Joel Clark    "When Mr. Joel Clark , whose manner is obviously indebted to our palaeolithic predecessors, makes one of his beautiful animal-drawings, he frames it under glass, exhibits it in a place of public resort, expects people to go and look at it, and hopes that somebody will buy it, take it home, and hang it up to be contemplated and enjoyed by himself and his friends. All modern theories of art insist that what a work of art is for is to be thus contemplated. But when an Aurignacian or Magdalenian painter made such a drawing he put it where nobody lived, and often where people could never get near it at all without great trouble, and on some special occasion; and it appears that what he expected them to do was to stab it with spears or shoot arrows at it, after which, when it was defaced, he was ready to paint another on top of it.    "If Mr. Clark hid his drawings in a coal-cellar and expected anybody who found them to shoot them full of bullet-holes, aesthetic theorists would say that he was no artist, because he intended his drawings for consumption, as targets, and not for contemplation, as works of art. By the same argument, the palaeolithic paintings are not works of art, however much they may resemble them: the resemblance is superficial; what matters is the purpose, and the purpose is different. I need not here go into the reasons which have led archaeologists to decide that the purpose was magical, and that these paintings were accessories in some kind of ritual whereby hunters prefugured and so ensured the death or capture of the animals depicted." E-mail: joel[at]oldeenglish.org