08-010
Artists One-Up Writers
Again
An
advertisement in an architect’s magazine offers “masterpiece recreations” for
sale by an art gallery in Florida.
“The masters of today re-creating the masterpieces of yesterday for the collection of tomorrow,” the advertisement blurbs enthusiastically.
It
promises “hand painted museum-quality re-creations,” and is illustrated by a
reproduction of one of Claude Monet’s incessant paintings of water lilies.
As
usual, we find here that artists can indulge in activities that would get
writers laughed at, if not sued or arrested. If a writer advertised that he was
re-creating masterpieces by Hemingway, Hawthorne, Shakespeare or Fannie Hurst,
turning out handwritten copies of their actual manuscripts, and was selling
them to collectors, the best reaction he would get would be ridicule.
Those
of us who write for a living have long been aware that painters of pictures
enjoy the upper end of a double standard. They get away with a lot.
If
an artist wants to paint a picture of a landscape, he is allowed by custom to
set up shop on a hillside overlooking the view he wants to put on canvas. He
sits there with his easel and brushes and beret, and paints what he sees, and
passersby think he is picturesque and oozing with aesthetics.
If
a writer set up his typewriter or laptop computer on the hillside and started
to describe the landscape in words, passersby would think he was a few participles
short of a compound verb form. A writer is expected to sit in his dismal garret
and describe the landscape from memory.
Another
inequity: Suppose an artist decides to produce a painting of a naked woman. (It
seems to be a frequent decision among artists.) The artist can call his
neighborhood model rental agency, or Nudes R Us, or wherever artists get those
models, and tell the shipping department to send around a young woman who will
disrobe and pose. It’s totally socially acceptable.
But
what if a writer wants to write a description of an unclad woman? If a writer
called a model agency, and the young woman arrived and saw him sitting at his
keyboard, and he asked her to remove her clothes and pose while he wrote about
her, she would probably sock him, intimate loudly that he was a pervert, and
call the cops. Again, the poor writer has to work from memory.
Why
is it that artists are allowed to do things writers are not? Why is it that
they can unabashedly advertise that they are making copies of masterpieces, and
instead of being criticized for lack of originality and of semi-fraud, their
efforts are offered to architects and decorators so those professionals can
provide clients with the best quality fake Monet renderings of water lily
ponds?
Anybody
want to buy a neatly typed manuscript of “Martin Chuzzlewit” in Dickens’s own
words? I can supply one cheap. And with even lower rates for Xerox copies.