What is a masterpiece? Who determines when a masterpiece has been created? Many questions arise when I think about creating a masterpiece. A masterpiece connotes a one of a kind, a very best.  Can artists creating many works over a lifetime and with any luck and perseverance create, at some time in their career, that one quintessential work that qualifies as their masterpiece? The dictionary defines masterpiece as- 1: a great book, painting, piece of music, movie, etc. 2: something done with great skill” If you accept this definition you have to believe that an artist may create only one masterpiece in his lifetime. Everything else would be a close runner-up. This may be true except in the case where an artist works in several mediums. It is then possible to create a masterpiece in each of the mediums they work.

Does creating a “personal best” automatically qualify as a masterpiece?  Does a masterpiece have to have general consensus from a majority of “experts” to qualify; those who have knowledge and experience in their field to determine a work as the best of the best in its category?   I think it safe to say then that determining a work a masterpiece can be made only after examining an artist’s life’s work.  Could it also be said every artist eventually creates a “masterpiece” at some time during their career?  If it is only a personal best, does it qualify as a masterpiece? How does one determine if a work of art created with “great skill” is a masterpiece?  An artist may create works that move us or cause a general uproar and get national attention.  But has he created a masterpiece?  Add to which as long as the artist remains alive and creative, is it not possible that a future work will surpass today’s so-called masterpiece and be even greater? 

Another question, for me, is that possibly there is no such thing as masterpieces, just great works created at different stages of an artist’s life; work having been created with great skill, getting noteworthy attention and praise, and each qualifying as a masterpiece in its own right.  It may be that the whole idea of a masterpiece is just an artificial invention by a populace that wishes to canonize artists and their works for their own purposes.

I realize in many cases particular works of art get determination as masterpieces long after the artist is gone, but I can’t help but wonder if the individual artists would agree with the majority that a particular work was in fact their best work.  It would be interesting to peer into their minds of artists past and see which, if any, work they had created they would say was their masterpiece.

Ultimately artists need to concern themselves with the process of creating great work all the time and leave the categorizing of masterpieces to future generations. To be an artist is to love each and every work you create and infuse greatness within it.

We live in a world where skin is everywhere.  Advertisers use skin to sell products.   Alluring semi-dressed females and sexy men all stare out at us from billboards. Calvin Klein has made us aware of men’s briefs, not to mention all the Victoria’s Secret’s push up bras and panties ads in magazines and on television campaigns.  Sports Illustrated spends millions on their Swimsuit issue.  Come on – Sports Illustrated?  Sex as a sport!

Ads use the semi-nude figure to sell everything from soup to nuts and there is not a word of outcry from the censors or the public for that matter.  So why all the fuss when a painter exhibits a male or female nude/ semi-nude in a painting?  Why do galleries still reject the idea of a nude in painting?  Stop me if I’m wrong but don’t we consider painting a higher art than advertising?

I guess it’s less sexual to have bulging crotches and massive over stuffed female chests and butt cracks than to see a nude painted with beauty, understanding and sensitivity.  Oh, really?

We are saturated with magazines that no longer hide much and expose more than I care to see.  The Internet is filled with evoking images that defy description with their explicitness and we worry about a child going to a museum or gallery and possibly seeing a nude in a master painting?  How did we get to this point?  Why can’t we separate the two forms of nudity?  Why is a painting of a nude seen as prurient while we display Playboy magazine on our coffee tables?  The double standard is so obvious as to be invisible and we accept it as the norm. 

Nude men are now a topic for interpretation in painting. But this has always been the case in art.

When the Greeks ruled the world; also through the Renaissance; men were the archetype.  Statuary was everywhere.  The human male figure was the ideal.  It symbolized perfection, strength and moral righteousness.  But sex then as now, is more –bisexual as practiced by many.  Now that same sex partners have become accepted, I manage to sell quite a few nude men and women and continue to get commissions.

In the twentieth and twenty first centuries, women prevail as the archetype sex symbol.  They no longer stand for motherhood, purity and a symbol for what is stable and right with humanity.  Today the female image is a commodity for sex, a toy for men, and a thing that can be used to sell useless consumerism.  Purchases by women account for a majority of the personal National product sold in America.

Men and women are beautiful and they need to be shown as they are by artists, painters and sculptors. We need to separate the prurient from the sublime and bring the nude figure into the light.  We need to again respect the human body as the art form it is.