If you can get really close you can get lost in Johns’ brush strokes, just as with Pollock it is the size, shape, and placement of every “random” (he did sweeten his paintings) dot.
Johns’ work doesn’t make me want to hurl.
If you look up “saccharine” in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of Norman Rockwell. He’s an artist, and culturally important – but Johns is more relevant to art, IMHO.
I can see “sentimental” or “earnest” for Rockwell, but not saccharine. He painted straight up, representational, narrative art - but he was damn good at it.
I guess it depends on your frame of reference. In my mind, Edward Hopper is the epitome of 20th century American representational art. In comparison, Rockwell absolutely seems overly sweet and romantic and chaste. But compared to Kinkade he looks as badass as Francis Bacon.
I wonder if Grant Wood and his buddies aren’t a closer fit for Rockwell.
Grant Wood, a deeply closeted homosexual in mid-20th c. Iowa (where they barely tollerated heterosexuals), and Norman Rockwell, who suffered from depression and whose wife also was herself so depressed that she self-medicated with alcohol and eventually died of heart failure after electroshock therapy.
I don’t know that saccharine is really the right word. Rockwell’s paintings often created strong emotions in the viewer, and they could be sad as well as happy. In later years his paintings become overtly political. “The Problem We All Live With,” one of his most famous from that period, has already been mentioned. Here’s another one, “Southern Justice”:
I have opinions. My main opinion on art is “fuck importance.” For the past 40 years anything can be called art – there are no significant barriers to break and all new “insights” are of the piddling variety.
There’s still vitality in motion pictures, architecture, and (probably) music. But gallery art is as unimportant as 14th century egg temperas after the renaissance, perspective and oil painting hit. Yeah, there’s some nice stuff, but really nothing to get excited about.
I’m glad there’s still fine art; the interplay of commercial art and fine art helps keep new styles popping up. But important? Nah. There’s just stuff you like and stuff you don’t like.
No, it’s the stuff I like and the unutterable crap you like. 