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

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

[cgbg]

Mass

I personally don't like most modern art, but your story actually demonstrates something different than you think it does.

The punchline: your art-teacher was an ignorant fraud.

How do I know that the teacher is to be condemned rather than all of modern art?

I had a great-aunt (now passed away) who had a knack for recognizing modern art that would become valuable in the future. She lived in NYC, and for years purchased starving artist's paintings with pocket change, and hung them on her wall as a hobby.

Thirty years later her collection was valued at tens of millions of dollars. Her insurance company refused to insure the pieces unless she installed a state of the art security system. Today her paintings are on display in galleries around the world (and I am still poor--rrrrrr :-) ).

So there is something on going on here--but I confess I can't tell the real from the fake.

Obviously your art teacher couldn't either! :-)

My great-aunt's name, btw, is Florence Barron. If you do an Internet search you can see what she looked like back in the sixties--Andy Warhol did her "portrait".

[sphinx]

As to "My kid could paint that" Now that he's seen it he could. (derivative) But would he have the creativity to come up with the abstraction on his own?

The kids do up until about about age six or seven. Then they begin to realize that the scribble-scrabble they've been calling a "dog" or a "horse" doesn't really look like a dog or horse. At that point, they start disciplining themselves and it all falls apart.

My four year old does stuff right now that is worthy of the Metropolitan. Easily the equal of the typical Pollock, and she does it sober. It won't last. She will grow up.

[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.

A strange thread here. I actually wrote these words five years ago. Nice to re read as my thoughts are still the same.

[kanawa]

Storm Warning to the Art World: Everything is going to Change! (Great Read -'bout time!)

[Sam Cree]

I’m inclined to agree with you that much modern art is deconstruction. Ortega Y Gasset referred apparently approvingly to it as “dehumanization.” I posted a thread on Helprin’s essay in which he used Gasset as a springboard to attack modern art yesterday, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1817366/posts

However, while I agree that in the past, before art had a capital A, served a much more practical master than “self expression,” it was still self expression that made great art great. Velazquez may have spent a lifetime in the service of royalty, but it was his unique vision and his ability to put it on canvas that has elicited admiration and wonder through history. IMO.

[ßuddaßudd]

bump for later

[aruanan]

The kids do up until about about age six or seven. Then they begin to realize that the scribble-scrabble they've been calling a "dog" or a "horse" doesn't really look like a dog or horse. At that point, they start disciplining themselves and it all falls apart

See Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Although I'm not convinced her left brain/right brain distinction has neurological relevance, her techniques do produce the results claimed for them. I think her claim that people tend to draw not what they see but their abstracted concept of what they think they see is valid. For the author, Betty Edwards, the goal is to delink the seeing and drawing from the abstract conceptualization and train oneself to go directly from seeing to drawing. For instance, you don't have to know what a sculpture is to run your hands lightly over its surface. By extension, her method of drawing is to do the same thing but with a pencil being the intermediary.

[Hot Tabasco]

This is the first time I've ever read any article on art and I read this and the link thru its entirety. It was great and finally revealed to me something that has been plaguing me for decades.

I never graduated from college but did have a class in humanities and one in English literature. In each of those classes we studied the works by one artist and the stories by one writer.

In both cases I remember getting into a heated discussion with the instructors over the "intents" of the painter and the writer that my teacher was tellin us. In both cases I could not for the life of me understand their lines of thinking regarding one painting by the artist and a story by the writer. Ultimately I left the class feeling like a complete moron because I just could not get it.

Well after reading this entire thread I have finally gotten it. I'm not the one who was stupid because I couldn't get it, but rather the teachers were the ones who were stupid because all they were doing was echoing the stupid philosophy that they fell hook line and sinker for in order to get along with their fellow elitists........

[Sam Cree]

"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?"

Because there is something more in a painted portrait than just high tech accuracy. Wealthy benefactors continue today to commission paintings for many thousands of dollars. Some portraitists, for instance, get upwards of $30,000 per portrait. The wealthy benefactors also have photographs, but for the moment, photographs and paintings are not the same thing. Maybe they will be in the future, maybe some day painting and drawing skills will no longer be appreciated and will die out. I can well imagine that, but it hasn't happened yet.

[ClaireSolt]

There is a new fresco at the top of the stairs in the Mauritshuis in the Hague. Titled Vanity of Vanities thr artit applied a bright smear of pink. blue, and yellow and an indication of his glases and jeans. I think it mocks the idea that the artist is a philosopher responsible for the form and content. The vision behind the Sistine chapel was the Pope who conceived and executed it including hiring Michealangelo. This is not to demean, at all, the genius of the artist who rose to the top of his field, it is just saying that we expect too much of them, now.

[Sam Cree]

That the emporer has no clothes would seem to have a lot of validity regarding a lot of modern art.

[Sam Cree]

The Pope had the original vision, true, and perhaps Michelangelo, if left to his own devices, would never have risen to the heights that he did while carrying out commissions. I think very likely that is true, which says something about the relationship between motivation and necessity. But I don’t discount Michelangelo’s talent and genius either.

It never occurred to me to consider that the world expects too much from modern artists. But since it expects every artist to reinvent the wheel on his own, and quickly, probably you are right in stating that.

[Hacksaw]

This church has always fascinated me (designed by Antoni Gaudi)

[LexBaird]

As to "My kid could paint that" Now that he's seen it he could. (derivative) But would he have the creativity to come up with the abstraction on his own?

Nearly every kid can. It is only after the ability to abstract what they see is drummed out of them that kids begin to say they can't draw.

It isn't that "my kid can do that" is a misunderstanding of the depth of most abstract art, but that most of it really IS that shallow.

[LexBaird]

Sometimes though, those who can paint/draw teach anyway... Burne Hogarth knew the human form, produced some excellent books on the subject, and taught in art school for decades.

But, but Hogarth was a mere illustrator, even a < gasp > COMICS artist! No a "real" artist, dontchaknow. IMNSO opinion, the American artists of the 20th century that will be remembered and studied 200 years hence will not be named Schnabel Pollock or Koons. They'll be named Disney, Rockwell, Watterson, Flagg, Schultz, etc. Those who made the actual icons of the century while the "fine" artists were masturbating for their cronies.

[LexBaird]

It always reminds me of an african termite mound.

[Sam Cree]

Agreed that the early and mid century American illustrators have been great artists, have kept artistic skills alive while others have done what they could to destroy those skills. Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, Dean Cornwell, Andrew Loomis were a few more of the greats in illustration. Frank Frazetta too, come to think of it.

[LexBaird]

There are lots of illustrators whose work is recognized instantly and identified with by people on a level that the fine art world used to do. For every era of the 20th century, you can name an illustrator who typifies and speaks of the times far more than whoever the galleries were hyping that year. Charles Dana Gibson, Maxfield Parrish, John Held Jr., Antonio Vargas, Norman Rockwell, Leyendecker, Christy, Schoonover, Hirshfeld, “Seuss”, Eisner, Kirby, Freas, Sendak, Hildebrandt... Man, I could go on and on.

[Xenalyte]

Why are they jaundiced? ;)