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I recently visited two museums in Sidney, Australia - the National Gallery - which housed an impressive collection of Victorian-era masterpieces, and the museum of Modern Art. Walking through the forth floor of the latter we passed by one installation piece - it was a pile of coal on the ground. This, I thought, is what modernity has reduced art to - a pile of coal on the ground.
Modernity, it seems, has robbed art of 20,000 years of development. Some modern artists I've spoke to don't even feel it necessary to look back upon the development of art - art, as far as they're concerned, started in the 20th century, when someone declared "anything can be art".
But really, can anything be art?
Visual art is about ways of seeing. As obvious as this may seem, it is one of those explicit truths whose simplicity makes it easy to forget or to take for granted.
When studying art on a theoretical level we are often challenged by academics to define art, and the question is turned into to a philosophical one - can art be defined, and what, after all, is art? These attempts to over-intellectualize something which is fundamentally intuitive has led many to believe this is a complex, even unanswerable question.
But the truth is that art is most definitely definable. It does, and has served a function in society for thousands if not tens of thousands of years now. It is concrete, living, and in many cases even quantifiable.
During the twentieth century a conspiracy took place to viciously defame the merits of the old academic art style. Gallery owners, driven by profit and greed, chose to back abstract expressionist painters because of their far more prolific output. No longer held by bounds of representation, they could finish a canvas in one day, where the old masters might spend one year on a canvas, sometimes longer.
The result was "modern" art.
Within this art form, the artist's idea, or "concept" takes precedent. Most of us were probably taught in art class - even up into college - that we ought to be free to "express" ourselves. And as wonderfully as this might serve to turn every human being into an artist, this really isn't what art has ever been about.
In fact, it is important to remember that art as expression is a recent development. At least, the artist's personal expression. Throughout history art served a very specific function - it exemplified an ideal, represented an object, or narrated a story or allegory. Even the first paintings done on caves were not abstract or exercises in self-indulgence, but beautifully, sometimes sublimely realistic representations.
I decided to try an experiment. A friend of mine has a four year old daughter who is bright for her age. I asked her to give me her opinion of which paintings she preferred. First I would hold up a piece of realism - say, Alma-Tadema's "Spring". Then I would hold up an abstract work - say, a Pollock or a Rothko. Without fail, each time she showed disinterest or perturbation in the abstract work, and tended more to remark upon the "prettiness" of the realistic piece, or objects within the piece itself.
This led me to wonder, were we taught how to appreciate abstract art? If so, it would appear that its appeal is intellectual rather than intuitive. Its purpose, it would seem, is one of alienating those uneducated or not in-the-know, and creating an artistic "elitism". But art, in my mind, ought not to be an elitist thing at all, but rather serve to elevate all humanity.
I believe the beauty of the academic artistic tradition is endangered. No longer are students taught the fundaments of draftsmanship and representation, but rather to "tap into their feelings" or even "defy the rules", without ever having been taught them. Especially this farce called "installation art", in which the observer is meant to glean from a haphazard collection of objects the artist's true intent. Honestly, do we really care?
Is a four year old child really going to see an allegory to the artist's pain, or is she simply going to see a pile of coal on the ground? Do the unadulterated eyes of a child see abstract art for what it really is, just a bunch of paint thrown randomly onto a canvas?
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from:![]() I have studied art and art appreciation at both the public school and collegiate level and still don’t quite comprehend what the so-called critics see in some of this stuff. I don’t mean to say that “good” art must be Norman Rockwell or even Rockwell Kent, but much of this material looks so slap-dash that I get the distinct feeling that the artist is having a good laugh behind the art establishment’s back! Check out this link to Scoop:
http://scoop.diamondgalleries.com/scoop_article.asp?ai=10298&si=123 |
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I agree that modern art is a joke and so is abstract art and all forms of it. A photograph of old paint or drying new paint does not bring a emotional response from me. However to some people it does.
The problem are with critics who make something out of nothing and a public that is willing to follow along. It used to be about having skill and ability, art was anyway. Now it is about bullshitting the public.
Picasso once talked about wanting to create something so awful and then wanting to see if a gallery would show it. On some level I think he succeeded in most of today's artists.
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“The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”
Hunter S. Thompson
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Joined: 29 Mar 2004
Posts: 2472
http://www.mwpai.org/
That is the link to the art school I went to. Both Think Insane and I went there around the same time. I studied painting and photography there along with sculpture.
I think the digital camera is bringing an end to the photographic arts because of how widespread it has become and how so many people are selling their work on stock websites for pennies. It opened everything up and then made it easy to do. Then made it cheap. Digital photography is turning into the bastard child of film that ate the paint chips from the window sill.
End of Rant about Digital
To get attention artists now use words to describe their work when visual arts should stand on its own. Critics pump up the work and then it becomes more than it really is. Inside the Tate in London are tin cans with poo in them that the Tate bought for more money than most people make in a year. Why? because someone came along and made shit art by calling it art. Most likely it was a critic that did it.
When I studied photography my focus, pardon the pun, was on documentary photography and portraits but I also branched out into fine art and experimental photography. Superimposing images and overlaying images was much more difficult in a darkroom than on a laptop.
Eventually all of these artists that take photos of dried paint and ramble on about depth of field and strobe lighting will wake up one day when they are in their middle ages and wonder what the hell they were doing for most of their life. At least I hope they do, no one want to die delusional. There is technique involved with the abstract arts, I am not discounting that, but photography used to be about documenting life and expressing emotion, points of view, and opinions. It was about defining who we are.
All the technique in the world and education does not help because right now there is a ten year old girl in Bosnia who photoshops better than the fifty year old who went to every adobe class. I just think that we have the technology and we ought to be doing something with it. Most abstract art is a rerun of something someone else had done. Sure we have had many great documentary photographers in the past but there has to be something to say about documenting life. That is the good thing about digital. More people are out there ignoring the trends and photographing the world around them. The trouble are the people who get the attention for taking photographs of literally nothing.
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Shit Art - Cloaca Machine
I was just watching a program about the Belgian conceptual artist Wim Delvoye. It got me thinking about what art really is. It's a question that is asked so much that it can become boring even thinking about it. But his Cloaca machine forced me to ask myself what art is again.
It's a machine that mimics the human digestive system, from the mouth to the bottom hole. Delvoye feeds Cloaca normal human food and shit comes out the other end. The end product is wrapped in plastic and sold to adoring art collectors.
There have been several versions of his cloaca machine, with the latest being a vertical system that works more like a person.
According to the website dedicated to his shit making machine, they have all sold out, with one hundred pieces being kept for "future capitalization".
He isn't the first artist to use feces to create art either, as the Italian artist Piero Manzoni became famous for canning his own waste and calling his works "Artist's Shit". The MoMA has one.
I can't imagine owning any of the works, but it does make one think about art and the people that buy it.
>> Art Collecting, Art Controversies
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Mordern art should be and is a place where young artists can make it-courtesy of Mr Saatchi etc. When I attended my first degree in Fine Art as a mature undergrad, I soon realised it was a waste of time and I was in blinkers. I still feel this now, a complete waste of money and debt. (and worry). I feel I had nothing to give as an older artist and came out totally demoralised. How I see is by seeing dated data, younger artists see things freshly and are not tainted by life.
However many of the undergrads, did not have the fire in their belly, that I had. Perhaps that was due to the lecturers-save one-Bob and Roberta Smith-who is a great chap. He gave and was always enthusiastic about anything. I find it sad when I see ageing punks trying to set the pace, including myself-it disgusts me. Surely this areana should be for the younger artist. Why isnt this happening, is it educat in the arts? Or perhaps I do not see it, as I am out of time anyway. Just don't bother if your over...45 years, leave it to the new artists.
from:Review 200 for SFMoMA.![]()
What's to be said that hasn't been said 100 times already?
The architecture did it for me. Worth the price of admission alone.
The rotating exhibits weren't too amazing. Lagerfeld was cool and revolutionary for copying comic books years ago, but now whatever he was innovative has now been done so many times as to make it boring.
They had an exhibit with a bunch of cars as well. I've seen cars before.
It's a nice afternoon, but it didn't alter my life like some other museums have.
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Modern Art Debate
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KingDead writes "Stop me if you've heard this before. A modern art exhibit has pissed off a good lot of people but has also a few supporters defending it as art. The piece in question is an instillation dubbed The Whippet and is a mummified dog resting on an 18th century bedspread. The curator expected this to be an 'emotive piece,' which, juding from the tiny Guardian photo, it looks it is. And as is usually the case, the curator is shocked by the intensity of the negative response. One visitor wrote with enough acid to burn through a thick book, 'I have never seen anything so disgusting in my life. If this is modern "art" I despair of the mentality of people.' Many feared that the artists killed the dog for the artwork. No, the artists bought the corpse of the dog from an elderly couple who refused to tell the history of it. The artists wrapped it in dirty plastic witha sign in its mouth advising, 'Do not feed.' The dog then hung for 20 years on the artists' living room wall. Whippets, the article says, were used for racing and hunting. They suspect the poor dog may have outlived its usefulness and was left to starve in a cellar, where there it was naturally mummified. The piece does has its defenders: 'I find the dog induces meditation on death and isolation. It is beautiful and restful.'"
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