01. There really is no such thing as Art. There are
02. only artists. Once these were men who took
03. coloured earth and roughed out the forms of
04. a bison on the wall of a cave; today some buy
05. their paints, and design posters for hoardings;
06. they did and do many other things. There is
07. no harm in calling all these activities art ……..
08. we keep in mind that such a word may mean
09. very different things in different times and
10. places, and as long as we realize that Art with
11. a capital A has no existence. ……… Art with a
12. capital A has come to be something of a
13. bogey and a fetish. You may crush an artist
14. by telling him that what he has just done may
15. be quite good in its own way, only it is not
16. 'Art'. And you may confound anyone enjoying
17. a picture by declaring that what he liked in it
18. was not the Art ……… something different.
19. Actually I do not think that there are any
20. wrong reasons for liking a statue or a picture.
21. Someone may like a landscape painting
22. because it reminds him of home, or a portrait
23. because it reminds him of a friend. There is
24. nothing wrong with that. All of us, when we
25. see a painting, are bound to be reminded of a
26. hundred-and-one things which influence our
27. likes and dislikes. As long as these memories
28. help us to enjoy what we see, we need not
29. worry. It is only when some irrelevant
30. memory makes us prejudiced, when we
31. instinctively turn away from a magnificent
32. picture of an alpine scene because we dislike
33. climbing, that we should search our mind for
34. the reason for the aversion which spoils a
35. pleasure we might otherwise have had. There
36. are wrong reasons for disliking a work of art.
37. Most people like to see in pictures what they
38. would also like to see in reality. This is quite a
39. natural preference. We all like beauty in
40. nature, and are grateful to the artists who
41. have preserved it in their works. Nor would
42. these artists themselves have rebuffed us for
43. our taste. When the great Flemish painter
44. Rubens made a drawing of his little boy, he
45. was surely proud of his good looks. He
46. wanted us, too, to admire the child. But this
47. bias for the pretty and engaging subject is apt
48. to become a stumbling-block if it leads us to
49. reject works which represent a less appealing
50. subject. The great German painter Albrecht
51. Dürer certainly drew his aging mother with as
52. much devotion and love as Rubens felt for his
53. chubby child. His truthful study of careworn
54. old age may give us a shock which makes us
55. turn away from it — and yet, if we fight
56. against our first repugnance we may be richly
57. rewarded, for Dürer's drawing in its
58. tremendous sincerity is a great work. In fact,
59. we shall soon discover that the beauty of a
60. picture does not really lie in the beauty of its
61. subject-matter.
Adaptado de: GOMBRICH, E. H. The Story of Art. London / New York: Phaidon, 2007. p. 15-18.