Posted on 06/08/2005 7:11:02 PM PDT by vannrox
The images of "The Yellow Wallpaper" are seared in a circular pattern around the walls of my mind.
:p
Hopefully, the arts you and I love will turn around.
BUMP!
Here's a camping tip: when retrieving water from a mountain stream use a waterfall or white water source to avoid giardia.
Let's just hope you're not going though life muttering and squeaking.
I painted over the wallpaper with a lovely, warm beige--muttering and sputtering as I did so!
LOL
LOL
Great example. What is your very creative and subversively defiant (if that isn't provocative, I don't know what is) former roommate up to these days?
Bump
Good article! Here's one I wrote four years ago:
My heresy does not shame me. I'm no longer a youngster desperate for acceptance. The conventional contemporary wisdom proved to be idiocy, and I tired of the effort it takes to label crap as quality. This apostasy is not without cost. I am an artist.
As a young art student, my instincts drove me to practice my drawing skills, attempting to sharpen my draftsmanship (that skill that allows you to draw with realistic accuracy). The frustration of not matching what my eye saw and my hand drew tore at me. Little did I know that I was polishing the brass on the Titanic.
The more I took art classes, the more I was schooled in the new reality: representative art is passe. It existed now only for the unenlightened masses, the beer-swilling middleclass dolts that we must ridicule. We being the elite, steeped in ironic detachment and unburdened by old musty notions of pictorial beauty. All "serious" art was now confusing, ugly, crudely executed and deep. Accuracy was for chumps.
I went along for years. Modern notions of fine art secretly disgusted me; I felt that I would never really "get" all the smirky jokes hidden in modern art. After years of reading about the 20th century masters it hit me: it's a big con. Marketing and promotion obscured the sad truth that terrible artists were being exalted to the heights of fame and reputation.
It started with Impressionism in the late 1800s. Billed as an esthetic revolution in art, it was the death knell for the ascendancy of artistic talent. Dandies who held sway over patrons with more money than brains took advantage of the human weakness of ego. Rich people became easy prey for the big sell. Say what you will about the horrible Catholic Church controlling the fate of European artists for centuries, at least they set the bar high. Until the late 19th century, you must be able at minimum to draw, paint and sculpt with accuracy to be considered an Artist
When the New Relativism (who's to say what constitutes true art?) replaced the old ethic, the dam broke and a thousand bad artists took over. Sloppy impressions of light and shadow became "good enough" depictions of scenery. Then the selling kicked in, and eventually this lousy art became "better" than mere representative (accurate) depictions of the very same scenery. The moneyed elite gathered into "schools" of esthetic opinion, and the old boring traditionalists lost out.
For the next 125 years, all bets were off. Junk could be peddled as high art and representative artists would be marginalized as traditionalists, hopelessly mired in discredited esthetic tar pits of convention. Pictorial realism withered in the heat of this new reality.
Silver-tongued marketeers held sway. They destroyed Art by eclipsing the old values with the new, as if they could not coexist. Five generations of great artists were destroyed by this new esthetic. They died poor and disillusioned.
Don't get me wrong, I love some of the confusing, haphazard and angry modern paintings and "installations". I can identify with the urge to break conventions. I've done it myself. It's fun to slop the paint on thick and luxuriously, to care little for form and perspective and to stick it to the viewer. I've engaged in plenty of that. But it is a shallow and temporary victory, because I know it is not skillful.
I could be wrong, but I sense the first frail whispers of a Renaissance of representational painting and sculpture. A few brave wealthy fine art patrons are sounding off about the low quality of modern art. Well below the radar, talented artists with classic skills are toiling away on projects with precious little financial incentive, just a hunger for quality.
It could take fifty years to reach the top layer of acceptance, and by rights it should not replace other "isms" in its ascendancy. Neo-classicism should (and will) share the limelight with all the isms of the last 125 years: expressionism, primivatism, impressionism, cubism, abstract, symbolism, surrealism, Dada, folk art, and many others. No style should eclipse another style of worth and no style should be exalted above its rightful place in Art History. There should be a place made at the top for comic art, art for animation, video grabs and a whole host of new and beautiful disciplines.
Patience friends. We are slowly coming out of a Dark Age.
[END]
I think I loaned my book to someone but it has been so long now that I can't remember who. It makes me sick, I am not so generous now.
The picture doesn't come up for me but I can imagine it from your description. LOL
I was 14 when Typo died , the stillness lingers , oh bereaved light
Voila! Ruined antiques and collectibles...yikes! They may have done more damage, dollar-wise than their own artwork will ever be worth.
Paintings that can convey a mood or story (as does this one) are what good art is all about, IMHO.
It's about time. It's also time that the idiot who patronize the "arts" get exposed as the know nothing lemmings that they are.
I have long maintained the following Maxim: Most modern "art" is nothing more or less than an horrific and colossal practical joke, perpetrated by those with no talent upon those with no taste.
This is great! These modern "art" fools are the same idiots who inspired "The Emperor's clothes" story. I'd be damn madder than hell if my investment company bought a damn dead shark! Especially for that money!! Wonder if they could recover the cost with an exhibit of dead mutual fund managers...
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