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Conceptual art

19 October 2009 in the art world by David | 22 comments

90 years ago, Mar­cel Duchamp did some­thing kind of funny by pre­sent­ing a uri­nal as if it were legit­i­mate art.

The art world responded by repeat­ing the same joke, with slight vari­a­tions, over and over, while pre­tend­ing to take itself seri­ously in the process. Much money was made by sell­ing ran­dom objects to rich suck­ers. Now the whole joke may finally be start­ing to fall a bit flat.

Den­nis Dut­ton writes in the New York Times:
The appre­ci­a­tion of con­tem­po­rary con­cep­tual art, on the other hand, depends not on imme­di­ately rec­og­niz­able skill, but on how the work is sit­u­ated in today’s intel­lec­tual zeit­geist. That’s why look­ing through the his­tory of con­cep­tual art after Duchamp reminds me of pag­ing through old New Yorker car­toons. Jokes about Cadil­lac tail­fins and early fax machines were once amus­ing, and the same can be said of con­cep­tual works like Piero Manzoni’s 1962 dec­la­ra­tion that Earth was his art work, Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 “One and Three Chairs” (a chair, a photo of the chair and a def­i­n­i­tion of “chair”) or Mr. Hirst’s med­i­cine cab­i­nets. Future gen­er­a­tions, no longer engaged by our art “con­cepts” and unable to divine any spe­cial skill or emo­tional expres­sion in the work, may lose inter­est in it as a medium for finan­cial spec­u­la­tion and rel­e­gate it to the realm of his­tor­i­cal curiosity.

In this respect, I can’t help regard­ing med­i­cine cab­i­nets, vac­uum clean­ers and dead sharks as reck­less invest­ments. Some­where out there in col­lec­tor­land is the unlucky guy who will be the last one hold­ing the vac­uum cleaner, and won­der­ing why.

But that doesn’t mean we need to worry about the future of art. There are plenty of prodi­gious artists at work in every medium, ready to wow us with sur­pris­ing skills. And yes, now and again I walk past a jew­elry shop win­dow and stop, trans­fixed by a sparkling, teardrop-shaped pre­cious stone. Our dis­tant ances­tors loved that shape, and found beauty in the skill needed to make it —even before they could put their love into words.

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Public Art Funding

19 March 2009 in the art world by David | No comments

James Lileks on some guy’s plan for the National Endow­ment for the Arts:

I’m just guess­ing, but I’ll bet the National Endow­ment for the Arts was con­ceived as some sort of mid­dle­brow self-improvement program—sending Pablo Casals LPs to schools, help­ing small towns put on “Our Town,” sub­si­diz­ing muse­ums so they could put on chal­leng­ing works like gigan­tic Calder mobiles, and pay­ing off the sur­vivors when the damned thing snapped a cable and carved a tour group in stir-fry slices. I’m sure it still funds good things. But let us risk a headache and try to think of a few art forms we man­aged to cre­ate with­out its assistance:

Jazz

Blues

Rock and Roll

Every movie made in America

Sky­scrap­ers

Paint­ing that looks like something

Sculp­ture that looks like someone

As it hap­pens I like mod­ern art, so this isn’t some philis­tine sneer at funny pitch­ers what don’t look like Whistler’s Mama. I’m not even opposed in prin­ci­ple to state fund­ing of the art, for two rea­sons: 1) the mon­archs and the church did a fine job of it for mil­len­nia, and 2) if some small town wants to help defray the cost of a play in the school gym, fine. But I have to draw a line, because if I say it’s good to sup­port orches­tras in large cities with Fed­eral money, then any­one gets to sup­port their favorite kind of art, even if it hap­pens to be guil­lo­tin­ing paper-mache repli­cas of the Found­ing Fathers on Pres­i­dents Day. You get your art, I get mine.

“Yes, but yours stinks” is not a use­ful reply. Accu­rate, but irrelevant.

Read the whole cranky thing and the Huff­in­g­ton Post arti­cle he’s respond­ing to.

I am per­son­ally sus­pi­cious of art that is picked by a com­mit­tee and requires gov­ern­ment fund­ing. Of course, that could be sour grapes, as the kind of art I do hasn’t received any gov­ern­ment fund­ing in the U.S. since at least the 1930’s.

Feel free to add your thoughts in comments.

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Wyeth

17 January 2009 in artists, the art world by David | 2 comments

Andrew Wyeth died a few days ago, in his sleep at his home in Chadd’s Ford, Penn­syl­va­nia. He was 91.

By coin­ci­dence, just a cou­ple of weeks ago I had din­ner with a friend in Mor­tonville, Penn­syl­va­nia, about 15 miles from Chadd’s Ford. So I’ve been think­ing about Wyeth the last few days.

Here’s a bit of what the New York Times has to say in its obit­u­ary:

Wyeth gave Amer­ica a prim and flinty view of Puri­tan rec­ti­tude, starchily sen­ti­men­tal, through parched gray and brown pic­tures of spooky frame houses, des­ic­cated fields, deserted beaches, cir­cling buz­zards and craggy-faced New Eng­lan­ders. A vir­tual Rorschach test for Amer­i­can cul­ture dur­ing the bet­ter part of the last cen­tury, Wyeth split pub­lic opin­ion as vig­or­ously as, and prob­a­bly even more so than, any other Amer­i­can painter includ­ing the other mod­ern Andy, Warhol, whose milieu was as urban as Wyeth’s was rural.

All of what the main­stream press has to say about him is pretty much mean­ing­less. The obit­u­ar­ies relate mostly to the busi­ness of build­ing Wyeth’s pub­lic per­sona, a con­struc­tion that cre­ated mass audi­ences and even­tual sales of well over a $1 mil­lion for each major paint­ing. That was good for Wyeth inso­far as it made him and his fam­ily very rich and pushed his work into the pub­lic eye, where it could be exco­ri­ated by crit­ics who had no abil­ity to com­pre­hend it.

As far as I’m con­cerned, Wyeth was the eas­ily the most impor­tant artist of the 20th cen­tury. In part that’s because of his tow­er­ing skill: his abil­i­ties with regard to tech­nique, form, com­po­si­tion, and ren­der­ing were com­pa­ra­ble to the finest artists in his­tory. But that is of course only part of the story, as many past artists with supe­rior tech­ni­cal skills but the absence of great­ness have demon­strated. Beyond his tech­ni­cal skill was his abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate his com­plete immer­sion in what he chose to paint. Crit­ics liked to com­plain about his sen­ti­men­tal, dreary sub­ject mat­ter, his “fecal” palette, his obses­sion with detail, the repet­i­tive nature of his work (as if what they liked was any less repet­i­tive), his unapolo­getic ded­i­ca­tion to an Amer­i­can visual tra­di­tion, and (most impor­tant in the mod­ern art world) the com­plete absence of irony in his work.

None of that mat­ters. Wyeth was utterly in love the places and peo­ple of a few small parts of Penn­syl­va­nia and Maine, and he knew how to con­vey that love. He wasn’t inter­ested in work­ing with any other sub­ject mat­ter, in any other way than what felt right to him, no mat­ter what the crit­ics or any­one else said. That kind of love, with the abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate it, is what all good paint­ing is about.

A few quotes:

“One’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes.”

“I love to study the many things that grow below the corn stalks and bring them back to the stu­dio to study the color. If one could only catch that true color of nature—the very thought of it dri­ves me mad.”

“God, I’ve frozen my ass off paint­ing snow scenes!”

God­speed, Andrew.

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Should children be protected from nude art?

1 November 2008 in personal, the art world by David | 8 comments

Last year, a friend of ours and her two chil­dren (ages 7 and 8, if I recall cor­rectly) vis­ited. They wanted to look in the stu­dio and my wife let them in (after cau­tion­ing them not to touch any­thing). I had a cou­ple of nudes hang­ing against the wall, which my wife imme­di­ately turned around to keep them from being seen.

I’ve been think­ing about that lately. Why was that nec­es­sary? These paint­ings were not porno­graphic or even explicit. They were of a man and a woman pos­ing in the nude.

I’m not crit­i­ciz­ing my wife, of course. She responded appro­pri­ately, espe­cially since their mother hadn’t been warned about the pos­si­bil­ity of them see­ing paint­ings of naked peo­ple. I think it kind of dis­turbs me that this was nec­es­sary, how­ever. We didn’t dis­cuss the issue with our friend—we just assumed that she would never allow her chil­dren to see that kind of art.

This is espe­cially inter­est­ing when we com­pare mod­ern atti­tudes to those of the Vic­to­ri­ans. We think of Vic­to­ri­ans as absurdly prud­ish, even to the point of con­sid­er­ing it proper to do things like put books by male and female authors on dif­fer­ent shelves and cover up the “limbs” of roast poul­try with paper cov­ers. We can laugh at that, yet I’ve read that Vic­to­rian chil­dren were rou­tinely exposed to nude art. It was con­sid­ered edu­ca­tional and uplift­ing. Obvi­ously, not all peo­ple in the Vic­to­rian era had the same val­ues, and I’m sure some found the idea of chil­dren look­ing at nudes to be inap­pro­pri­ate. Yet I’ve seen images of muse­ums from the period, with throngs of both adults and school-age chil­dren look­ing at nude paint­ings and sculpture.

Are we more prud­ish about art than the Vic­to­ri­ans, for all that adver­tis­ing and other media are filled with sex? Is it inap­pro­pri­ate for chil­dren to see nude art?

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this topic, but I do know that if there were a nude in my liv­ing room, some uncom­fort­able sit­u­a­tions would occur from time to time.

Com­ments?

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I hate this kind of “art”

9 July 2008 in the art world by David | 28 comments

<rant>

At the New York times, an arti­cle on a show exhibit­ing mod­ern inter­pre­ta­tions of Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms.”

These are posters depict­ing sub­jects such as bird poop­ing “democ­racy” onto the earth and an obese per­son with the cap­tion “this is abuse of the free­dom from want.”

I hate this kind of pseudo-ironic, self-absorbed, visual blovi­a­tion. Because the aca­d­e­mic art estab­lish­ment is just about entirely left­ist, this kind of art almost always presents ideas of the polit­i­cal left. I’m very very inde­pen­dent polit­i­cally, but I hate this kind of stuff regard­less of whether I am in agree­ment with (or indif­fer­ent to) the ideas being expressed.1

Elliott Earls’s rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of Nor­man Rockwell’s “Four Free­doms” prac­ti­cally screams. A lit­tle girl seems to be cry­ing, her eye bruised, with an Amer­i­can flag in the back­ground and two words fram­ing her fig­ure: “Lib­erty Weeps.” The color scheme is red, white and blue, but patri­otic pride has been sup­planted by sadness.

How tire­some.

My reac­tion to any­thing like this is one of vis­ceral con­tempt. Art like this likes to pre­tend that it is “dan­ger­ous.” Yet none of the “artists” par­tic­i­pat­ing have any fear of hav­ing the gov­ern­ment take any inter­est in this work. They aren’t going to be car­ried away in the night and never seen again, as an artist express­ing “inap­pro­pri­ate” ideas might have been in Soviet Union, Nazi Ger­many, or nowa­days in a place like North Korea. (This is par­tic­u­larly well illus­trated by the pic­ture by Chip Kidd, depict­ing a burnt U.S. flag and the cap­tion, “Free­dom of Speech”—made with the full under­stand­ing that no one will ever con­sider cen­sor­ing it.) No one who might affect their careers is going to refuse to hire them, because any­one who might hire a polit­i­cal artist is going to at least pre­tend to like this kind of crap. Instead of hav­ing their careers destroyed by bravely “speak­ing truth to power,” these mediocre hacks get writ­ten up in the New York Times. They are express­ing entirely main­stream ideas, bet­ter expressed in other ways. This work adds noth­ing to dis­course on free­dom in mod­ern soci­ety. Yet these artists, and the writer of the arti­cle, indi­cate sur­prise and dis­ap­point­ment that the show doesn’t gar­ner much atten­tion. Peo­ple just walk by and ignore it. They are demon­strat­ing not a dis­like of art, but a dis­in­ter­est in vapid garbage. Good for them.

I would hate any pic­ture that depicts George Bush look­ing into a mir­ror and see­ing Adolph Hitler. I would hate any pic­ture that depicts Barak Obama as a hand pup­pet of Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad. It doesn’t mat­ter what the pol­i­tics are. Such pic­tures are banal, idi­otic rub­bish. They require no thought or cre­ativ­ity. If you seen one, you can think of all pos­si­ble vari­a­tions on the theme in about five min­utes. They are polit­i­cal cartoons—bad polit­i­cal car­toons. They are not art.2 They are not even interesting.

</rant>

Do you agree? Dis­agree? Are there kinds of polit­i­cal art that are good? If so, what dis­tin­guishes good from bad? Feel free to comment.

Note: there’s not going to be any dis­cus­sion of pol­i­tics here; just the bad­ness (or not, if you want to dis­agree with me) of this clumsy approach to polit­i­cal art. Any explic­itly polit­i­cal com­ments will be deleted. If you want to dis­cuss pol­i­tics, you won’t have any trou­ble find­ing places on the web for that.

1 I might respect an artist slightly more if he or she were demon­strat­ing a lit­tle bit of chutz­pah by mak­ing non-leftist art and pre­sent­ing it to the left­ist art estab­lish­ment. But not much.

2 I don’t mean to imply that a car­toon or illus­tra­tion can­not be art. It is only to say that this spe­cific kind of car­toon, by and large, is nowhere near to being art.

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Tell me more about…the Art Therapy

29 June 2008 in personal, the art world by Katarzyna | 2 comments

Wel­come again — David and the read­ers of the ATSH. Today briefly, but I hope to encour­age you to shower this site with, as always, some inter­est­ing comments.

I know, that ‘Art Ther­apy’ sub­ject is quite loaded with dif­fer­ent mean­ings and, prob­a­bly, not free from con­tro­ver­sies too. Yet, from what I can see brows­ing the rel­e­vant pages, this kind of psy­cho­log­i­cal (med­ical) ther­apy has flour­ished in the US, with AATA (Amer­i­can Art Ther­apy Asso­ci­a­tion) look­ing quite fit and professional.

At the same time it remains rel­a­tively exotic in Europe and espe­cially in Ire­land. My col­lege was first in this coun­try to intro­duce Art Ther­apy MA degrees (based on BA Hons. in Fine Art) — they are avail­able from 1998, became quite pop­u­lar, yet it’s still far from ordi­nary to see Art Ther­a­pist work­ing in insti­tu­tions, schools or hospitals.

I haven’t per­son­ally met yet with any sort of this prac­tice and know noth­ing about its fac­tual effec­tive­ness. I’m inter­ested espe­cially in any record, expe­ri­ence related to the ASD (Autism Spec­trum Dis­or­der), since one case of it has been diag­nosed in my fam­ily. Have you met with an art ther­apy “in action”? Are you your­self qual­i­fied and prac­tic­ing? Do you have any opin­ions, thoughts or expe­ri­ences on that sub­ject, on how it works (if at all) on autis­tic chil­dren? Thanks for sharing.

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Few not-modern notes on humanity…

19 April 2008 in personal, the art world by Katarzyna | No comments

Quite recently I’ve got an inter­est­ing, half-an-hour talk about noth­ing. It hap­pened to be focused on mod­ern art, mod­ern human con­di­tion, place for beauty and ethics within it and, after mak­ing a heroic round in escap­ing its inbuilt vac­uum it came to the point of an incep­tion — to a rather corny remark that “non­sense” seems to be a sur­name of today’s exis­tence. How to make art in the mod­ern chaos and to remain sane? Although Louis Bour­geois wrote in her paint­ing that Art is the war­ranty of san­ity she wrote also I’ve been in Hell and back, and let me tell you — it was won­der­ful. Going to Hell is the con­di­tion of the mod­ern artist, whether s/he comes back and is ready to admit that it was won­der­ful is a quite another, usu­ally very per­sonal story.

Since my part­ner in the above-mentioned chat was far from being an aver­age, junior, intel­li­gent guy who finds “fash­ion­able” to talk post-modern slo­gans (no mat­ter how out of place they are), we’ve man­aged to make a way for some deeper obser­va­tions. Yet every­thing seemed to slip through our fin­gers — any sense, any under­stand­ing of each other. Why is it so dif­fi­cult to com­mu­ni­cate on a level, where any social game must to dis­ap­pear in the pres­ence of truth? Why in the age of gutsy exhi­bi­tion­ism, omnipresent “dis­play” of human “val­ues” we are mute and/or extremely ama­teur­ish when it comes to for­mu­late, under­stand and con­vey basic reflec­tion on our exis­ten­tial con­di­tion? I won­der what was that ancient Greek spoke about, or peo­ple of 18th cen­tury France, or even con­tem­po­raries of Hem­ing­way, Kafka, Dos­to­jew­ski? Have they been taught the art of com­mu­ni­cat­ing one­self to oth­ers or maybe times they lived in encour­aged it in the most nat­ural fashion?

So we talked about beauty which became some­thing ter­ri­bly old-fashioned, neglected and mis­un­der­stood. After Picasso and the mod­ern rest ridiculed clas­si­cal rules of har­mony and plea­sure it seems to be quite trendy to make art that dis­turbs, wipes out smile and joy; art of dark colours, sad faces and delib­er­ately non­cha­lant in appear­ance. Even if beauty occurs it’s very often acci­den­tal, has noth­ing in com­mon with beliefs and aspi­ra­tions of an artist. Major­ity of work in my col­lege is like that, my own work oscil­lates between “blue” and dark­ness of being alive here and now… What a waste of a pair of healthy hands. Why not to aspire to be the next Cezanne or Canova? Why not to aspire to make the hap­pi­est, the most beau­ti­ful paintings/sculptures ever? Why even these ques­tions sound ridiculously?

It was the eter­nal beauty of art in Paris that grabbed my mind and heart. Who knows — maybe it’s the right time for a new Renais­sanse, for redis­cov­er­ing once again value and sense in our human con­di­tion? That could be even interesting…

Just for the clas­si­cal taste, few shots of The Louvre’s trea­sures I took dur­ing my trip to Paris:

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Few words on an artist’s condition…

3 March 2008 in personal, the art world by Katarzyna | 3 comments

Don’t be too over­whelmed by the title. It’s meant to be too big to what I’m going to write here… I just need a sort of its intel­lec­tual chal­lenge to re-start me again for the ATSH, which I was forced to neglect by some tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties… To every­one who doesn’t know — I’m a con­trib­u­tor to this site and hop­ing to make most of David’s cour­tesy to let me be here and address you, my audience…

So, today few loose reflec­tions on what I con­sider as an expe­ri­ence of being ‘a con­tem­po­rary artist’. First of all, I must say I’m intensely reluc­tant to use the word when refer­ring to myself and my iden­tity. And it isn’t merely due being ‘just’ an art stu­dent, but it seems to be rooted in my deep belief that, what a human being under­goes in a long, com­plex process of mak­ing (cre­at­ing) of what art crit­ics will call ‘an art­work’ can­not be expressed in a one, semi­ot­i­cally dis­torted and cul­tur­ally mis­un­der­stood and abused (just have a quick surf around ‘artis­tic’ pages — any­thing now can be called ‘art’ and any­body ‘an artist’) term. Who am I then? — some­body study­ing, mak­ing, deal­ing with art, some­body strug­gling with artis­tic means to find myself — that belief will (hope­fully) never change. If so called ‘art-world’ (art lovers, crit­ics) will name me even­tu­ally ‘an artist’ one day I will feel rec­og­nized and appre­ci­ated, but it always be a sort of a sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of my activ­i­ties, putting ‘a label’ in order to ‘classify’.

Czes­law Milosz, one of my favourite poets had tried twice his poet­i­cally non-compromising def­i­n­i­tion of what does it mean to be ‘an artist’; and his under­stand­ing, both quite roman­tic and yet clas­si­cal, is worth to be dis­played here. So, first of all, it reminds of being a child in a world made by adults and con­se­quently — to be always vul­ner­a­ble and ready enough to hear their indulging laugh­ter… And sec­ondly — it’s a deci­sion (a sane one yet tran­scend­ing the ‘com­mon sense’ level) of let­ting one­self to be the land of demons that rule here as if they were at home and speak numer­ous lan­guages — it means to be like an always open house, with­out a key in the doors, so your invis­i­ble guests get in and leave with an ease…

An artist (should write ‘a gen­uine one’ but there are no ‘fake artists’, just like an Art — it’s true or isn’t art) then would be less a strong, self-confident indi­vid­ual of the per­son­al­ity sharp as a knife and being dri­ven by an above-average ambi­tion and inge­nious ideas (Picasso’s , Damien Hirst’s type) but more — an extremely sen­si­tive, open, always curi­ous, inno­cent and naïve in a sense (as a delib­er­ately adopted atti­tude) char­ac­ter; so com­plex that appear­ing as sim­ple, so pow­er­ful that let­ting him­self to be a sort of ‘a medium’ for what is tran­scen­dent, super­nat­ural (Mark Tobey’s name comes to my mind). Does one have to be born this way, or — is it pos­si­ble to ‘made’ an artist out of noth­ing pre­ex­ist­ing in him/her innately? How does it all trans­late into func­tion­ing in this very world of “dead” God, ‘thirsty’ deal­ers and agents, traf­fic jams, mort­gages, hyper­mar­kets, rip-off men­tal­ity? Self-deceiving, com­pro­mises, psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tur­bances?
No, I don’t want you to get an impres­sion that I pose for a mar­tyr or a vic­tim… More I think about me and oth­ers being luck­ily ‘con­demned’ to art more I believe that the game is worth all the invest­ment and much, much more… It’s this sort of a chal­lenge that, liv­ing in the ancient times when gods were still alive and kick­ing, you would say: ‘I’ve been touched by some­thing that is greater than me, and I will never be the same man again. And it’s like a burn­ing fire some­times, but I wouldn’t exchange that for all the wealth of this world’

Sorry if sound­ing sen­ti­men­tal… Greet­ings to all art-aficionados…

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Excellent article in New Criterion

24 June 2007 in the art world by David | No comments

Go read this essay on the painful banal­ity of “mod­ern” art by Roger Kim­ball at the New Criterion: Why the Art World is a Dis­as­ter.
Almost none has any­thing to do with art as tra­di­tion­ally under­stood: mas­tery of a craft in order to make objects that grat­ify and enno­ble those who see them.
Thanks to WWG at the Cen­nini Forum. 

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