Adapt, (when necessary), or die. This is the law of nature. It is also the rule in the arts. As in natural evolution, those in the arts should be the minima essential to achievement of the immediate aim. To effect unnecessary changes may be as fatal as to make none; one cannot anticipate, only respond to environmental circumstances. Marine creatures did not and do not become terrestial either at one go, or even rapidly. The process includes many individual, small adaptations, each of which is tested in the light of experience before another is made. (Sometimes such evolutions result in a reversion towards the original condition, should circumstances dictate - as in modern sea-mammals, like whales and dolphins, which have retained many mammalian features but re-adopted piscine shapes and modes of propulsion.
To evolve away from the perceived worst excesses of 20th century Modernism in the arts, without degeneration into Victorian sentimentality or a general, mediocre banality or formality would appear to be essential as the Millenium turns. New Traditionism offers a gradualist, conservative strategy for achieving evolution in the arts which will be beneficial for all creative artists and poets. It is a strategy for survival and renewed fecundity in the changing environment of modern scientific, cultural and social developments.
New Traditionists accept, generally speaking, that it is not possible to be consciously original, except on the basis of conventional traditions grounded on the principles of creative transcendence. (Transcendence is the situation in which the perceptible qualities of the whole unaccountably exceed the sum of its component parts.) If one does not know or understand what already has been done and how, one cannot purposefully do something different. Serendipity may well play some rôle in creative originality, but it can hardly be called conscious or purposeful. Original creativity is the activity of constructive "new-making"; adding to the sum of human experience through progressive culture-building. New Traditionism therefore promotes the cultivation of valid traditions and conventions based on those principles which assist the creative processes and encourage qualitative excellence.
Creative artists operate within a seamless continuum as their minds - moving simultaneously between imagination and reality, between the ordinary and the extraordinary, between perceptual and analogical vision, between logical and lateral thinking, between bathos and sublimity, between the conscious and the unconscious, and between the literal and the symbolic - extrapolate associations, meanings and significances, (which often appear to be more intuitional than empirical), in an unbroken medley of diverse mental activities, whilst concurrently directing the hands to realise - in some material, physical form - those abstractions which they are attempting to symbolise even when they are uncertain of everything that they articulate for their "objective correlatives",(ie. the as yet unrealised, but emergent, objects/artifacts such as poems, paintings, sculptures, music-scores, etc.).
Although the basic principles of creativeness rarely alter, New Traditionists recognise that artistic conventions do change over the years. They therefore promote changes,(where necessary), of a gradualist evolutionary, rather than of a sudden revolutionary, nature. This is so that coherent understanding is retained at all stages. Change must be simultaneously gradual, practical and intelligible if there is to be both progress and continuity. Conventions, in the arts, form the contextual scaffolding for the support of meaning. The mind can well cope with new meanings within established contexts; it copes less well, if at all, when the contextual supports for understanding meaning are abruptly removed.
New Traditionism does not seek to abandon the benefits of modern philosophic, scientific or artistic experiences; its aim is to incorporate all these in an ordered framework of valid principles, traditions and conventions that will allow comprehensive and comprehensible developments, so that factions, sects and "schools" become more homogenous one with another and less hermetic in theory or practice - since their interactions will tend to modify, rather than ossify, both theory and practice - thereby encouraging the growth of a richer, fuller, more intelligible culture in which everyone, (not just the privileged members of some selective group or other), can understand, and participate in, what is happening.
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Art or Non-Art?
A.Definitives
1.Man made (not machine/mass produced, or "found" objects).
2.Intentional (purposeful).
3.Imaginative (mentally creative/inspiration).
4.Communicative (conveyance of significance/meaning).
5.Expressive/evocative/emotive (power/effect).
6.Aesthetic (sensually appealing/attractive).
7.Cultural (in origin/derivation/association).
8.Referential (to externalities/didactic).
B.Indicatives
1.Transcendance (ineffability of the work).
2.Craftsmanship (composition/construction).
3.Symbolic/Iconic (representativeness).
4.Satisfying (intellectually stimulating).
5.Universality (inter-cultural associations/relevance).
6.Originality (constructive progressiveness/uniqueness/intuition).
7.Conventionality (usage of artistic devices).
8.Ritualistic (religious/cultic/esoteric).
9.Mythologic (allegoric/traditional/historic/narrative).
10.Decorative (ornamental/non-utilitarian).
11.Balance (proportionality).
It will be noted that the traditional qualities of "sincerity", "beauty" and "truth" do not appear, in their own right, in either category. This is because in themselves they are virtually undefinable. For classificatory purposes therefore, "sincerity" is subsumed under A.5, "beauty" under A.6 and "truth" under B.5: these seeming to be their most probable respective approximations.
Definitives comprise the essential attributes for a work of art: each of them must be perceptible, to some degree, in or through an object, for it to be categorised as a work of art. Together they form the "necessary and sufficient" conditions required to define "art". (The bracketed annotations are descriptive, but not exhaustive, of the relevant attributes.)
Indicatives comprise additional attributes which are not essential, but which "add value" in proportion to the quaity and degree that they are perceptible in or through the object. Any object which includes most of the indicatives is likely to be evaluated higher,as a work of art, than one which appears to have fewer. (It will be rare for any object to include them all!)
An object which does not contain any of the the definitives, or only some of them, is ulikely to be a work of art, in any meaningful sense.
This schema both defines works of art, (under definitives),
and indicates some qualitative and evaluative criteria (under
indicatives - a category which is not listed exhaustively), and so
distinguishes - for the New Traditionist Theory For Art -
works of art from "non-art" objects. Such is the categorical schema, it is open to philosophical,
theoretical and critical analysis, as all theoretical propositions should be.
