Yeh, Delvoye has art that spews out shit as regularly as Old Faithful. Or is it that he has machines that spew out art as regularly as Old Faithful.
Either way, the critics lap it up.
Speaking of Pop Culture:
NASCAR: (as someone else, perhaps PJ O’Rourke, called it) a bunch of cars making left turns
Las Vegas: where among the giant casinos (an oxymoron, since casino means little house), is the Belagio, where gondolas ply indoor canals. Gondolas, in the desert. Is there a better metaphor for “fucking useless” in the art world?
Norman Rockwell was awesome. So was Walt Disney. Neither had had happy lives growing up, and so they, by their own admission, created worlds as they wished could be, not as they were. If you believe that the function of art is to serve humanity’s understanding of itself (as I do), you’ll agree that they were very good craftsmen, very good businessmen, and perfectly decent human beings. But not great artists.
When I started reading your post I thought you were getting set to praise Detroit for its importance to the nation (and all the working-class Midwestern Americana that calls to mind, Suzi Quatro, Bob Seger, heartland rock, Detroit Rock City, …). But it only led up to a banal somewhat strained metaphor. Well, keep trying.
I’ve been to East Berlin and seen some of their socialist realistic murals - I’ll take Warhol and Pollock any day. Plus you got sent to the camps if you didn’t paint in the socialist realism style. Ditto for music.
Band camp?
You must not have been dragged to enough Nutcracker performances. I think I’d rather see the dildos. (I just wrote “take the dildos” but thought better of it.)
Probably more dildo sites on the web also.
What do you have against pigeons getting shit-faced?
What’s the deal with people getting outraged that bad art isn’t typically undefined as art?
If I notice something that is spectacularly unsuccessful, I don’t try to undefine it from being what it is. A Yugo is still a car. Windows ME was still an operating system. Qin Shi Huangdi’s abortion of a website was still a message board. (Granted, a message board whose content was almost entirely a ginormous picture of a WW2 admiral, but still.) Sarah Palin was still a VP candidate.
Why this hard-on for bad art?
Why are you being such a prescriptivist when it comes to cars? A turnip is a car, a thought is a car, the thought of a turnip is a car. Anything can be a car. Now the thought of a turnip might not get you to work, but who says cars need to be functional? It’s only small-minded, mid-westerners who try and limit cars.
Even those dead civil rights workers?
Oh yeah, not nude, but I think it’s pretty cool anyway.
Fair enough. I apologize for reading too much into your prior post.
In other words, Rockwell was not a true artist because he had broad appeal, whereas the anal didldo dancers are true artists because they have a very limited appeal to a self-appointed and self-annointed cadre.
I figure that they are all artists, going in their own directions, with their own followings.
Which post here did you get *that *idea from?
In the great tradition of Cloaca, Canned Artist Shit, and the Dildo Dancers, I pulled it out of my ass.
Now that’s art. A round of applause for Muffin!
I have a more practical view of these matters. Back in the neighborhood we weren’t too sophisticated, but we knew what we liked - and what we liked were cliches. That said, I say that if there’s a box office, then it’s art. So Dancing on a Dildo qualifies as does Canned Artist Crapola, but I’m afraid Muffin’s Post Contemplating on Western Art does not. It grieves me too.
Back when I was younger, oh say 24 hours ago, I used to take that position. But now I figure that to the extent that Rockwell’s craft was developed in Art School, then he’s probably an artist, as is any other -er- graphic artist.
As it happens, I don’t much care for Rockwell’s work: I find the emotions that he depicts to be overwrought and unrealistic. But you can find any number of works in the 19th century Western Canon that strike me the same way. So I dislike Rockwell because I’m a philistine -salt of the earth really- and not a snob.
I used to think that art was a combination of craft and theme. Rockwell’s work has both. So Jane -seriously- by what criteria is Rockwell’s work not art? It seems you think it lacks soul. Are you saying the themes he worked on are too banal? That can’t be right, given Rembrandt’s subject matter. I agree Rockwell’s work doesn’t challenge me too much (though Karl’s counter-examples are much appreciated, and I’ve read professional critics who think Rockwell was under-rated). So while I can think of a lot of art that I consider better, I’m having trouble putting Rockwell in a different category than any other artist working on a commission with strict commercial restrictions.
Hm. Maybe that’s it. “Strict commercial restrictions.” The problem there is that, uncomfortably, commercial pressures can be good for art at times. Some of the experimental stuff is pretty banal after all, though it can provide a certain frisson.
Ah, I miss New York.
All I know is that Shakespeare’s greatest farce was the one that blew all the stained glass out of the cathedral.
And Chaucer’s was fart interrupted analingus.
If you’re ever in Pittsburgh, visit the Warhol museum. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. I was, actually. I’m still not a huge fan of his work, but it’s still pretty cool.
It’s understandable. Some of us, when boarding a train, always wish we could ride in the engine.