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TAMIL ART ON
THE WEB: Sathyam Art Gallery
தமிழ்
ஓவிய
கண்காட்சி
"...On the one hand, the work of art is a
product of its time, a mirror of its age, a
historical reflection of society to which both
the author and the original audience belonged.
On the other hand, it is surely no idealism to
assume that the work of art is not merely a
product, but a producer of its age;
not merely a mirror of the past but a lamp to
the future.." - Karthigesu Sivathamby in Literary
History in Tamil 'Great nations write their
autobiographies in three manuscripts; the book
of their deeds, the book of their words, and
the book of their art. Not one of these books
can be understood unless we read the two
others; but of the three, the only quite
trustworthy one is the last.' - John Ruskin
"Nation building is rightly,
though at times excessively, associated with
political and social
processes. Yet, it is not confined to
national liberation movements, charismatic
leaders and liberators, wars of national
independence, and the struggle of national
entities to emerge to independence from a
position of relative powerlessness and
subservience to a dominant power.
Nations are as much cultural as
political forms, and the creation of a unique
high culture of world significance is often
central to their legitimation. True, the effects
of culture are not as clearly quantifiable as
those of politics. The effect of Verdi, for example, on Italian
nationalism is hardly as clear cut as that of
Garibaldi. Wagner's impact on German
nationalism is amorphous alongside the concrete
political achievement of Bismarck. William Butler Yeats' influence on
Irish nationalism is not as definable as that of
Michael Collins or Eamon De Valera. The
inspiration of Chaim Nachman Bialik on Jewish
nationalism is diffuse in comparison with that of
Herzl.
Yet it may be argued justly that
artists have equal if not greater importance.
They above all express the nation's
distinctiveness; their creativity is part of the momentum to
independence; they are themselves symbols and icons of the nation's
unique creative power; they regenerate their
nation morally and speak for its heart and
conscience." ( John Hutchinson, European
Institute, London School of Economics and
David Aberbach, Department of
Jewish Studies, McGill University, Quebec,
Canada in Nations & Nationalism, Volume 4,
1999)
"Artists have played a crucial
role in the expression, representation and
crystallisation of the nation. A study of the
art of a people is a study of its
culture, or, to use Herder's term, its
'spirit'. Artists have thus
been the chroniclers of national identity and of
its changes over time, under varying historical
circumstances. As Herder made clear a long
time ago, not only the visual arts, but also
music and dance, are crucial parts of the
heritage of 'the people', embodying and
documenting different states of what Durkheim called the 'conscience collective', the
spirit of a people, as it was, as it changed, and
as it persisted or revived this or that principle
from the past." (from the Introduction to an
Exhibition in honour of Professor Anthony D Smith
held in conjunction with a Conference on 'When is
Nation' at the London School of Economics and
Political Science, 23-24 April 2004)
"...There is a
tendency in modern times to depreciate the value
of the beautiful and over stress the value of the
useful...We do not
ordinarily recognise how largely our sense of
virtue is a sense of the beautiful in conduct and
our sense of sin a sense of ugliness and
deformity in conduct...
It is not
necessary that every man should have his artistic
faculty developed, his taste trained, his sense
of beauty and insight into form and colour and
that which is expressed in form and colour, made
habitually active, correct and
sensitive.
It is
necessary that those who create, whether in great
things or small, whether in the unusual
masterpieces of art and genius or in the small
common things of use that surround a man's daily
life, should be habituated to produce and the
nation habituated to expect the beautiful in
preference to the ugly, the noble in preference
to the vulgar, the fine in preference to the
crude, the harmonious in preference to the
gaudy.
A nation
surrounded daily by the beautiful, noble, fine
and harmonious becomes that which it is
habituated to contemplate and realizes the
fullness of the expanding Spirit in itself.... "
- Sri
Aurobindo on the National value of
Art
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