The Art World Couldn't Understand William Blake

This is a coin sorter, and it's a useful tool to help me explain why certain works of art become classics, get taught in schools, live on in the culture, while so many others just disappear into oblivion. In order to achieve that level of prestige, it's not always enough for a creative work to be beautiful or

thought-provoking. It also has to fit into one of a handful of accepted categories, categories like painting, poetry, the novel, or the film. When a work of art drops into one of these channels, it enters a whole ecosystem of commercial, critical, and scholarly attention, institutions that can promote it,

and preserve it. You can think of this whole coin sorter as that ecosystem. All the institutions that comprise it have for a very long time been organized to classify work in this way. And when something comes along that can't be classified, well, the ecosystem has a hard time assimilating or even

seeing it. And left on the outside, its chances of long-term survival are slim. This is a predicament that unclassifiable artists have faced for centuries. And for centuries, so many of them have found solace and inspiration in the radical, visionary work of William Blake, the patron saint of

unclassifiable artists. Here, take a look at this. How would you categorize this from Blake's book Songs of Innocence? Is it illustration? Well, there's a poem here, short one, you can see, but it's embedded in this gorgeous design in the curving, spiky stem of this evocative red flower. Despite what

you might expect, this imagery is not a depiction of the subject of the poem, not really. The poem makes no mention of a flower. Each of the two art forms have their own aesthetic and symbolic integrity, neither one subordinate to the other. And yet, when you put them together like this, their interaction,

their dialogue, creates something new. What you're seeing here, these are not paintings. They're prints of engravings from Blake's illuminated books, which he [music] designed, wrote, etched, colored, and printed himself using a technique that he invented. [music] These extraordinary books are works of

art that mix and synthesize categories. And as a result, the art world of the late 17 and early 1800s [music] didn't really know what to make of them. And Blake never sold more than a handful. At that time, the ecosystem that we've been talking about was in the process of forming and hardening. The key event in

England was the founding of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, when Blake [music] was 11 years old. The Royal Academy was one of several similar institutions springing up across Europe in this period, institutions that elevated the status of the fine arts, while also wielding their power to help

define the [music] standards by which art was judged. The academy in England trained students to be obedient [music] to its values, and rewarded that obedience at their annual exhibitions, where a good placement on the wall could make an artist's reputation and create a demand from private [music] clients. In

turn, these exhibitions, which were popular events, shaped the taste of collectors, patrons, [music] and the public, dramatically expanding the commercial market for artworks. After apprenticing as an engraver, a 21-year-old Blake entered the Royal Academy as a student in 1779, but

quickly found himself at odds with its teaching, especially the aesthetic philosophy of its first president, Sir Joshua Reynolds. Blake despised Reynolds' emphasis on generalizing and idealizing nature, and hated his reverence for Venetian and Flemish style oil painting with its soft tonal