Too easy:
Do you in fact KNOW anything about the earlier history of the abstract expressionist movement?
Do you know anything about art history?
Judging the aesthetics of an object is one thing; judging the motivations of historical individuals without any knowledge whatsoever is something else entirely, and I hope you’d call me on it if I ever pulled that in a debate with you.
It’s not a great movie, but I’d be interested to hear your reaction to the movie “Pollock.”
That’s a movie? Is it any good at all?
‘They’ /= ‘All Artists’. Try again.
My suspicions about their motivations are merely suspicions. Influenced by my own healthy reservoir of cynicism. Did I ever claim them to be fact?
Sorry. My Mistake. It was the abstract expressionists who were just in it for the money. :smack:
CandidGamera, this will no doubt be my last post to this thread, because your ability to backpedal in circles is making my head spin.
My post was a broad, obvious, cartoony parody of you. Not the people you’re arguing with. Not the artists you’re denigrating. Not the people who slap paint onto velvet and sell it to people who worship Elvis alongside Jesus. You.
I don’t know if you are unable to understand that or simply unwilling to. I don’t care. This thread really does tell me all I need to know about you, one way or the other.
Oh, I’m sorry - you’re assuming that because you erroneously tried to generalize my statement in the post that I was responding to that it meant that I automatically was following suit with the wide-open expansion of my focus. Sorry, no.
Wow!
Ususally a ‘moder art sucks’ thread just dies after a bunch of people attack the art.
I’m so happy this one is really going!
All right, I’ll let you explain. Who, exactly, is in it for the money?
I think the only answer you’ll get is something along the lines of “Those who are in it fir the money are the ones who are in it for the money.”
Damn, that looks like a perfect painting of some of the openGL glitches I’ve seen in video games.
/Makes notes to start screenshotting them and selling them for obscene amounts. :dubious:
Why I hate Abstract “Art”:
I took an art class as is required at my class a few years ago. The professor loved Mondrian. He had one hanging in his office (it may have been a reproduction, I don’t know what these things go for). Anyway, he shows us a slide of Mondrian and asks the class questions about it. I point out that there was no true skill going into a picture of six cris-crossing lines with one box they formed filled in by blue, another filled in by yellow and another filled in by red.
It’s just because it’s a slide he tells me, I’ll get the one in my office, you’ll see. So he disappears for fifteen minutes and returns with a framed picture. He sets up a chair in the front of the class (a huge lecture hall with at least 100 students) and invites me down. He holds up the picture right in front of me and tells me to look at it.
It’s a 50 x 50 grid of variously colored squares. Inside each square was a variously colored circle. Sometimes the circle and the square were the same color so all you saw was an empty square. This was art he said.
My response: This doesn’t require very much talent, it’s basically arts and craft day at my cousin’s preschool. A six year old with the appropriate restraint to not eat the glue could create a picture equally as good.
That’s why I hate modern art.
I will admit though that I liked it a lot and if I had the money would gladly hang it (or a reprint) in my house. But to say that a 50 x 50 grid of colored squares is some kind of artistic masterwork is ludicrous.
CandidGamera, you rule!
As I said just a few posts ago, it is a suspicion. Therefore, there aren’t specific targets. But maybe I should take this time to explain why I have that suspicion, though I’ve touched on the issues already. I’m a cynic. I believe that most people are motivated by whatever benefits them the most. In any culture, after a long enough period has passed, an opportunity arises for counterculture. ‘Rebels’, so to speak. Maybe they’ve got something genuine to rebel against, maybe not. It varies. Eventually the counterculture is co-opted back into the main culture and becomes routine, or disappears. It’s the cycle of life. And it moves us all.
Like I said. 
Should I congratulate you on your predictive ability, or your keen mastery of the English language that allowed you to read my posts and determine that I wasn’t accusing specific artists? 
Anyways, folks, this is fun and all, but I have stuff to do. I’ll try to check back in tomorrow. Try to keep the uproar to a minimum. Maybe elect a chief art-snob, and filter all comments through him or her?
So it’s a guess. You should know that on this board, that doesn’t cut it. And you have identified specific targets – the artists whose work you are decrying.
You may have a point about counterculture, but it’s a long way from there to “they’re in it for the money.” In fact, most counterculture I’ve seen despises money. The hippies of the 60s were not often warned by their fathers to cut down on the work hours, after all.
I vote for you.
There’s only one person turning up his nose in this thread … .
Could this whole thing be a variation of “90% of everything is crap”? I mean, surely there are people out there who have tried to pull the scam that CG is describing. In my long association with the art world, I can’t think of anyone who’s done so successfully–although arguments could be made for Warhol, Koons, and the guy who’s name I can’t think of; comic book panels? sploding planes?–anyway. But those people are artists, they’re just more “conceptual” than “graphical.”
“Art” != “2D rectangles.”
What CG doesn’t acknowledge, and what no one seems to have mentioned really, is that Cage’s 4:33 and the simplistic works that CG doesn’t get are just the tip of the iceberg; the end of the story; the receipt for the transaction.
To many people, an abstract expressionist painting is more about process than product: the painting itself is just what’s left when the dust of creating it has settled: it’s a document of what the artist experienced while he was painting it.
And even with more conceptual stuff that’s not about process, it can be about a huge idea expressed in a small medium.
CG is focusing on the physical product, as if it existed without a context.
Art is FAR more about what it does to you head than what it does to your eyes, CG. Much of the art that you denigrate isn’t about craft or skill or manual dexterity: it’s about thinking of a new way to say something, not necessarily with language or pictograms.
You’re looking for art where 1=1 and a pipe is a pipe. That’s a very, very small subset of “Art,” and, frankly, is the easiest kind to produce. The hardest kind of art is the kind that requires thought and, more importantly, carries thought from one person to another. Who are you to say that only literal imagery is a valid way to accomplish that?
Nothing is more abstract that written language, but you fail to acknowledge the systematic education that is required in order to understand it. Art encompasses ALL languages, and they don’t all work from the same phrasebook.
Don’t want to learn Icelandic? Fine. Cool. But it’s just childish to roll your eyes at someone reading an Icelandic poem and saying ANY ape can run his eyes from left to right over a row of black squiggles; that doesn’t mean he’s actually READING.
I’m not sure why. Lobsang has apparently tired, I’ve conceded, and at this point it appears CandidGamera is merely practicing stubborness.