Sorry, you do. The art that you see is filtered by the "art world."
You might get lucky and see something by accident, but what of the art that never gets any play because art critics don't find it fashionable?
I e-mailed Steyn with the following question"
Good luck. But don't hold your breath, he's a busy man.
Pablo Picasso
Picasso is an interesting case. Artists hate Picasso and their hatred bleeds into their evaluation of his work and it has nothing to do with politics. At the end of his life, he would doodle on a cocktail napkin, sign it and sell it.
> I also never slam or generalize the forum
Not much of a stretch of this and many other issues.
I try not to be so prejudicial, but to each his own.
It turns out I don't have to. Steyn's tribute to her follows his article at the head of this thread. Here it is
Leni Riefenstahl was a brilliant cinematographer and editor who could compose and edit anything, except, in the end, her own life. If only she’d been able to snip one problematic decade out of her 101 years, we’d know her as a game old gal who in her 60s went off to live with an African tribe, in her 70s learned to scuba dive, and at the age of 98 survived a plane crash in the Sudan.
If only it weren’t for that awkward patch…
In the 1930s, Fraulein Riefenstahl put her formidable film-making talents to the cause of the Third Reich, and produced one of the most remarkable films ever made: Triumph Of The Will. Granted that audiences were a lot less media savvy in 1934 and granted that a people dumb enough to fall for National Socialism will fall for anything, it’s still hard to believe that even in its day anyone accepted what remained Fraulein Riefenstahl’s official explanation to the end – that this was just a “documentary record” of the 1934 annual party convention. Whatever Triumph Of The Will is, it’s not a documentary. Its language is that of feature films – not Warner Brothers gangster movies or John Ford westerns, but rather the supersized genres, the epics and musicals where huge columns of the great unwieldy messy mass of humanity get tidied and organized – and, if that isn’t the essence of fascism, what is? Today, you can see Riefenstahl’s influence in the work of George Lucas (Star Wars) and Paul Verhoeven (Starship Troopers), both film-makers for whom the principal thrill of directing seems to be the opportunity it affords to subordinate the individual.
Her directing career died with the Third Reich. “Art is my life and I was deprived of it,” said Leni Riefenstahl. Tough. Whatever her disclaimers, she made evil look better than it had any right to: a cautionary tale in the art of film.
Someone made a documentary of Reifenstal's life in which she explains what she did and why she did it. Steyn is far too glib in his descriptions...but he does recognize the power of art - particularly in his last sentence.
Sorry, you do. The art that you see is filtered by the "art world."
Wrong again. I just can't be lazy and uninterested. Great fortunes have been repeatedly made by perceptive people with taste of their own and the courage to pursue it...and the Internet has made it so much easier.
Pablo Picasso
I have my own view of Picasso's work. I'd care about what others say only if I find their views insightful or if I were trying to put a price on one of his pieces.