the myth of pure art

it's a typography book. Typographics 2. oldish--1996, but worthwhile background reading. except you aren't really supposed to read the thing... it's a showcase of all this brilliant design. you look at it. you say 'oh wow. how cool.' flip the pages. and if it's really really cool you read the unobtrusive text at the bottom which notes the creator(s) of this reproduced piece of art. and you say 'how cool of them, to have done this with type.' quite a lot of it is unreadable anyway. cutting-edge. blurred and faded and transpositioned to death.

but on page 147 there is a spread from a magazine called 'creator: culture without compromise.' half of an article by someone called Paul van Dijk. an article about the myth of pure art.

devastatingly, i find no satisfying answers upon googling any of these phrases. my book of Typographics cites the magazine's editor as one Nick Crowe and its origin in the Netherlands slash UK. perhaps it was too short-lived to warrant a wikipedia entry, too foreign or small to need a website. i'm not sure what to make of its lack of existence in this ten-years-later digital future, but i find it a sad event. i wanted to know more. i have a thing for magazines. i took a picture of the cute logo (sorry it's fuzzy):

if i may, i will quote bits of the article. i have no idea when it was originally published.

"I have declared pure art dead. But I also think, and this is an opinion that I have held for some years no, that pure art as such has never really existed, because people have always been dependent on patrons and customers.
[...]
I think that every designer or photographer is in principle, also a pure artist. And vice versa. The pure artist is strongly affected by the market, and the artist's own approach, own aesthetic, and own integrity, determine whether it goes any further than what the market expects. "

Paul van Dijk. director of the academy of visual arts, maastricht. that's all i know about him. so why do i care what he has to say about pure art?

purity seems such an imagined abstract. obviously there is influence. obviously there is connection. obviously nobody stands alone on this planet. that pure art is dead, or never existed isn't such a huge statement, really. yet mr. van Dijk senses a balance somewhere... a place within us where purity can exist. integrity. ownness. self.

recognizing self-ness is not so radical either. but it resonates. here i am, some jobless artist reading the chopped up typography examples in a decade old book. growing up, wondering. consuming. being consumed. and i really want to give something to the world. create. expand. redefine.

i don't suppose i need a job to do that. i'm littering the internet with sentence fragments without much help from anyone. i'm scribbling in notebooks and cutting up cornflakes boxes. cornflakes aren't very expensive. but through that cheap typing paper you can still see the orange and yellow of that cereal's logo. a reminder that starving artists still have to eat.