"Modern Art" finally exposed to be the fraud that it is!

Art Renewal ^ | June 7, 2001 | Fred Ross, Chairman of the Art Renewal Center

[Billy_bob_bob]

There is an excellent new movement in the art world called "Photorealism", creating paintings that look as if they were captured with a camera, but with interpretations of the light and shadow that only a painter can do. It's really something, and a definite finger in the eye of the "modern art" (more like "Moron art") world. I really like the work I've seen from the photorealistic art world, and I'm hoping to see a whole lot more in the future.

[piasa]

Why would a wealthy benefactor pay a small fortune to a painter when he could get a more accurate, less expensive and far more "high-tech" photograph? Why would a rich adventurer bring a painter when he could commision a photographer?

A valid point... but why hire an artist to make something that you can make simply by coating two horny male cats with paint and throwing them on a canvas to fight... why hire an artist to do that which your 13 year old child to do?

[jwh_Denver]

why hire an artist to do that which your 13 year old child to do?

This is I believe the biggest problem people have in getting over the "I could do that! Or my kid could!" That is not the point of art. Art is supposed to create a reaction in the viewer. If you can't get by that then head over to the classical stuff cause you know you couldn't have painted that. No matter what your perspective is you have the right to your opinion. I've seen modern art I liked and some well, if it wasn't behind a window.........

[brat]

I agree....some of it is brilliant. Most of it is trash.....I recall the chunk of linoleum, curled and hanging on the wall next to the fake brick...and the cocoon done in white gauze fabric with Christmas lites twinkling......LOL

[The Duke]

Isn't it a requirement in these modern times that a display incorporate feces, urine or perhaps semen in order to be considered art. As in "Hello Monica, that blue dress you're wearing tonight is simply a piece of art!"

All art is sh&t ... literally as well as figuratively.

[Thebaddog]

You can create it alright, and we all have the right to express ourselves. The question is, is it art? And I feel that there is a lot of art that is pornography or simply childish rebellion masquearading as art.

[Quila]

15. Capture one or both of the political parties of the United States

I like that item. Assuming there are only two political parties, aren't we? What was the difference between the U.S. and the USSR? The USSR had one fewer political parties (at least according to that item).

But then, "capture one political party" seems to be the same goal as the Christian Coalition.

[F16Fighter]

Admit it -- The Communist Manifesto and posters of Marx and Rob Zombie are perched high up upon your gothic cell wall in your room down in Mom's basement.

[Quila]

Admit it -- The Communist Manifesto and posters of Marx and Rob Zombie are perched high up upon your gothic cell wall in your room down in Mom's basement.

I have a copy of the Communist Manifesto. If you don't, then everything you say about it is from ignorance. You can only truly appreciate its awfulness if you've read it. As for your other points, I might go for a poster of Groucho, and I hate Rob Zombie. Gothic style is pretty cool though, and my office is in the basement of my house.

So, you think our two/one party system is democratic? It might be if they hadn't written laws to keep any other party from becoming a danger to the power structure. The USSR also had laws to keep competing parties out. They at least had the honesty to do it blatantly rather than in the name of something like campaign finance reform.

[Wm Bach]

Ironically, by forcing "artists" into a rigid eschewal of form, modernism effectively enslaves artists to THAT school of thought. How "original" is it to do the same thing that a thousand other no-talent hacks are doing?

The same thing is happening in the music conservatories. Were it not for movie soundtracks, Academic Music would have been the very death of orchestral music.

The earthly and etherial Joseph Schwantner and the young liturgical Chris Theofinidas are tonal voices in the nihilistic wilderness, with Costa Rica's Migual Ramirez bringing some sanity back to the concert hall with a little bit of latin groove.

[MassExodus]

During the 4 years I wasted earning a "Bachelors Degree" in Art, I spent one semester in an independent study of oil painting.

Instead of working hard to fulfill the course requirement, I drank beer and played Rugby.

Not wanting to show up empty handed at the critical review period,
I covered a canvas with various shades of green and palet knife in hand,
scrawled 3 vived red vertical forms in the vicinity of the middle.

This "painting" was received as a work of "ingenious sensibility",
it was at that point I realized that the piece of paper they handed me from this Liberal Arts College was utterly worthless.

[parsifal]

When I was younger, in high school, I actually snuck a piece of "art" into an exhibit. I chewed up a big piece of gum, wadded it up with some notebook paper, and stuck it on a piece of paper where I had scribbled some figures in pencil. I wrote "The Wad Explained" on the bottom of the paper and hung it on the wall next to some other exhibits. For all I know, somebody might have bought it. parsy.

[general_re]

Parsy the subversive - I like it. One of these days I'm going to get me one of those velvet Elvis paintings, or maybe the poker-playing dogs - you know, the ones they sell by the roadside sometimes - and nail that up at the local art gallery, just to see if anyone notices...

[parsifal]

Oh they would notice that. They could tell what it was. Now if you hung it upside-down. . . .parsy

[eureka!]

"This seems a bit broad brush to me. Have you not seen abstract art that you thought worthy.."

I have. I have also seen watercolors and drawings by my 4 year old that moved me in that way, seriously. My biggest beef is the use of tax dollars for some of the garbage...

[general_re]

Ah, of course you're right. Maybe one of my daughter's "Little Mermaid" paint-by-numbers works....

[Utah Binger]

Derivative is a good way to describe certain "copyists" of approaches used by others. In the broad sense of the term it seems that most American painters of the twentieth century have all been derivative in some way of those that came before whether it be the impressionists, the cubists or even the serious abstractionists. This latter term should be used to describe all art replaced by photography as all painting is abstract.

American Modernism does have a unique vein in a few of the proponents. One could cite Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe and above all Maynard Dixon as painters attempting and succeeding in being unique and modern in their approach. In the case of Dixon, he was accused as being a western painter and compared to a couple of illustrators of the west. In reality he is a modernist painter in the west that has gradually emerged through several forms of a modern approach, namely tonalism, pointalism, impressionism and finally cubist realism. By 1930 he achieved his own powerful style, simplistic yet powerful compositions that have a strong message for the viewer about the western landscape.

Modernism does not mean abstraction in the strictest sense, however, real artists and not copyists can make a strong statement without answering to the academics. Remember, those who can't paint, teach.

[gcruse]

. The question is, is it art? And I feel that there is a lot of
art that is pornography or simply childish rebellion masquearading as art.

Were it not for having money taken from me at gunpoint
to pay for someone's execrable droppings deemed 'art'
by a bunch of self-deluded connosewers, I would say,
"What difference does it make?  Does the term 'art'
really represent anything more than whether someone
likes it or not?"  Unfortunately, as long as the NEA
subsidizes this trash, it matters.

[VOA]

"Modern Art" finally exposed to be the fraud that it is!

Like a broken clock, even Adolph Hitler occassionally said some rational things...

1. Tax the churches (OK, I only believe in having churches cough up enough for to
make reasonable contribution to the area they are located in)

2. "Show me a man who paints the sky green, and I'll show you someone who should be shot."
(But I guess I'd probably have been in trouble, because as much as I laugh at a lot
of "modern art", I do dig Magrites (sp?) skewed version of existence.)

[Thebaddog]

The first amendment issues obscure the meaning of art and I do think that there is a level where a person's efforts to express themselves do rise to a level of accomplishment that can be called art. It is in the eye of the beholder and it does change. Today, the aesthetically pleasing meaning of the word is all but lost, but that is just for the moment, I hope.