The times. (Owosso, Mich.) 1882-1897, 1893-06-30
AMATEUR A9TISTS.
TIE PEaCCNS Wr!o WORK ron
PLEASURE AND NoToRlETY.

Affecting the Various Professions In
which Mankind Is Trying to Earn q Liy-
ing-A Metropolitan View.
The other day a company of American
artists seated at the cheap but filling re-
lection of Gruyere cheese anu the beer
of the country amused itself by discuss
ing the serious want Of patronage from
which American art is just nov suffer-
ing.
II tell you" cried q young painter of
great talent, "that the professional art
list in this country is worse off than ever.
There was a time some 10 or 90 years
ago when his prospects looked bright
and his outlook cheerful. But today he
wastes all his time and energy on pot
boiling, and even his pot boilers have to
go at a sacrifice"
"There are too many of u.s." quoth
one of his hearers. "The supply ex-
ceeds the demand, and we are simply
paying, as in other walks of life, for the
crime OF overproduction."
"There are not too many of u.s." re.
lated the first speaker. ''It's the infer
nal amateurs who are doing work al
most as good as ours, and who are I'M
derselling us. 1t is the reign of the am
ateurs which has taken all the gilt off
the gingerbread of the professional"
True, absolutely true, in almost every
highway and byway of modern industry.
The amateur is rapidly ~displacing the
professional to his own slight-some-
times imperceptible benefit, and always
to the others injury. When one stops
to consider this truism, one is fairly
stunned by the magnitude and quantity
of the illustrations which proveit. Take,
for instance, the field to which the dis
cussion above quoted has relation. The
woods are full of amateur "artists."
Hardly a family now exists but has an
''artistic" son or daughter who neces-
sarily babbles the jargon Of the craft
and spoils more canvas and wastes more
paint in a week than most professional
artists can afford in a year.
Not only do their execrable compost
lions degrade the standard Of art, they
do worse and more material harm by
making values ri~diculously cheap. Glad
to get anything at all-half the cost
sometimes Of the material they use. The
amateur painters Of New York alone
constitute unconsciously a guild which
practically starves out the profession.
And the worst Of it is that the amateurs
work is nothing like as c~onspicuously
bad in all instances as it used to be.
Sketchy and thin as the best of it may
be, it certainly complies with the ele-
mentary rules of art, and he must in
deed be q bold critic who, comparing it
with tho efforts of trained and expert
professionals, should unhesitatingly pro-
nounce it without exception rot and rub
Dish.
The amateur actor and the amateur
actress have inflicted i~ncalculable injury
on what calls itself specifically the pro-
fession. 1t is an open secret, for exam
pie, that the once profitable city of
Brooklyn has been made n positively
"bad show town." as the phrase goes, by
the number and audacity of its amateurs.
During the season they undertake per-
of the severest professional
character with a prodigality of energy
and expenditure almost amounting to
profigate extravaganza which utterly
eclipses the productions of the regular
theaters. In fact, the Brooklyn amateurs
have all but destroyed the professional
drama in that city.
Again, the concert rooms of New York
fairly swarm with unpaid vocalists who
acquit themselves in many instances
quite as we'll as their professional sisters
and brothers, and there are already SO
many amateur instrumentalists in this
city eager to play in public who have no
urgent pecuniary need to do 50 that it is
doubtful if the Musical Protective union
dare order another general strike here,
so enormous would be the rush of fairly
amateur fiddlers and others
to take the places of the strikers.
Rising higher in the social world, we
find bowling swells like Suffern Taller
basing their regulations entirely on their
knack of driving four-in-hands en- anna
teur, so that the amateur coachman has
become really an important public char
acter and worthy Of incessant notice.
The amateur wing shot is another So
cial lion. Compared with the feats of
the plain, uncelebrated every day pot
hunters of Maryland and Pennsylvania,
the performances afield Of George Work
and Edgar Murphy and De Forrest Mau-
rice and the rest of them seem positively
puerile. But none the less are these lat
ter knights Of the trigger exalted and ex-
tolled by the newspapers as marvels of
skill and vaunted among the possessions
Of which we ought all to be enthusiastic
ally proud. For are they not amateurs?
At the present rate Of development
n cannot be certain of the ultimate
limit of amateur expansion. We shall,
beyond doubt, have amateur surgeons,
amateur lawyers, amateur journalists,
amateur BARRIERS, amateur ~tailors, anna
teur plumbers, amateur icemen, even
amateur day laborers, perhaps. Our
streets will be patrolled by amateur po-
licemen, our CONGREGATIONS extinguished
by amateur firemen. And who can tell
when the amateur will have so profound
ly exhausted the honest occupations that
he will have to become an amateur GRIM
inal?
Then shall we have our amateur bur-