Storm Warning to the Art World: Everything is going to Change! (Great Read -'bout time!)

Plenair magazine (Reprint via the Art Renewal Center) ^ | FR Post June 2005 | Paul Solderberg

[jocon307]

ByDesign, that is one of the best posts I have ever read here on FR! You have kept you head while those about you were losing theirs. MORE POWER TO YOU!

vannrox, thanks for this great thread!

[Sam Cree]

placemark

[patj]

On a guided tour of the Art Museum, we came to a canvas painted all one color, no design whatever, I said, "I have this at my house, we call it walls." Dirty looks followed. When we came to the Jackson Pollock display, I said, "Don't you get the feeling that this guy was laughing all the way to the bank?" That did it. The guide berated me as did several in the group. I laughed.

[FreedomPoster]

Actually, dihydrogen monoxide is the proper chemical term. There is a very good web site about this pollutant to be found here:

http://www.dhmo.org/

[SlowBoat407]

My wife is an artist who must fight the 1913 model constantly. She is being left out of more and more art shows, where she sells most of her work, because her art (ceramic relief) does not fit in with the Modernist philosophy that art must be painful, enraging, political, and above all, lacking in any evidence of mastery of the medium. Last year, at one outdoor show, Best in Show was won by an "artist" who cut out photographs and pasted them sheets of newspaper, then mounted grommets on the whole thing to hang them. His work was "a comment on his nomadic life as a child", when his family moved quite a bit.

My wife called it a cry for help.

Bravo to ARC and to PAM for taking the beach head!

[Robert A Cook PE]

Those are "paintings" ... ?!?!?!

(Quiet sound of awed amazement ......)

The colors, imagery, and beauty are amazing!

[FreedomPoster]

Nice. In particular, I liked:

"Dandies who held sway over patrons with more money than brains took advantage of the human weakness of ego. Rich people became easy prey for the big sell."

On this theme, also see post #60.

[Republicanprofessor]

If your focus is, instead, the beauty and power of the natural world, then your subjects are infinite; but if your focus is yourself, then there really isn't a whole lot to say.

I maintain that you can still work from your own view of the outside world and make original and personal art that can speak to others.

And in all those centuries, the role of the public was to view and admire artworks so as to be inspired and uplifted.

Not quite. Until the Enlightenment in the late 18th century, the public was quite excluded. The rich paid for the art and enjoyed it, but if you think Louis XIV opened Versailles for the public to enjoy the art, you have another think coming. Chartres and other Gothic cathedrals were not built so much for the public to enjoy as it was for the public to feel the power of God and to worship as the Catholic Church told them to.

But artists who offend people - by, for example, pasting elephant dung on a painting of the Madonna, or by hanging statutes of lynched children from the branches of real trees in town squares, or by painting pictures of young girls, their dresses raised, being probed by octopus tentacles5 - are praised by the Art Establishment for their originality, their vision, their genius.

Not all modern and abstract artists do this. I do find this work reprehensible. But the only alternative is not perfect realism that the public laps up. There is a whole range of art that is not offensive, and maybe the internet will provide more accessibility to these striving artists.

I do believe that the tide will change, but I don't think it will be so sudden. The instigation was 9/11, when the leftists' rant that there is no true right and wrong was dashed. The relativism of Postmodernism is dead. And the future is for a wide range of art: from realism to a new, warmer and more meaningful kind of abstraction.

I see this as similar to Giotto's developments in 1300s. It took the world a century to absorb his innovations in modeling and realism. And then around 1400 Masaccio added realistic light to Giotto's mass and weight and there was a revolution in art.

Giotto's Kiss of Judas from 1305 and Masaccio's Adam and Eve from about 1420.

But now I think the revolution may be in abstraction. It's taken a century for the world to absorb the abstraction of Picasso (and to work through the Manneristic postmodern ennui). Now it is time for a new kind of abstraction, I think. But the public will always love realism, and if that's what they support, so be it. Others may want and find something new in various kinds of personal abstraction.

[Republicanprofessor]

Art ping.

Let me know if you want on or off this ping list.

[Republicanprofessor]

Is that a Caravaggio in the bottom of your post 22? Please put some labels in your posts, if only in a list at the bottom. Then I can learn something.

Are you on the art ping list? Please ping me when you post an article so the rest can read it too.

[Sam Cree]

Thanks.

My main area of appreciation in art is Western art, of which the peak of technical skills was probably reached in the 19th century. IMO. For whatever reason, much of this art has been overlooked.

I keep an open mind concerning abstract art, though, as there is clearly some great stuff around that isn't srictly representational.

[little jeremiah]

Thanks for the personal story. It's cheering to know that there are still "real" artists today.

[little jeremiah]

I knew someone would know about him.

Which is worse - the so-called artist, or the stoopid idiots at museums who purchased canned s**t?

[PGalt]

Great article. Thanks for the post. Thanks for the ping.

[Terabitten]

[kayak]

bttt

[two23]

The best came first

[subterfuge]

Interesting post By.

[subterfuge]

Wow. That first pic looks like a photo. Is it?

[vannrox]

Is there some way that you can put me on the art pink list. I really don't have any idea on how to do it.