Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
—Pablo Picasso
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
—Albert Einstein
One doesn’t stop seeing. One doesn’t stop framing. It doesn’t turn off and turn on. It’s on all the time.
—Annie Leibovitz
Over a lifetime, I have had the good fortune of knowing and hanging around with a number of practicing artists: a couple of painters, some dancers, a few poets, a whole bunch of writers, several bands of musicians, and a handful of architects. I have even been acquainted with certain mathematicians who consider their best work to express a kind of beauty, while also respecting the logic of numbers and clear reasoning.
I have noticed a few things. Almost without exception, these people knew at an early age that this is what they wanted to do. It was a calling, a vocation, which they could not ignore. We know that athletes like to work out. Their body is their instrument. It’s the same with the artists I have known: The writers need to write, the painters must paint, the musicians are compelled to play even if there is nobody there to listen.
This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
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The culture that supports the arts has several branches: the artists; their collectors and audience; the critics who introduce, explain, and advance new art; and finally the galleries, dealers, promoters, and other merchants who collect the money and ultimately pay the artists—so they can keep going and perhaps earn a living.
All of these worlds have to work in unison to create and sustain our culture. If you persecute the artists, or look to the state to plan exhibitions, or ban certain undesirable artists or their work, you kill off the spark of society.
Don’t take my word for it—look at history. If the dominant church, or government, or supreme leader, or ideology tries to circumscribe the arts, you always get the same outcome: a darkening age, stagnation, emigration, a gradual decline in creativity, and, eventually, a failed economy.
On the other hand, when you have tolerance, multicultural participation, and state support for the artistic temperament, you also always get the same result: the Renaissance, the Athens of Socrates and Aristotle, Al-Andalus, Baghdad’s House of Wisdom, and more recently the explosion of impressionism, candid literature, and quantum mechanics in the Europe of the 1900s.
Which brings us to the current issue of Alta Journal. From our beginning, we wanted to emphasize thoughtful coverage of the arts. The internet, television, and newspapers operate on a daily, even hourly, cycle. So they have the opportunity and the advantage to cover fast-breaking news: the White House, crime, sports, the stock market, the shifting sands of crowd opinion.
Arts and culture tend to fall off the front page, get crowded out by current events. We thought our slower, quarterly publication schedule would allow our writers more time to offer judgments, do more detailed reporting, make assessments about what will endure. With this extra time, we urge them: Let’s not strive for the first story, but aim for the most insightful. Compete to be different.
We dedicate this issue to the artists, the collectors, the patrons, the fans, and the culture that nourishes them. Onward.•
Will Hearst is the editor and publisher of Alta Journal, which he founded in 2017. He is the board chair of Hearst, one of the nation’s largest diversified media and information companies. Hearst is a grandson of company founder William Randolph Hearst.
