This is linked to from Dave Barry’s latest column. He claims it’s genuine, and it appears to be so. Except it’s so much pretentious bullshit, I am not so sure.
Is it real, or is it a joke?
After that room with a lightbulb won that art prize I’m prepared to believe just about any of the whacky art stories I hear nowadays.
After a few minutes looking at other pieces and reviews on that site, it looks and sounds legitimate. The terminology and general use of language is definitely consistent with art and design. I have seen many pieces where the concept is bigger than the object on the surface, which is what I think explains the one in your link.
I’m reminded of an old Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin tries to become an avant garde artist. Conclusion: “In this business, it’s impossible to tell who is conning who” or words to that effect.
I remember reading a piece in a magazine once by this guy who’d been working on the renovations for an art museum. They had covered a statue in canvas to protect it from the work they were doing. Two museum patrons approached the statue and began arguing about why the artist had covered the statue.
That chair reminds me of the Claus Oldenburg’s Soft Toilet, which I think is the silliest thing in any book of the world’s great works of art. I’ve always felt that art is about communicating ideas. That means that anything that requires a long explanation by the creator has probably failed.
pilot’s got it. Hamish seems to suggest that a piece of art should communicate exactly the same “idea” to a passive audience as to an actively involved and committed audience. This is obviously false.
There is no single universal language; there is no single universal art. An artist who makes a piece that requires participation and committment from the audience has not failed: an audience who insists on passivity, such as Hamish, is the failure.
You’ve made a quite a leap, lissener. I was not arguing for passivity, and indeed many of favourite works demand engagement from the audience and discussion.
When an the meaning of a work of art is hermetically sealed, however, that it communicates nothing without cheat notes from the author or sculptor or painter, I would consider that a failure. I am not a phillistine who demands that all work be neo-classical. Wassily Kandinsky communicates, though not necessarily at first glance.
But art made opaque for opacity’s sake represents one of my pet peeves – the scholasticism of our age, where intellectual endeavour is cloaked in impoenetrable neologisms, and where a painting or sculpture is placed in a museum not to express an idea or emotion, but convince the audience of their inherent inferiorty. After all, it must be explained to those outside the circle – they “don’t get it,” because they’re outside the privileged circle of understanding.
And I defend communication as central in art. Otherwise, why put something on display, or out in the open?
I have a story similar similar to Hamish- When I was in high school, our class went to the museum of art. While there, we saw a sculpture that consisted of about two dozen rocks arranged in a circle on the floor. As the class was leaving the room, one of the kids took a quarter from his pocket, and placed it dead center in the circle. About a month later, when I returned to the museum with some friends, that quarter was still there.
And that’s the problem with that kind of art- it is completely arbitrary. If that chair in the link is art, than anything an artist says is art is art, and we may as well put random found objects into a museum and let people find their own meanings. Actually, that’s not so different that how it actually does work.
If people like something, no matter how mundane or esoteric or just downright stupid, then fine. Pay your $25000 to have it in your home if you want.
But to have a frickin old chair in the corner of a room and expect anybody to understand it’s anything other than some old chair seems to go against the point. Comunicating ideas is the point, isn’t it? Not confusing and mystifying people.
I also think they overcharge for crap. Materials and time, that’s what they should charge, not ‘what the market can bear’.
Art is a crock of shit 75% of the time, it really is. It’s a big joke, and the artists know it.
(a) at MOMA, many years ago, there was a work consisting of rocks arranged in the circle (hm, somebody’s not being original) and I had to kick one just slightly out of place, like 1 inch. My stepfather and I wondered aloud if the artist walked in at that moment, would he instantly see the out-of-place rock and shout Mon Dieu and run to fix it? We thought not. (b) During the same visit, stepfather and I had a mock conversation about the brilliant artistry of a ventilation grate in the wall. Then we noticed a security guard listening to us, and we wondered how many times the poor guard had had to listen to the same sort of conversation. We felt as stupid and banal as most modern artists.
Sorry, there is no point here, except that most modern art sucks, and I’m terribly offended whenever anyone doesn’t like a particular work of modern art that I do appreciate, like for example Rothko (one of the abstract impressionists who paints almost nothing but bands of color. But they’re great, and if you don’t see that, you’re a philistine. Same with Mondrian.)
If Jeff Koons can hang Hoover applicances on the wall and call it art, why not?
Hoity-toity, reviewer-approved, big-dollar, ESTABLISHMENT art, maybe; there are plenty of us, however, who are trying to follow in the footsteps of people who actually knew how to draw and paint and did so brilliantly. I wouldn’t dare compare my work to theirs, but that is the direction to which I aspire - and I know I’m not alone (although it would be nice to have more company). When people buy my work it makes a huge difference to me.
Re: that circle of rocks - my sister was an art museum guard in Cincinnati a long time ago & she had hilarious stories about their futile attempts to keep the children out of the installations. If one puts a sandbox on the floor, it seems only fair to expect 3-yr-olds to rise to the challenge. As they often did.
Wow, that was depressing as hell.
Somehow all their blather is just too ironic - legitimate not as a discussion of art, but as a reflection of the deceptive posturing of our time. When marketers can succeed in generating a buzz over nothing, and the masses are satisfied with chasing money as their only goal, then how better to reflect modern life than with soulless, skilless art.
And in the meantime that SOB Kinkade is walking away with the business of all those poor saps who just want something nice to hang over their couch & have never been taught how to look at art.
Think I’ll go read Robert Henri for a while…
I’m sorry, but while this looks very cool, to call it art is insulting to ME.
Part of that “art” is to provoke.
Part of that “art” is PR…to make people re-evaluate what is art.
If it succeeds in making you have this discussion, and making you define what you consider is art, then the “art” was successful.
The kid who put the quarter in the circle of rocks was the true artist. He saw something absurd, and instead of dismissing it, he made it even more absurd. That took some thought. He could have stolen a rock, he could have spit on it…but he saw an opportunity to make his statement. That is “art”. The kid has a future.
First of all, kudos to Guanolad for starting something besides the usual TV/movie thread.
I think fessie has got it. Sometime in the last 100 years of so, “art” became divorced from “skill.” Once upon a time, an artist needed to have both an idea/point of view and the skills required to express it. Nowadays, however, an artist is anyone who has (or thinks they have) an idea. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have to be a particularly good idea.
I kind of disagree with the idea that art should not encode a universal language. The very best art speaks to something that transcends culture. In any event, it certainly ought to transcend the artist’s personal idiosyncracies.
I remember seeing an Eddie Murphy skit on an SNL re-run a couple of years ago EM was an “angry black artist” who had created a piece called “Kill All The White People.” In the skit, the critics, lap up Eddie’s outrageous explanation of his “art.” I think much of post modern art is this way.
The biggest problem with so much of post-modern art is that, being entirely subjective and, in fact, introspective, it’s difficult to tell whether the artist is one of the greatest and most profound thinkers in human history or a pompous buffoon. Guess which one my money’s usually on?
I often suspect that much post-modern art is a bad joke that gets taken to far, sort of like Kinkade. Maybe they shoot for an ironic commentary on post-modern art itself and then, accidentally, get taken seriously. Take a look at this piece, for example. Did anyone notice it came from “Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects?” Yeah, it looks like it came from the Projects, all right.
I agree that the kid who put in the quarter is more of an artist, insofar as zero is greater than a negative. But how was putting a quarter in any different than spitting on it would have been? If the one is art, then is not the other? Spitting, at least, would have sent a clear message.
The problem is that these so-called “artists” have no respect for art. When you take a piece of trash and put it in a museum, the message you’re sending is not that trash is art; the message you’re sending is that art is trash. If art is so vague that anything can be a work of art, just by the “artist” saying so, then art has become meaningless and pointless.
I’ll never forget the Earthroom. I was assigned to review it for a special elective expository writing class focusing on art criticism. I’m not a big fan of writing art criticism; I just picked that section because it was the only remaining section of Expository Writing II Honors (a required freshman class) that fit my schedule.
So I tromped down to Soho, and discovered that the Earthroom was basically just that: a Soho loft apartment filled about 3’ high with dirt. Clean dirt, but dirt nonetheless. How the hell do you review an apartment full of dirt? Being a literarily inclined person who has written lots of papers on, say, the meaning of the yellow butterflies in a García Marquez short story, I’m no stranger to making shit up. But this was a bit much even for me.
Sometimes I wonder if these guys can even manage to take themselves seriously. Not that I think this applies to all 20th- and 21st-century artists, but sometimes conceptualism just turns into mind games IMHO.
For what it’s worth, I know several working traditional artists who are labeling themselves as “craftsmen” to avoid being lumped in with the conceptual artists. I’ve noticed a geographic split on this - people doing the same kinds of things in the U.K. want desperately to be called “craftsmen”, while the ones in the U.S. want to be called artists. I personally don’t care what label people put on my ceramic sculpture work. They can call me artist (as long as they aren’t lumping me with people who sell bottled faeces) or craftsman (as long as they aren’t lumping me with makers of popsicle stick Santas).
I sometimes wonder if some of this “conceptual art” originated with passive-aggressive artists who got pissed off when their clients didn’t appreciate their best work. “You want to buy crap? I’ll give you crap!” If so, it’s sad that the buyers didn’t take the hint the first time it happened, and actually rewarded people who treated their customers this way.
I scored really abysmally on this quiz, and pass it along for its minor entertainment (or despair) value: