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Post by Russell Letson on Sept 3, 2014 13:27:56 GMT -5
I mean, heck, while we're going back and forth over whether or not the guy on the video has the authority to ask the questions, a doctor and a lawyer (in other words, NOT stupid people) from among us have admitted to feeling the same sense of being defrauded by modern art. All I can do is offer myself as an example of someone who follows his nose/eyes/heart and refuses to feel ashamed of what he enjoys or respects or is moved by--and isn't afraid to stamp, say, Andy Warhol's more famous work as something between a joke and a scam, and lots of lesser characters as self-indulgent, pretentious posers*. I never had an art appreciation or art history course, though I did spend a crucial academic year loose in Italy, gawping at pictures and statues and buildings. And The following year I had the great gift of being introduced to aesthetics-as-a-subject by the magnificently sensible and grounded Jesuit I have mentioned here before. There really is something to "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like," though a thoughtful person should be willing to concede that "what I like" is not necessarily what anybody else will like, let alone that it has anything to do with universals **. * Every time I hear the term "conceptual art" I want to puke, and "installation" makes me feel queasy. ** For years I've been trying to find a copy of a Marty Feldman sketch in which he asks the agent at a ticket-booking window if he has any plays "with giraffes in them." There aren't, but he finally settles on one with "naked ladies playing football." Taste can be intensely individual.
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Post by millring on Sept 3, 2014 13:32:53 GMT -5
I don't really care much what curators think or say. I think that the guy on the video does.
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Post by dradtke on Sept 3, 2014 13:33:50 GMT -5
I don't really care much what curators think or say. I think that the guy on the video does. So I guess I can be forgiven for not really caring what he thinks or says either, huh?
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Post by millring on Sept 3, 2014 13:34:03 GMT -5
All I can do is offer myself as an example of someone who follows his nose/eyes/heart and refuses to feel ashamed of what he enjoys or respects or is moved by--and isn't afraid to stamp, say, Andy Warhol's more famous work as something between a joke and a scam, and lots of lesser characters as self-indulgent, pretentious posers*. Philistine.
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Post by millring on Sept 3, 2014 13:34:25 GMT -5
I think that the guy on the video does. So I guess I can be forgiven for not really caring what he thinks or says either, huh? Totally absolved.
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Post by Russell Letson on Sept 3, 2014 13:38:05 GMT -5
Addendum to David's last comment: A few years ago we dutifully marched through the Pitti Palace in Florence, where the Medicis had apparently bought pictures by the renaissance equivalent of the truckload, perhaps to cover up some inadequate wallpaper. There was work by Raphael and Botticelli and Titian and (one of Cezarija's favorites) Artimesia Gentileschi--and also hundreds of perfectly competent but run-of-the-mill pictures of standard subjects. If you want a modern equivalent, watch any number of contemporary action movies that are very well produced technically but not up to the level of, say, The Wild Bunch (let alone any of Kurasowa's work) as artistic efforts.
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Post by millring on Sept 3, 2014 13:42:53 GMT -5
Addendum to David's last comment: A few years ago we dutifully marched through the Pitti Palace in Florence, where the Medicis had apparently bought pictures by the renaissance equivalent of the truckload, perhaps to cover up some inadequate wallpaper. There was work by Raphael and Botticelli and Titian and (one of Cezarija's favorites) Artimesia Gentileschi--and also hundreds of perfectly competent but run-of-the-mill pictures of standard subjects. If you want a modern equivalent, watch any number of contemporary action movies that are very well produced technically but not up to the level of, say, The Wild Bunch (let alone any of Kurasowa's work) as artistic efforts. But then we're digging back into the can of worms wherein the worms were discussing the fact that at least those paintings demonstrated a mastery of a sort, and not just some naive, solipsistic, artist-wannabe whose sole justification for producing was "self-expression". Further, those paintings didn't require someone with a masters degree to decode them.
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Post by Russell Letson on Sept 3, 2014 14:09:24 GMT -5
Actually, decoding some of the iconography depended on the equivalent of a college education, what with literacy rates and all. Medieval devotional pictures (or, to deploy the cliche) stained-glass windows were pretty explicitly narrative and pitched at a broad audience. But in the Renaissance, pictures made for aristocratic or wealthy-merchant patrons assumed a greater degree of sophistication, including familiarity with classical myth and the various ways it had been adapted and allegorized. This analytical/aesthetic material was already part of the intellectual world of the late middle ages (it's in Chaucer, for example).
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Post by Lonnie on Sept 3, 2014 14:10:30 GMT -5
Patti and I were both moved by this one. Marty, Bill and Tramp know why.
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Post by Marshall on Sept 3, 2014 15:49:11 GMT -5
Very interesting discussion.
On the subject of the Impressionists; I have always loved their work because it seemed to be striving for a perfect balance of image and media. Old masters were being photographers with paint and canvas. You lose the paint in viewing the work. The Impressionists seemed to say, "This is an impression of an apple. It can never be and apple. It can only be a painting of an apple." Of course they strove to get across to the viewer the full emotion of the situation; the liveliness of the light. But they never lost sight of the medium.
Later forms of abstract art became just that; abstract. They lost that representational connection with the familiar. And thus lost the emotional connection with the uneducated viewer. Thats when we started to need the advice of the arbitures to tell us if we should like it or not. Much like in the Beaus Arts days when the art elite would tell which images were right for viewing.
You can build a case that there always has been, and always will be, and Art Community that judges the validity of ART independent of the everyday intelligent public.
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Post by dradtke on Sept 3, 2014 16:02:52 GMT -5
This is the wallpaper on my computer.
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Post by millring on Sept 3, 2014 16:12:05 GMT -5
This is the wallpaper on my computer. What an INCREDIBLE coincidence. That is also the wallpaper on MY computer! What are the odds?!
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Post by dradtke on Sept 3, 2014 16:16:36 GMT -5
This is the wallpaper on my computer. What an INCREDIBLE coincidence. That is also the wallpaper on MY computer! What are the odds?! At this point I'd have to say 100%.
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Post by millring on Sept 3, 2014 16:18:14 GMT -5
That's how fait accomplis work.
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Post by Lonnie on Sept 3, 2014 16:19:42 GMT -5
Here's mine...
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Post by Supertramp78 on Sept 3, 2014 16:21:42 GMT -5
I was struck by something that guy talked about then completely ignored.
When the Impressionists first started doing their thing, the Académie des Beaux-Arts (those that decided what art was and what art was not) decided it wasn't art and would not allow any of it to be shown at the annual Salon. So they arranged their own show. Many art critics hated the stuff.
"I confess humbly I do not see nature as they do, never having seen these skies fluffy with pink cotton, these opaque and moiré waters, this multi-colored foliage. Maybe they do exist. I do not know them." Henry Havard 1879
The very term "Impressionism" was an insulting phrase coined by Louis Leroy in a scathing review of Monet's "Impression: Sunrise". The phrase was meant to describe it as not finished.
"Impression I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it — and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more finished than this seascape."
His full review is called "Exhibition of the Impressionists" and it is one nasty bit of snark from 1874.
The guy in the vid was saying that the impressionists were rebelling against the Académie des Beaux-Arts and that started the fall of art as we know it, despite the fact that what THEY did was in fact pretty good. His solution? I guess it is a return to the days of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. We need standards. We need what would have prevented the Impressionists from ever happening. It is an artistic version of one sailor being rescued from the ocean filled with drowning men and telling the guy, "Pull up the rope, I'm on board." He wants the freedom to create art that he thinks is art but he wants to tell others that their art shouldn't exist.
If, in 100 years, the stuff that he hates today has been forgotten like the art from 100 years ago that nobody bought was forgotten, then he will have a point. But someone buys this stuff. People, not just curators. Art patrons. Nobody can make a living selling just to museums.
Oh, and I really love that graph he had that showed a line of "Standards" falling like a rock and hitting zero by those bad old 1960's - replaced with a big banner that says, "Art reduced to personal expression." Despite the fact that I don't think there is any agreed upon 'standard' by which 'standards' can be measured and as such I have no idea how you can chart the path of 'standards', ALL art is personal expression. That's what art is. What was art before that? I don't get it. If you aren't expressing yourself, you are just copying someone else's style and art.
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Post by billhammond on Sept 3, 2014 16:23:52 GMT -5
Here's mine:
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Post by millring on Sept 3, 2014 17:09:10 GMT -5
thanks for the ear worm.
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Post by frazer on Sept 3, 2014 21:56:27 GMT -5
Great thread.
I took life drawing lessons at the college where I studied for my art history degree. The process taught me a lot about close observation, and the value of basing work on a solid method. I love seeing evidence that an artist can draw well, whether it is in the form of the final work or part of the process of creating the work. I don't believe this means art must show evidence of painterly skill, which seems to be one of the bees in this guy's bonnet.
For me, the 'modern artists are charlatans' argument doesn't stand up. It's fine not to like a piece of art, and it's healthy to question why something should be considered art. It's also rewarding to try to understand a 'difficult' piece of art before deciding whether you like it or not, or whether it is art at all. It's perfectly valid to say 'I think I know what the artist is trying to do, but I think the result is garbage', but not to dismiss it out of hand. In my experience (in my former career exhibiting the work of many artists in public galleries and spaces), each artist was absolutely driven by the need to do what they do. Many - at least in the UK - scrape by, supporting their artwork by doing other work. They're certainly not making, or seeking, easy bucks.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 3, 2014 22:23:47 GMT -5
I have a few driven, extremely capable artist friends. They all have impressive technical ability but none of them focus on producing classical, figurative stuff. Their energy and imaginations have led them to other things. Despite having had an art history graduate girlfriend with a passion for communicating the reasons why works in a huge variety of styles might interest me, I have still not progressed very far from a gut feeling response to what I view. That response remains happily unpredictable to me. Is a Picasso or a Rothko or one of my friends' works to be ridiculed as "the emperor's new clothes" if it provokes an unanticipated, strong and genuine feeling and appreciation?
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