Posted on 06/08/2005 7:11:02 PM PDT by vannrox
Fantastic article! I sent it off to an artist friend of mine whose web site I will be updating shortly. He is an incredible glass artist of some renown that feels the same way about glass. I would love to see the ideas in this article spill over into the glass world!
Chihluly comes to mind as the greatest example of no substance.
the wallpaper represents the torment of theyoung bride's predicament... stare at the wallpaper and as your eyes relax the images of her two lovers will become apparent and she is lamenting having to make the choice. notice her leanings and the obvious number of handmaidens are respectfully representative of the fears of choosing poorly, spinster-ship, lesbianism, suffocation, and wastefullness.
teeman
or it could be that the painter forgot to crop the sucker.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised at the abject stupidity demonstrated in this statement, since the artist likely didn't pay much attention in math class, but...
... Niagara Falls drops 150,000 gallons of water every second, or 12,960,000,000 gallons per day.
... one billion tons of water is 239,808,153,477 gallons.
In other words, it takes about eighteen and a half days for only one billion tons, let alone "billions" of tons, of water to flow over Niagara Falls. So in order for "billions of tons of pollutants to flow down the Niagara River in a single day, a goodly portion of the countryside of New York and Canada would have to be flooded with 100% pure pollutants.
Hey, I have that same picture, only ours is titled "Wall."
bump
Perhaps the water is super-saturated with Moore's "art"...
I dropped out of art school in the 70's (1970's) because no one would teach me how to draw or paint. Globs of orange acrylic paint, straight out of the tube, dribbled onto aluminum foil were cheered as "art" while anything requiring thought, skill, and practice was soundly derided . The antipathy toward representational art was pervasive and harsh.
Since then I've learned by doing and by studying with other artists. I now have many friends -- other traditional oil painters -- who had the same experience during those years. Back then I thought I might be simple and "unsophisticated" but I've since learned otherwise.
Thanks for posting.
"I am an artist and I am sick of so called art that consists of rubber chickens hanging from dead branches and other such rubbish that I have actually seen in galleries."
True story. My college roommate was an art major. One of her professors kept giving her awful grades on her projects bcse she wasn't being "provocative" enough. So she got a wooden salad bowl and painted it pink. Inside it, she glued a headless Barbie doll, a used maxi-pad, and fake acrylic fingernails. Then she wrote "Womanhood" on the rim of the bowl and turned it in. He gave it an "A."
Banned??? But she was expressing herself! That's art! How can the modern art crowd fail to appreciate her self-expression?
I've been an artist my entire life, my mother was a talented artist, and she encouraged me from the moment I could hold a pencil. I suffered through endless classes in high school and college listening to no-talent hacks babble about "expression" and "individuality", all the while, they all wore the same black clothes, had the same dyed-red hair, and created the same, bland, lackluster dreck they called 'art". It's gotten steadily worse, the art field is completely inbred, incestuous, more about politics and cliques than talent, and is completeley hollow and a sham.
I decided to pursue illustration, as it still seemed to hold the things I value in art, and is lacking in "fine art": skill, technique, discipline, thought, and you could make a living at it. I still paint on my own, and maybe someday I'll exhibit it. But, after the indignities I experienced with the babbling idiots in art class, it turned me off pursuing the gallery field completely - it's all political anyway.
I remember seeing senior projects in a gallery - a prize winner was a bundle of sticks.
I remember a *required* class for art majors, where the teacher (who did'nt grade or take attendance) spent the classes I bothered going to explaining how to force landlords in warehouse districts to allow work-live arrangements, force them to install plumbing, and how to work the private, state and Federal grant systems so you would'nt have to get a job. When she was'nt ranting how unfair those greedy landlords were, she made us endure tedious, ridiculous arguements between red-headed "artists" in black debating if the public's reaction to your work had any meaning. (I literally stood up and left that class mid rant)
I took a symbolism class in college, where we were allowed to pursue our own agenda, and since I was studying illustration, I worked on a series of paintings with a common thread, with enthusiastic encouragement from my teacher. Halfway through the class, sadly, the teacher died suddenly (he was a great teacher, too, an honestly nice person, and very talented), and a woman who'd been painting for *2 years* with no formal training , degree, or even teaching experience took over, and forced us to look at her "art", which were canvases with paint piled so high, it looked like the seagull guano on an old pier. She did'nt outright demand we all work in the abstract, as all of us were half a semester into our work, and eventually stopped talking to anyone but the small group of students doing abstract work. When we submitted our projects, she failed everyone who *did'nt* do abstract work, declaring it was a class on abstract expressionism, and wrote up smarmy, snotty comments ripping our work apart. We took it to the dean, and he re-graded us - I've yet to see a teacher look that disgusted at another teacher before, or since.
I took a senior level watercolor class, where the "visiting" professor (he was a grad student, a relative of someone high up in the school, we heard) had never really used watercolors, and refuses to teach us technique, even when we as a group demanded it. We ended up taking over the class, and taught each other. After the semester, we all found our grades for the class missing, no record of it anywhere on our transcripts...the idiot had never submitted any of the paperwork all semester, and they "could'nt find him", to get our grades. This was a guy, we had been told, who was a featured gallery artist, and was very respected in the field. He was a dirty, unwashed hippy type, dumb as a bag of rocks, and we never did see his art - the one time he tried to actually teach the class, he proved he had no clue how to hold a paintrbrush or paint anything but bright, colored blobs.
I took a class that was required by illustration majors and fine art majors - and he sneered the entire semester at illustration students, because - and this is a direct quote - "They get PAID to paint".
I've spent my entire life learning technique, from charcoal and pencil, to conte and pastels, to guache and watercolor, oil and acrylic, clay, wax, bronze, you name it. I'm immersed myself in materials of the trade, spent most of my life before an easel or a drafting board...and go to shows, where the 'artists" don't have a clue about any of it, and will defend "found" materials (ie. trash) versus traditional materials. It boggles the mind. Art used to be something you dedicated your life to, these limp wristed toadies can't even tell the difference between a filbert and a round paintbrush. If they even USE brushes - most of the art students I had to endure finger painted under the loving approval of idiotic teachers.
I'll subscribe to this magazine - I've been a huge fan of artist's like l. Alma Tedama, from the moment I saw his "Spring" hanging at the Getty in Malibu, and the first time I saw the exquisite Gerome at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco - their technique is absolutely mind-boggingly perfect, and the paintings hold you spell-bound.
I also discovered another "lost" artist, who is still sneered at because he was a "commercial" artist - Maxfield Parrish.
What a joy, to see art that isn't selfishly about anger, bitterness, childish expressions of outrage at politics or social issues, or expressions of narcissistic and promiscuous sexuality. "Art" these days, pardon the expression, is just mental masterbation, and should be rejected...but then, looking at prime time TV and the current state of the world of literature and movies...I'm not holding my breath it'll change anytime soon.
I was born 100 years too late, or early, truly.
Could it be the bigger fool theory in art is about to come to an end?
Imagine the poor schnooks stuck with million dollar urinals.
Christo falls on one side or the other of an orange shower curtain, but it hardly matters which side, since they're both the same (not to mention the same as each of the other gazillion orange shower curtains with which he trashed Central Park).
Piero Manzoni died 1953
"Merde d'artista"
http://home.sprynet.com/~mindweb/can.htm
Typo died 1963.
Cristo's umbrellas killed one person in California and one person in Japan. I'm sure that the "artist" finds something creative and "living" in that art.
What a wonderful article. I feel vindicated. I knew, at twelve years of age, modern art was crap and I said it. I was told I was too young to understand. I said the same thing at 20 and was told it was lack of education. At 30 I was told I was "old fashioned and a stick in the mud". I'm just glad to find out that I wasn't the crazy person, they were! (I always knew they were)
Precisely! The modern aesthetic would have it in a landscape format and have cropped out the "superfluous" elements. Now, if it were "The Yellow Wallpaper" there might be even more psychological thrills for the viewer.
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