211–220 of 271 posts
I went to design school, I visited Art Basil. Agree++ Seriously, maybe it's because I'm really a hacker that was interested in design but "Art" as in the starving/gallery kind is 99% crap - 1% mind blowing.
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I went to the MOMA recently, and one piece was literally a piece of cardboard with some silver spray paint and a few holes in it. My response was, "I could have done that. There's no art to it." That and many other pieces could have benefitted from an explanation. I see no problem with people "reading their way" through a museum. I did that at the Met, because I was curious about the background to many of the paintin…
There is a large branch of modern art, "conceptual art", which is precisely dedicated to making art of anything, just a concept. Typical examples are ordinary objects, sometimes not even transformed (for instance, a water bottle on a column). It can be traced back to the 1917 "ready-mades". There, the art is in the intention of the artist and nothing else. Sometimes you may feel cheated. Sometimes, it's brilliant. Th…
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There are ideas, notions, feelings, etc. that cannot be adequately expressed through statements alone. Hence, art.
This statement is meaningless as is and I think if you were to make it precise you would find it ridiculous.
I don't "get" sports. I do not understand the appeal of watching a bunch of dudes run around a field trying to get a ball in a goal. Not to mention all the evidence we've seen of what sports like football and boxing do to the bodies of athletes. (Or what that may imply about the organizational bodies and spectators of those sports.) But, I don't get to pretend like the sports world is full of pretentious dickheads. K…
>But, I don't get to pretend like the sports world is full of pretentious dickheads. Kinda funny how that works. Somehow what "normal" people do is always right and good Uh, that's what pretentiousness is. Sports fans don't (by and large) act like they're better than you because they understand what's happening and you don't.
He talks about the evolution of art toward something that can only be appreciated if you know the theory behind it, and also about the interplay of the (poor) artist and the (rich) patron and the psychological aspects of what the patron it buying (often: they get to be an "insider", with the whole notion of being an insider being something that the artist has constructed.)
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My SO and I promised ourselves to give an honest shot at trying to grok the exhibits in Tate Modern, but this set was the final straw for us: http://www.flickr.com/photos/appelogen/5179792842/
What's wrong with that exactly? It looks like a fine painting, though quite unoriginal. There is definitely a "snobbery of philistines" who want to not understand modern art because it isn't about pretty pictures. Making pretty pictures has been outdated in the 1840 by photography, and it's been nearly 100 years since Duchamps presented his "fountain". If you like pretty pictures, there are people painting dolphins j…
I don't understand how you can call out snobbery at the same time that you equate painting from life with dolphins jumping in front of a full moon, and imply that photography made life painting completely obsolete.
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This statement is meaningless as is and I think if you were to make it precise you would find it ridiculous.
What's wrong with saying that there are some things better expressed in mediums other than text?
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The OP point was not about art being mere satisfaction for art nerds, but that there may be an effort to appreciate it. That's true of most art forms. It just happens that which effort depends partly on the person. It seems that for some reason, people are put off by what's around modern and contemporary art (the social aspects of people participating in it, etc…). Nothing prevents you from going beyond that, appreci…
Re:Rothko Except Rothko was a lousy artist before he hit on the black on black rectangle thing. A study of his development as an artist shows somebody who is almost talent free. I think the point is that much of modern art is so self referential that it has become almost devoid of any sort of external meaning. This is easy to observe. Sit for a few hours in the modern art wing of your local free public museum and obs…
I accept that you think he was almost talentless, but he wasn't. I think he was a great talent long before he became well known for the typical rothko stuff, and it wasn't just talent in the modern sense but also in the craft sense, when he was a figurative painter especially of new york scenes (try googling his painting of the new york subway).
Your anecdote about the vatican collection is a good one. But it doesn't mean that modern art is worthless, or even suggest that it is.
There's a lot of subtlety in rothko's brushwork that most people don't pick up on. Really they're large, complex pictures but on a different level from most painting. I saw about 20 of his paintings in the turner/rothko exhibition in London about three years ago, and seeing them in a space that suits them brings out their impressive quality, and it became hard to see them as "just rectangles" or however you want to put it.
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Re:Rothko Except Rothko was a lousy artist before he hit on the black on black rectangle thing. A study of his development as an artist shows somebody who is almost talent free. I think the point is that much of modern art is so self referential that it has become almost devoid of any sort of external meaning. This is easy to observe. Sit for a few hours in the modern art wing of your local free public museum and obs…
The old statues are more relevant to many people because it is so amazing that they have been preserved and it gives them a window into old things, and because old things achieve a sort of special-object status especially in connection with religion (relics...) Moreover, the old things have already been through ruthless filtering, and the things which remain tend to have more inherent interest than the average recent…