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Post by Doug on Sept 6, 2014 17:41:53 GMT -5
...and so, I present: Performed by Lowell George, written by a true artist (Jimmy Webb) with album cover ART by Neon Park, another artist. And just in case I've counted wrong and this is the last post on page 6, I have not even mentioned Voldemort. I hadn't heard that before. Thanks. Jimmy Webb song by Lowell George that's great.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 7, 2014 14:16:51 GMT -5
"With each new generation, standards have declined until there were no standards. All that was left was personal expression." Very profound is Mr. Florczak. I can't help but think this is an indication of the direction of our social structure as well. When considering the value, whether moral, stated, artistic,or humanitarian... or whatever term you choose to apply, it seems that even personal expression has diminished to a level that requires little or no thinking or effort.
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Post by Lonnie on Sept 7, 2014 14:23:04 GMT -5
"With each new generation, standards have declined until there were no standards. All that was left was personal expression." Very profound is Mr. Florczak. I can't help but think this is an indication of the direction of our social structure as well. When considering the value, whether moral, stated, artistic,or humanitarian... or whatever term you choose to apply, it seems that even personal expression has diminished to a level that requires little or no thinking or effort. Well, like, um, uh, whatever...
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Post by godotwaits on Sept 7, 2014 17:48:40 GMT -5
Well. This all sounds like John Cage is in deep shit.
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Post by dradtke on Sept 7, 2014 18:07:57 GMT -5
"With each new generation, standards have declined until there were no standards. All that was left was personal expression." And he, personally, is expressing that.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 7, 2014 18:09:19 GMT -5
Seems like a great many explorations of artistic forms, from poetry that doesn't follow meter or rhyme properly to film that abandons classical narrative and pictorial forms, to music that experiments, like Giacomo's, can be unfavourably regarded. That's fine and nothing new. It is not indicative of the diminishment of all that's good and valuable in the world. Just for the hell of it - Perhaps Stravinsky's near riot provoking "The Rite of Spring" would have been more fitting. edit - oh all right then, if you insist. What? It could have been Stockhausen! I have explored his artistic, musical and critical efforts and Mr Florczak's picture is unlikely to appear in a pictorial dictionary next to a definition of 'profound' IMO.
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Post by godotwaits on Sept 8, 2014 4:13:55 GMT -5
Didn't "Rite of Spring" provoke a "near riot?"
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Post by aquaduct on Sept 8, 2014 8:10:24 GMT -5
So what we're really saying is that Mien Kampf does have the capacity to be great literary art rather than the delusional rantings of a deranged megalomaniac tyrant?
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Post by millring on Sept 8, 2014 8:29:29 GMT -5
So what we're really saying is that Mien Kampf does have the capacity to be great literary art rather than the delusional rantings of a deranged megalomaniac tyrant? Everything is relative.
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Post by Russell Letson on Sept 8, 2014 10:29:47 GMT -5
Aside from the categorical problem of putting the Schicklgruber memoir/manifesto next to, say, Pride and Prejudice, there's the fact that many offensive or dishonest or crazy or repulsive utterances have been rendered with considerable skill and even beauty. One canonical example (conveniently kin to Adolf's paraliterary work) is Triumph of the Will, which film scholars concede is a very technically accomplished piece of work. Leni Riefenstahl was an artist, just one who chose to work for a nasty patron with a nasty agenda. And while some might find the comparison uncomfortable or even offensive, I can point to any number of works that present Christian martyrdom as worthy of veneration, rendered with considerable artistry (in the technical as well as popular senses of the word), but from my point of view projecting a distinct sadomasochistic vibe. (Pictures of St. Sebastian probably offer the clearest examples. Google up some images.)
Art can be well or badly made, repulsive or inspirational, complex and subtle or flat and blatant, self-referential or outward-looking, propagandistic or detached, popular or hermetic. . . .
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Post by Supertramp78 on Sept 8, 2014 10:43:00 GMT -5
All art is just personal expression. Always has been and always will be. Art hasn't been devolving into nothing but personal expression. It started there. If someone doesn't like it, it isn't the art they don't like, it is what is being expressed.
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Post by patrick on Sept 8, 2014 10:47:41 GMT -5
One canonical example (conveniently kin to Adolf's paraliterary work) is Triumph of the Will, which film scholars concede is a very technically accomplished piece of work. Leni Riefenstahl was an artist, just one who chose to work for a nasty patron with a nasty agenda. I would add "Birth of a Nation." Really a moving film for its time, until you remember that its propaganda for a reprehensible purpose.
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Post by patrick on Sept 8, 2014 10:51:37 GMT -5
And, of course, the Third Reich itself set up "standards" that it considered to represent the traditional canon and condemned any art that didn't conform to them, including art that we today consider masterpieces.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 8, 2014 10:58:27 GMT -5
Would it be appropriate to say Thomas Kincaid is the equivalent to Jackson Pollock?
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Post by Supertramp78 on Sept 8, 2014 10:59:51 GMT -5
Well they are both artists and they both sold lots of stuff (although I didn't care for the work that either of them did) and they both made lots of money and both died drunks.
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Post by millring on Sept 8, 2014 11:24:39 GMT -5
Art can be well or badly made, repulsive or inspirational, complex and subtle or flat and blatant, self-referential or outward-looking, propagandistic or detached, popular or hermetic. . . .
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Post by Russell Letson on Sept 8, 2014 11:28:54 GMT -5
Tramp, of course art is personal (only persons can make art) and expressive (in the root sense of something internal being squeezed out), but while those terms are necessary, they are not sufficient. And there's a problem with that "just," which in this context suggests "solely" or "fundamentally" or "primally" and has the effect of flattening a complex generating process by omitting other components.
"Personal expression" does not necessarily require shaping or intention--in my long-ago aesthetics course, the example used was the reflexive yawp of pain or pleasure or surprise, which might be part of the generating process that leads to a work of art but is not itself "art." The usefulness of that Art 101 triangle I mentioned upthread is that it includes audience, even if that audience is also the artist. What the triangle does not include is the notion of intention (art is not just a reflex) and shaping (it is not merely a product of natural forces).
If I were designing a class on basic aesthetics, I would add to the triangle a label on the artist-object line indicating that it represents intention and craft/made-ness, one on the "object" vertex emphasizing materiality, and a note on the "audience" vertex that it can fold back onto "artist." But the triangle itself is a metaphor for a communicative process, even if the receiver of the message is the same nervous system as the sender's. "Aesthetic distance" applies to the artist as well as to the audience.
Even as a journalist/essayist, I don't know what I think until I've put it into a form of words--and the more I shape those words, the more precise becomes my understanding of what it is I think that I think. And if there remain parts of what I "think" that aren't getting onto the page even after I've worked things over, I might turn to some medium that gets those non-verbal parts outside my head, out where I can see them--or that at least satisfies that drive to tidy up my mind.
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Post by millring on Sept 8, 2014 11:36:01 GMT -5
Tramp, of course art is personal (only persons can make art) and expressive (in the root sense of something internal being squeezed out), but while those terms are necessary, they are not sufficient. And there's a problem with that "just," which in this context suggests "solely" or "fundamentally" or "primally" and has the effect of flattening a complex generating process by omitting other components. "Personal expression" does not necessarily require shaping or intention--in my long-ago aesthetics course, the example used was the reflexive yawp of pain or pleasure or surprise, which might be part of the generating process that leads to a work of art but is not itself "art." The usefulness of that Art 101 triangle I mentioned upthread is that it includes audience, even if that audience is also the artist. What the triangle does not include is the notion of intention (art is not just a reflex) and shaping (it is not merely a product of natural forces). If I were designing a class on basic aesthetics, I would add to the triangle: a label on the artist-object line indicating that it represents intention and craft/made-ness, one on the "object" vertex emphasizing materiality, and a note on the "audience" vertex that it can fold back onto "artist." But the triangle itself is a metaphor for a communicative process, even if the receiver of the message is the same nervous system as the sender's. "Aesthetic distance" applies to the artist as well as to the audience. Even as a journalist/essayist, I don't know what I think until I've put it into a form of words--and the more I shape those words, the more precise becomes my understanding of what it is I think that I think. And if there remain parts of what I "think" that aren't getting onto the page even after I've worked things over, I might turn to some medium that gets those non-verbal parts outside my head, out where I can see them--or that at least satisfies that drive to tidy up my mind. excellent observations.
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Post by Russell Letson on Sept 8, 2014 11:55:40 GMT -5
Would it be appropriate to say Thomas Kincaid is the equivalent to Jackson Pollock? Aside from Tramp's comparisons, I'd say that they represent different kinds and degrees of bad art--and, of course, that's a subjective judgment. But from my point of view, Kinkade puts a (very modest) degree of technical skill in the service of sentimental, manipulative representations. Pollock (whose work I am only slightly familiar with) seems to have moved from a kind of abstract-design-y vision that required a non-trivial degree of skill to a strange pursuit of immediacy and authenticity that proved to be a dead end--which he proceeded to drive right through. (Yeah, I know how he died.) Both painters strike me as being driven by "ideas" about art, though very different kinds of ideas. Pollock in particular pursued the idea that there should be minimal conscious shaping of the materials, that the work should come out--be ex-pressed--unhindered by the technical and aesthetic conventions of earlier times. Myself, I find such notions self-indulgent and the pictures unmoving and not even very interesting as decorative objects. Kinkade, on the other hand, strikes me as cynically commercial--or, if he was sincere, tasteless and unsubtle. He's the pictorial equivalent of a bad metal band--loud and simple-minded, with ideas quickly exhausted. Both, I notice, are easily parodied.
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Post by millring on Sept 8, 2014 12:01:32 GMT -5
The problem I have with Pollock (overly simplified for the sake of a forum post) is that he told the same joke over and over and over again. We got it the first time.
The problems I have with Kinkade are too many to enumerate here.
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