself an
artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian,
Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown - a
mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility,
the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession,
this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and
at last it does have the merit of being honest."
Pablo Picasso - 1952