I can see why it was in the garbage..............
I wonder if Debbie (I’ve never seen a piece of wood that won’t look better painted) Travis was doing one of her redecorating shows and tossed that piece out.
That is an awesome picture. Not a million dollars perhaps, but it’s way better than anything submitted for the Turner prize.
My father in law found a historic painting of Sam Houston in the trash 50 years ago. I don’t think it is worth anywhere close to a million dollars but it is hanging over my fireplace now and we love it.
And the thief didn’t get the money.
even though I didn’t understand it, I knew it had power.”...Yes indeed!...Power to the tune of over 1 million dollars
One of if not the most notable member in Mexican Communist Party history.
Please post a picture of the work of art;all I see here is a pice of trash.
I’m afraid I would have left it in the garbage.
But it's a throwback, a monument to a bygone age. Art doesn't look like that anymore.
If I'm honest, I think that visual art may have run its course. Once one takes painting from an act of worship to storytelling to allegory to depiction to impression to abstraction to dreams visualized to paint-on-canvas to blahblahblah, there's really no place left to go. Dada was the Punk Rock of visual art; just as the Sex Pistols were the End of Rock 'n' Roll, so Duchamp and Magritte wrapped it up for Western Civ's deconstruction of cave painting.
And just as "rock" since the Sex Pistols has been nothing but pastiche and dance music, the visual arts after Dada have been little more than styling and profiling. Post-Dada, what did we see? A whole lot of nothing, in my opinion: de Kooning scrawls, Stella boxes, Rothko stripes, and that stupid Jasper Johns flag thing. In other words, a bunch of people jerking off. With nowhere to go post-punk, rock became either pure commercial product or went over to theater (e.g. Hair Metal). With nowhere to go post-Dada, visual artists either went pure commercial (Pop Art) or went over to pure shock theater — dead animals, messy bedrooms, etc. Rock Star, Art Star — there's really not much difference.
I admire the pugnaciously backwards spirit behind artrenwal.com, and I also like some of the works featured there. (I think this work is a fine example of craft painting. It is sentimental, yes, and breaks no new ground, but even so it's a powerful piece, well-executed and beautiful.) However, I fear that today's art "renewal" movement is more nostalgic than truly revanchist. The sort of folks who buy Thomas Kinkade's wet-cobblestone Main-Street fantasy paintings are not doing so out of any intellectual bent towards the culture and values of the past; they just think they're pretty.
(And that's okay: if pretty is what one wants, one should have it. Still, as a reactionary of the Altar-and-Throne school, I can't help but wonder what an artist's brush in the hands or a real hard-ass Right-winger might produce.)
A few more words on Kinkade: I admire Thomas Kinkade as a businessman, but his self-stated goal is to "bring to millions of people an art that they can understand", and I'm not sure that mass appeal is the most important aim when creating a work of art. To my mind, art (of any kind — painting, music, whatever) is an intellectual activity, not an emotional activity; art should proceed from the artist's true self (that is, his reason) and is meant to be understood via reason. ("Art" that can be immediately grasped on an emotional level is called "entertainment".) In other words, I think Art is an intellectual activity, and should be born from and perceived through an act of intellect. Putting on Bach in the background while folding shirts is fine, but one does not truly listen to Bach except by sitting quietly and focusing one's mind upon the music. Bach used as background music isn't really Bach at all. In like manner, a "purty pitcher" may please the eye of the Average Joe, but the Average Joe is cheating himself out of the true esthetic experience if "purtyness" is all he wants out of a painting. Esthetics is a branch of knowledge based upon Reason, not emotion, and as such must be taught to people just as must every other branch of knowledge. To grow up without a proper education in esthetics is to grow up blind to the beauty that lies beneath the surface of art.
(This is why art education from elementary school on up is so important — but don't get me started on that subject.)
Anyway, I don't want to harsh on Kinkade too much. He's skilled, and he sells a lot of paintings, but James McNeill Whistler he ain't. Let's leave it at that.
I seriously doubt I would pay more than $50.00 for this "art"
