No wall owned or controlled by me shall ever display (i) an Ansel Adams print; (ii) a Monet print; or (iii) an old French advertisement or facsimile thereof.
It’s not that I don’t see the art in those things: (i) Ansel Adams’ technical prowess and eye for composition are unassailable; (ii) no argument is needed for Monet’s talent and historical significance; and (iii) old French advertisements are often colorful and graphically interesting.
But they’ve become visual cliches. Every joker with his or her first post-college apartment walks into Bed, Bath & Beyond and buys these three things. They scream, “I have not given any thought to what I would like to display on my walls, but instead have simply purchased that which is most likely to appeal to a large number of people but offend none.”
What attractive, inoffensive works of art would you never hang on your wall? Or am I the only one with oddly strong feelings about these things? (It might have something to do with the daily beatings I received from my parents, who wielded framed Ansel Adams and Monet prints, topped off with whippings by way of a rolled-up French advertisement.)
I have an Ansel Adams, but it’s a picture of the University where I got my doctorate, so it has personal meaning.
Mine would probably be Aubrey Beardsley, Andy Warhol and that guy who does drawings of model-y looking women who all have the same face. I can’t think of his name, maybe someone else can.
Also known in my house as “Thomas Kinkade (shake your fist here and clench your teeth and kind of growl out the rest), goddam painter of light”
I’m going to go with Escher. Cool looking drawings, but with a college dorm feel. Keep in mind this is coming from a woman with a Dali print on her wall. That she got in college.
For me I guess it would be any of the “big names,” like Van Gogh, Picasso, Kandinsky or Chagall. Not that I don’t like the work, but again, they are pretty much all over the place, too much so.
Add to that Jack Vettriano’s Singing Butler. That damn painting is everywhere now.
I misread Escher as saying “Bosch”, and was about to take you to task for being so wrong-headed…I wouldn’t display an Escher for the same reason. Then again, Bosch (and Dali) would seem similarly college-dormish, the difference being that Bosch is really really good.
As I’ve said before, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers series is some of the ugliest shit I’ve ever seen. They look like something you’d find in a flea market for 3 bucks and the only reason you’d buy it was for the frame.
