If you actually knew anything about art, you wouldn’t say this.
I think the kid’s work (presuming it is actually the kid’s work, and not an elaborate hoax of some sort) is very, very impressive. Balance of color and composition would be very good for a 20-year-old artist, let alone a 4-year-old.
And for those hung up about the money: Buying art, for many, is an investment. Let’s say that this kid does turn out to be, over the next ten years, a towering genius on the order of Kandinsky or Duchamp, and single-handedly drags the art world into a new conceptual paradigm. Wouldn’t her early work then become extraordinarily valuable? and wouldn’t those who got in on the ground floor be entitled to enjoy the financial rewards of their foresight? If somebody paid a thousand bucks for a sketch Picasso made when he was six, wouldn’t he get the last laugh when it sells for millions?
Sure, maybe it’ll turn out to be nothing. It might even be a fraud. But then again, it might not be. And even if you don’t know shit about art, as many of you clearly don’t, you must know something about money. Yes?
Normally I’m one of the first to rant against worthless Art, but I usually do it against the Art As Investment crowd, which I suppose this is potentially a part of.
But to be honest, I think the paintings this kid has done, or the ones they’re showing on the website, are actually really good.
But then, I always say, Art is what you like; There is no right or wrong.
I assume these critics would be open-minded enough to recognize the brilliance of a new Titian, Van Gogh or Rodin despite the artist’s “outmoded” traditional ideas of what art should look like?
I found Composition VIII to be pretty and colorful, but does it do anything for me? Nah.
I found Ancient Sounds to be ugly, but does it do anything for me? Nah.
Look, I’m not arguing that these artists aren’t skillful. I couldn’t do what they did anymore than I could do what Michaelangelo or Renoir did. The art just doesn’t appeal to me, that’s all. And I’d like it if those of us who have tastes in art that does not include what is currently stylish were not treated as though we were either ignorant or philistines.
If that’s what you’re doing, your presentation is all wrong. Pit the article instead of going into a tangent about the girl’s ability or your perceived lack thereof.
A print of this hangs in my former dentist’s office. I cannot look at it and not feel pain.
I agree with the posters who call this a hoax. In any event, I find them more interesting than Pollock’s work. IMO, Pollock’s stuff is shit. But then, what the fuck do I know? I just know what I like. (and I like what I know )
I’ve watched her (I believe it’s a female) work and she is very deliberate in her choice of colors and where she puts the paint. What may be just as important, she seems to know when she is done. Not bored with painting, but finished with the one she is working on. I have seen other animals that seem to have an aesthetic sense–and animals of the same species that appreciated it. I had a cat whose assemblages were very much appreciated by my other cats. They enjoyed watching her work (no anthropomorphizing–she would put one together and the others would watch the whole time) and would continue to “admire” it (walk around it looking at it) once she was done.
I have a book about animals that create art, but I can’t seem to find it now, and I can’t remember the name of it. Pretty neat book. Lousy read: the text is a bunch of blather about how the animals are expressing their reincarnated souls by drawing squiggly lines in the sand with a stick, but the big, glossy color photographs were fascinating. Mostly dogs, some cats, but a few horses and other animals.
I was trying to Google the title, though, and I came across this essay about animals who create art. It’s pretty interesting, but I was particularly amazed by this bit:
Anyone else want to claim that abstract art doesn’t “mean” anything?
Just goes to show that people can find patterns in anything if they look hard enough. The pitted surface of the moon looks like a human face, a group of stars looks like a giant mythological hunter, a cloud looks like a giraffe, and an elephant’s painting expresses “rhythm and verve”.
Lobsang, have you ever picked up a well (i.e. clearly) written book about modern art and studied it? My brother bought a two-volume set entitled Art Across Time for a class, which he later gave to me, and I’m enjoying it a great deal. It makes the meaning of even very difficult pieces come across quite clearly.
No, you haven’t. Seriously. The snippet you provided isn’t even close to what Joyce was doing in Finnegan’s Wake. I’m not saying I understand the passage Larry Mudd quoted, but it’s clearly not gibberish. There are obvious associative themes between his word choices, sometimes by meaning, sometimes by sound. I can’t analyze the whole passage: I haven’t read Finnegan’s Wake, and Joyce is way outside my ability to process without an annotated text to work with, but there are a couple of things that stand out to me:
Joyce invents a lot of words. Some are almost impenetrable, some are easier. “Ramskin” most likely is his word for a condom (usually made out of sheep’s intestine in Joyce’s day), and the associative imagery of “a bone, a pebble” makes me guess he’s refering to trash or roadside litter. The second half of the quote re-enforces that impression, as they sound damaged: chipped, chapped (scuffed) and cut into pieces (probably refering to the condom). And (assuming this is in the original text and not a transciption error on Larry Mudd’s part) “allways” has a double meaning: the trash (or whatever it is) is always cut up, but it’s also cut up “all ways,” or “into very small pieces.” If I’m right in my reading of “allways” and “ramskin,” then there’s a clearly violent/sexual theme going on here. It is a very small intuitive leap to go from “mutilated condom” to “mutilated penis.”
In this sentence and the next, we have several direct references to the history of written communication. Note the word “papyr,” which is not just a idiosyncratic spelling of “paper,” but is also a truncated version of the word “papyrus,” a primitve type of paper and the root of the word we use today. It’s probably significant that the word “made” is initially misprounced so as to sound like “mead,” but I don’t have enough context to know why.
“Hides,” of course, refers to the forerunner of papyrus, when scraped hides were used to record important information. The phrase “hides and hints and misses” has a great rhythm to it. We get a touch of alliteration with “hides and hints,” a play on words with “hints and misses,” and the associative meanings of “hides” and “misses.” If something is hidden from you, you are likely to miss it. Joyce was pretty infamous for his dirty mind, so I’m certain there’s some additional meaning to “miss” in this passage, but I can’t guess what.
What does the sentence as a whole mean? No idea. But it clearly means something.
IIRC, Finnegan’s Wake is supposed to roughly parrallel the journey of Odysseus, although I might be confusing it with another of Joyce’s novels. Normally, I’d do a Google check to confirm this, but I’m trying to interpret this passage blind. Working from that assumption, I’m guessing this sentence refers to the protagonist’s “journey” through Dublin. Note the distinction made between “finally” and “endlike.” The meeting will take place after an extended period of time, but will not yet be the end of the journey. I don’t know if “Mister Typus” and “Mistress Tope” are re-occuring characters in the novel or some symbolic creation for the purposes of this passage. Note that “Typus” continues the (if you’ll pardon the pun) literary symbolism of the previous sentence (“type”) and sounds suspciously close to “typhus,” which may work into another, larger theme or plot point of the book. No idea what to do with “Mistress Tope,” although I like the word “typtopies” to refer to their children. Wether they refer to actual children or metaphorical children isn’t clear from this one sentence.
I can’t make heads or tales of the rest of the passage, except to note the re-occurance of “typtopies,” this time reversed and used as an adjective: “toptypiscal.” (“typical” might be another association for that neologism, but that’s just me free associating.)
Now, I may very well be pulling every last word of that out of my ass. If I am, though, I’m having trouble performing the same stunt with your computer generated quote. Now, that could be because I already know there’s no meaning to that passage, and I already “know” there’s meaning to Finnegan’s Wake, and am somehow deluding myself into finding what’s not really there in one quote, and deluding myself into not finding it in the other.
Or, it could be that Finnegan’s Wake really is one of the greatest novels ever written in any language, and your quote is just random gibberish.
You don’t find it at all interesting that she was looking at a painting by an elephant, without knowing it’s by an elephant, and says it shows “the same kind of rhythm and verve one sometimes observes in the little dance steps [of] elephants”? Is that a straight up coincidence, or what?
That’s the thing…I don’t see a mess in those paintings. There is a keen sense of composition and color there which I would think is fairly evident, but apparently not.
With all honesty, I would I would be proud if I had made those paintings, as a 29-year-old.
I mean, look at the Pollackesque painting. Look at the dark borders, and all the white scribbles near the edges. The white scribbles disappear towards the center, which is dominated by hues of red and yellow. The shapes of the scribbles all concentrate the painting toward the center. There is an undeniable “rhythm” and balance to this painting. Like I said before, this is not the work of an ordinary 4-year-old.
And the first painting, an expressionistic piece reminiscent of Kandinsky, once again, the kid shows some innate understanding of color and compositional blanace. The painting is not just a haphazard jumble of colors. There’s a beautiful interplay between the complementary hues blue and orange, concentrating on that circular form near the center of the painting. The colors and forms all lead the eye toward this focal point. There is a playful movement created through the contrasting colors and forms. And this is not some bullshit art talk. This is what I see.
The middle painting is not quite so impressive, but it still shows an unusual understanding of form and color.
We’re not bullshitting you. This is very interesting work for a four-year-old. Had a 25-year-old produced this, I would say it’s solid and compositionally sound, but ultimately very derivative. For a child, it’s nothing short of incredible.
Again, though, this raises the question of what the purpose of art is.
I’m with you, in that i find it very interesting to have the meaning in artworks explained to me by an expert. The feeling of being educated like this is often akin to having the clouds part and the sun come through—everything is suddenly clear and you have a new appreciation for what you’re looking at.
Yet some people argue that if an audience cannot find meaning in an artwork without having it explained by someone with long years of expertise in the field, then that piece has failed one of the fundamental tests of a work of art—its ability to communicate.
Of course, starting down this road is probably only going to lead to the same old argument about “good” art versus “bad” art, “popular” art versus “elite” art, “highbrow” versus “lowbrow,” even, following Clement Greenberg, “avant garde” versus “kitsch.” That debate never seems to reach any satisfactory conclusion.
Sure, and as a basic logical proposition that’s fine.
But it’s also a reductionist and essentially evasive answer that really fails to take into account the fact that the gradations of artistic knowledge and aesthetic taste are much too complex to be encompassed by a simplistic linguistic analogy.
I spent several years in a *Finnegans Wake *reading group. Needless to say, it changed the way I read and write; it changed my relationship to language.
Mining Finnegans Wake for its gems is a synergistically productive task: for each measure of effort, you get back a double or triple measure of reward.
That said,** Mr2001** is correct in that a computer program could probably produce text that’s just as opaque to him, or to anyone else not interested in digging for what’s diggable. But he’s wrong if he thinks a computer could produce a text that were as rich in buried treasures as FW.
It might interest him, incidentally, that there’s a pretty large subset of people in A.I. research who are interested in FW.
BUt more on track, “found art” is perfectly valid, artistically. THe paintings of that girl–and of elephants–can become art depending upon their context.
)