If there’s anywhere in the world that I’m likely to find someone who appreciates things that few have an appreciation for, it’s here. This board is diverse enough in its tastes to include an appreciation for the most avant-garde stuff.
That said, can anyone here enlighten me as to the appeal of artistic excrement?
I know Dave Barry is a humor columnist, but that tidbit definitely appears to be for real.
Is there anyone here well-versed enough in appreciation of modern art to tell us why this "project has anything remotely resembling artistic value, much less the monetary value assigned to it at auction in Sotheby’s?
I’ve heard about this before, a long time ago. I couldn’t tell you why it’s considered art.
I did hear from a friend about an anthropology class he took where each class was supposed to bury something for the next year’s class, which they were supposed to uncover and use to reconstruct the previous year’s civilization. His class buried a container of excrement. God knows what the next year’s class made of it.
Or what the aliens from Alpha Centauri will make of the stuff dave Barry describes, when thety try to reconstruct our civilization.
Can we please, please, please avoid the lame discussion about what art is. You know, the one that always comes up. The one where someone says: “yeah, but I know it when I see it.”
You think it’s preposterous that the Tate Gallery spent so much on canned shit? Piero would agree with you. Of course it is. That’s the whole point. “Since shitty art sells, I’m going to make this work real shitty.” However, he put it in a pretty package, and that’s where the message is. Manzoni was pissed off at all the art that was nothing but fancy packaging with nothing on the inside. It’s an insult. A joke. That’s where the value is. (I’m not talking about money).
Of course, it’s not art that’s made to look at. It’s not even meant to make people think all that much. It’s meant to cause something. The fact that 41 years later, art collectors still take shit because they fell for Manzoni’s joke is proof that it was successful.
Rembrandt used feces as a pigment in his paintings. Of course, there was no “message” behind this, it was just that Northern European painters didn’t have access to the same weath of sources as Italians, such as ground up ancient mosaic tiles, or dyes available from the trade routes that converged on the Mediterreanean.
Which is not to say that Rembrandt didn’t have a developed sense of the vulgar. There is a least one etching of him of a peasant woman defecating under a tree.