26/4/94
It is right and fair in life to consider as guiding beacons the high-minded and the excellent. In Art, especially, many have been declared saints through the opinion of experts, the worship of the faithful, or by time itself, which knows how to rightly distribute accolades. To these great figures of Art, the young and unseasoned creator looks up, to give substance to their dreams and fuel their ambition. It is from these figures that the artist draws inspiration and studies their methods. These great ones constitute the tradition in Art, which successors follow with respect or violate with iconoclastic sacrilege.
Often, however, admiration, respect, and worship for the greatest can limit our tolerance range, and through a strange but common Spartan selection process, verging on fanaticism and hysteria, lead us to reject those who fall even slightly short on the scale of values.
Thus, we forget that the paths in Art are paved with efforts and that the best are the smallest percentage of the mediocre. If we worship the great, let us love the mediocre. In their works, for the absence of the "Height," we find solace in the traces of passion, love, knowledge, and primarily the sincerity that birthed them.
Besides, even the great and significant attained their deserved position thanks to a part of their work and not its entirety.
The hundred great photographs of Cartier-Bresson are the essence and peak of his work, not the thousands of mediocre (never indifferent) ones that accompany them. A hundred photographs that represent a brief moment of life in shooting time. Without the quartets, Beethoven might not have held the same position. The Fellini of "Casanova" may fall short of that of "8½". However, what sin and injustice our disdain for their less lofty works would be, since all have something to teach.
Van Gogh said one must show respect for the mediocre and understand that this is already something, and that one does not reach this mediocrity but at the cost of a great effort.
I love the mediocre works because they help me measure against the great. Because they give me the proportion of the sizes that surpass me. Because they warm me with their limits. I only detest the contrived, the fake, the commercial, that which is made with the outer world in mind. Then, regardless of the intelligence it conceals, the work is neither mediocre nor great but bad to inauthentic.
Plato Rivellis