Page 12 RAlN December 1978 "While our invention of innumerable conveniences has made our unnatural manner of living in great cities so endurable' that we cannot imagine what it would be like to do without them, yet the fact remains that not even the multimillionaire is rich enough to commission such works of art as are preserved in our museums but were originally made for men of relatively moderate means or, under the patronage of the church, for God and all men, and the fact remains that the multimillionaire can no longer send to the ends of the earth for the products of other courts or the humbler works of the folk, for all these things have been destroyed and their makers reduced to being the providers of raw materials for our factories, wherever our civilizing influence has been felt; and so, in short, that while the operation that we call a "progress" has been very successful, man the patient has succumbed." " ... in societies based on vocation, it is taken for granted that the artist is not a special kind of man, but every man a special kind of artist." "Who paints a figure, if he cannot be it, cannot draw it." Dante (Canzone XVI)-These words of Dante, utterly alien to the assertions of those who maintain that art can be successfully divorced from its theme and from experience, are alone sufficient to establish a fundamental identity of European and Asiatic art ... the goal is only reached when the knower and the known, subject and object, are identified in one experience. In European religion, the application of this doctrine has been a heresy. In India it has been a cardinal principle of devotion that to worship God one must become God.... In this condition the mind is no longer distracted by perception, curiosity, self-thinking and self-willing; but draws to itself, as though from an infinite distance, the very form of that theme to which attention was originally directed. . our individualistic position ... aims at the greatest possible freedom for oneself. The traditional philosophy also aims at a greatest possible freedom; but from oneself." ... The Ch inese artist does not merely observe bu t identifies himself with the landscape or whatever it may be that he will represent. The story is told of a famous painter of horses who was found one day in his studio rolling on his back like a horse; reminded that he might really become a horse, he ever afterwards painted only Buddhas." EVERY PERSON, A SP Coomaraswamy is essential reading for understanding the true chasms between Traditional societies and our Industrial culture and the fundamental changes our heads and actions have before us in the coming years. If you think that adopting new tools or smaller technology alone will change our world, read some of his wri tings on art. Art? If you wonder what art has to do with technology or work or economics, you're just bumping into one of the basic differences in attitudes and actions that Coomaraswamy so beautifully bridges. Much of his writing is buried in obscure journals across three continents. His The Indian Craftsman (1909) is a beautiful study of traditional patterns of working, and several volumes of his essays have appeared over the years. These new volumes pull together much of his last work (1930s-40s).
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