Posted on 04/05/2002 12:36:30 PM PST by Caleb1411
Artists today, having for the most part given on beauty, meaning, and aesthetic standards, are trying instead to be "challenging," or shocking. But this becomes harder and harder to do.
Blasphemy elicits a charge from Christians, but that has become too easy. The excrement motif - immersing Christ on the Cross in urine, followed by pelting the Virgin Mary with fecal matter - has been done to death. Besides, how can blasphemy have much of an effect in a culture for which nothing is sacred?
The Holocaust is, sort of, sacred, so why not "challenge" viewers by trivializing that?
This seems to be what artists and curators were thinking when New York's Jewish Museum, of all places, put together the show "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art." It features work such as Alan Schechner's "It's the Real Thing: Self-Portrait at Buchenwald," a photograph of emaciated concentration camp inmates, into which the artist has digitally inserted a picture of himself, mugging with a Diet Coke.
Other works in the show include concentration camps made out of Legos and Zyklon B gas canisters done up with the logos of Chanel and Tiffany's. The controversy the show has provoked and the Holocaust survivors protesting outside are doubtless considered part of the art.
Another artistic movement is to sculpt using the medium of dead bodies. Damien Jacques started the fad by posing cut-up cadavers in still lifes. He only exhibited the photographs, though (such as the head of a dead man on a plate, surrounded by vegetables). Later, he exhibited the actual bodies of cut-up animals, displayed in large glass boxes filled with formaldehyde.
Now, in the predictable course of an artistic movement, an artist is displaying actual human corpses that he has mutilated. German artist Gunther von Hagens is exhibiting "Body World" at the Atlantis Gallery in London. The show consists of some 30 corpses that he has skinned, embalmed in plastic, and mounted in various bizarre poses.
Another artistic movement that has spanned the 20th century to our own time is minimalism. Artists began wondering about what is the least line or gesture that can constitute a work of art? Picasso drew pictures, such as the famous Don Quixote print, that consisted of a single line, undertaken without lifting his pen. These and similar drawings were interesting and aesthetically pleasing. But then artists had to see just how minimal they could get.
Before long, they gave us the black canvas. Then, the empty frame. More recently, artists have come up with "conceptual art." This means there is no actual art, just the idea for a work of art. The typed description is put up on the wall of the gallery.
This year, minimalism may have scored its greatest triumph. The Turner Prize is England's most prestigious award for contemporary art, carrying a prize of close to $30,000 and exhibition at the posh Tate Gallery. The winner: Martin Creed's "The Lights Going On and Off."
It consists of an empty room. Viewers go in and after awhile, the lights come on. Then the lights go out. That's all there is to it. The winner of the Turner Prize for the best contemporary work of art is nothing, and the particular nothingness put forth by the artist won him $30,000.
But there are signs that the culture is finally waking up to the irrelevance of its art world, which as Tom Wolfe has pointed out consists of no more people than would populate an American small town. The Turner Prize is inspiring not admiration but ridicule. A genuine artist, Jacqueline Crofton, threw eggs into that empty room, whereupon the Tate Gallery prissily banned her from the premises for life.
At the corpse show, a father named Martin Wynness, saying that the exhibit was disrespectful to the dead, poured paint on the floor and threw a blanket over a display of the body of a pregnant woman, cut open to display the body of her dead baby. He was charged with "vandalism," as if the artist's desecrations were not vandalism of a more monstrous kind.
Art reflects the culture. If so, ours really is a culture of death and, at the same time, a culture of triviality. Have we bottomed out, both culturally and artistically? Have the events of 9/11, with the need to actually defend Western civilization and its values, changed anything? Could life be breathed back into these dead bones?
One New York artist, trying no doubt to bring together minimalism and the aesthetics of shock, proclaimed that the airplane bringing down the World Trade Center was the greatest work of art in the world. He must have been puzzled at the reaction. A retrospective of his works was canceled. Other artists stopped speaking to him. The art world finally found something it could not stomach.
Because, if judged by those, or any OBJECTIVE standard - they'd be called what they are: talentless.
And certainly not artists.
Huh?
Hmmmm. Perhaps you'd care to provide us with that set of OBJECTIVE standards that separates good art from bad art.... ;-)
Tourist Guy?
I keep asking if there are any artists who will produce, say, a model of the Kaaba made of elephant dung, or a play depicting Mohammed having sex with his male disciples, or a photograph of the Koran in a jar of urine.
That will be challenging.
Y'know how Rush says feminism is basically "ugly women need love (attention) too"?
I think that's modern art, too.
And the thing is, people are embarassed to look at, oh, Norman Rockwell or Frank Frazetta (illustrators both), and admire their work. But, they'll flock to a showing of mindless exercises in color mixing. Why? Because the enlightened say "it's art" and if you don't get it, you're, well, of a lower class, shall we say?
My coffee table contains nary a modern artist. Instead, I have collections of Robert McGinnis and Gil Elvgren.
Want meaning? Here's meaning: the cowboy is the good guy, and girls are pretty. Next question?
Isn't there some ?art? that consists of eggs thrown on an empty canvas?
They should have paid J. Crofton for her artistic contribution in that nothingness room!! LOL!
Maybe a stink bomb would get the message across. (Maybe I'd better not give a budding ?artist? any ideas!)
... which would lead to a work called "bad artist in pool of blood."
We all agree: modern art is defined by how much BS you can inject into your description of the content and meaning of your work.
Example: Dot in the center of a white sheet of paper, suitable framed and matted. "This represents the isolation of the individual in the esentially empty modern culture of post-war America." Alternate interpretation by critic who hasn't read said explanation: "A hymn to simplicity and a rejection of non-essential decoration."
My daughter has decided to go to law school and paint on the side. LOL!
Well I liked it. I thought, intentionally or unintentionally, it was a satire of the whole gallery-minimalist-object oriented boring current art world that this article criticizes. The room was better off empty!
Here's a link about it:
Beauty in the eye of the beholder is equivalent to morality being in the eye of the beholder. For many centuries GOD was the source of beauty; of course this notion would be scoffed at today, by the current "artists".
Brian.
"Hagen! was tust du ?"
"Was tatest du ?"
I'm hoping to cash in on a little NEA largesse. The NEA awarded $1,500 to a poet for "lighght" (that's not the title; it's the whole poem) in 1997 [105th Congress, 9/17/97] I think I've got at least a million dollars' worth of one-word poems in me.
One day a wag -- what would the wretch be at? --
Shifted a letter of the cipher RAT,
And said it was a god's name! Straight arose
Fantastic priests and postulants (with shows,
And mysteries, and mummeries, and hymns,
And disputations dire that lamed their limbs)
To serve his temple and maintain the fires,
Expound the law, manipulate the wires.
Amazed, the populace that rites attend,
Believe whate'er they cannot comprehend,
And, inly edified to learn that two
Half-hairs joined so and so (as Art can do)
Have sweeter values and a grace more fit
Than Nature's hairs that never have been split,
Bring cates and wines for sacrificial feasts,
And sell their garments to support the priests.
From The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce
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