[jalisco555]

The most exciting thing that will happen as the eclipse passes will be the emergence of new talent all around us. There are thousands of artists around the world who have gone on creating art because they have not been able to do anything else with their lives, but whose work has been totally obscured.

I hope that day comes soon.

[MEG33]

I am of the ignorant masses who can't tell you anything about art except knowing what I enjoy seeing. There is room for a wide variety of taste,but many times it all seems like a fraud perpetrated by the artist and the dealer. I don't want my tax dollars supporting this fraud!

[Diago]

bump

[Molly Pitcher]

Thank you for the post. This article....and the book it's based on...interest me very much.

Jane - a MUST read!

[IronJack]

self-styled artist Piero Manzoni canned, labelled, exhibited and sold his own excrement (90 tins of it) in the early 1960s. The Tate has recently acquired No 68 of this canned edition for the sum of £22,300.

And they wonder why donations to the art community have been declining. The utter presumptuousness of the art elite is either appalling or laughable, depending on whether you have money invested in them.

[Katya]

"Edward Hopper, a painter much more deserving of such an accolade, was being totally marginalised. "

How true, although I think he's been revitalized over the last ten years.

[solzhenitsyn]

This article reminds me of a time when I was in the Boston MFA, enjoying some fine modern art -- that it, I was laughing out loud at it. I remarked to someone that one large painting could have just as well been done by a gorilla with a can of spray paint. This offended a very elegant woman, who gave me a an angry lecture to the effect that my problem was ignorance; I needed to study modern art, so I could learn to appreciate it. My response was that if you need a PhD to see the beauty in something, how good is it, really? The beauty of the best art is obvious and can be seen and felt by philistines like me, everywhere and in every age.

I like some modern art, but the field is dominated by phoniness and by crappola that won't stand the test of time.

[wardaddy]

I published representational historic and native american art as a side business once. It was fun but not terribly profitable.

The problem with modern art is that artistic interpretation of subject matter or expression has gone off the charts.

I confess...i like some modern art...some.

When I was last at MOMA and saw basically a neat stack of bricks that someone paid 350,000 dollars for i knew I "had left Kansas".

Performance art is where the truly "out there" reside...IMHO.

PS: A big problem with canvas "art" today is that are too many illustrators posing as artists. I know I'll take heat for that one. That has really been a problem one way or another since Remington and Russell here in the US.

[irish guard]

I am HTML impaired, but this article

http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/may03/139774.asp

appeared in our paper this morning. It is about a picture recently hung in our Milwaukee County Courthouse that depicts not only Martin Luther King, but has offensive Rodney King references, gang references and just plain stupid artistic work of a skull with a bullet hole in it, all in the name of ....yes...."Diversity" and the struggle blacks face.

Big problem is it hangs in a courthouse where justice is dispensed and nothing like tainting potential jurors with anit white, anti establishment, pro gang violence stuff on the wall in an 8' by 16' piece! Thankfully, our County Executive gets the joke, art for art's sake is sometimes very stupid. Any help with the HTML would be appreciated.

[mountaineer]

Manzoni drew a line on a strip of paper — a single long line, in ink — rolled it up, put it in a tube, sealed it and recorded the length of the line and the date of its making on a label pasted to the outside of the tube.

Not mentioned is that Mr. Manzoni won the "P. T. Barnum Award for Brilliance in Modern Art Marketing" several times, including a lifetime achievement award in 1967.

[MWS]

I can't stand modern art. I am of the philosophy that good art really ought to objectively represent something- an idea, an emotion, an object, etc. Modern art is all about subjectivism. It is reflective of the emergence of relativism as the mainstream philosophy, which strikes me as dangerous.

[Incorrigible]

It is not the need for art that has diminished, but the quality of art that is being shown. This is not because it is no longer being made. It is because a benighted view of art has a stranglehold on the few who choose what little art we are aloud to see. And the public acquiesce, because what else can they compare it with?

He could just have easily been writing about the news media in the US and UK.

[gitmo]

Being on the ignorant side when it comes to art, I looked up Rachel Whiteread’s House. I was surprised that it was actually interesting.

[AlbionGirl]

There is some place for “ought” in life, but none at all in art; art is a gift, not a duty.

I've always felt the same way. But seeing this declared by a curator makes me feel less conspicuous for not liking Impressionism, Opera and Jazz.

[tuna_battle_slight_return]

"Even Anti-Art is Art...That Is Why We Reject It"

[Ditter]

bump for later

[Richard Kimball]

Bump for later

[MarkL]

In my case, I guess I just don't get it... But then, even though my mother tried with all her might to get me to appreciate art, I never did, and would up the "heathen" that I am today...

One of many pieces of "modern art" that I've never "gotten" are the shuttle cocks on the lawn of the Nelson-Atkins museum of art in KC.

This may look like it's been retouched, but it's not! There are actually a bunch of big shuttle cocks (AKA badmitton birdies) laying at different angles on the lawn of the museum. While it's somewhat amusing, as I said, I just don't get it.

Or, for that matter, the Bartle Hall Convention Center "Sky Stations." Although they do look sort of cool when lit up at night.

Mark

[uglybiker]

"Modern Art" finally exposed to be the fraud that it is!

[Twinkie]

When you see "art" that consists of a few carelessly
scribbled black lines and green splatters that my dog,
Dixie, could do, if you consider buying it let me know
and I'll have Dixie paint one for you for free. It's
such a slap at true artists that spend hours really
using real techniques and painting something genuine.
If you want to see real work, look at some of Jim
Gray's art. This isn't advertising, it's just truth.

[JudgemAll]

Well, certain things are seen with the hand and not the eye. Other things cannot be seen at all, like emotions, hardwiring experiences, rythms, jurisdiction, time and truth. Of course, conveying these abstract texture onto a painting is difficult work and does require some programation of the viewer, but once the language is acquired for a certain cult following, it works.

Of course there is a difference between genuine abstract art and modern art, modern art being this replacement of pure pristine youth beauty with something utterly sterile, as if sterility was synonymous with purity. Modern artist are utterly deranged and castrated and it shows in their autistic works. The omnivorous extravagant consumption sought ends up being like eating brown herbs in a bowl of cold water as a diet.

What is worse is that the obsession of modernity with the seeking of eternal life through technologies or make up masks of sterility only accentuate the necrosis despite the attempt to hide it. No doctor can produce a miracle cure the way a pregnant woman can produce a miracle child with young cells coming out of the old.

As for having a Ph.D to comment art or blaming ignorance, this is preposterous, since accreditation is not synonymous with truth. Quite the contrary, accreditation is most often used effectively to hide the truth. Modern art would be the epitomy of modern progressist superstition in people and in their art, denying God, yet pretending to be this iconoclasm that is in fact very idolatrous.

Gives credence to seeing with your heart and not your eyes and hence God can take any eye visible shape form.