me? I just don't see it. Pollack's later stuff is truly something a six year old could do. Are we saying that a man regressing to his primal emotional state is the supreme striving of art?

I simply don't get Warhol . . . it is something a middle schooler would do to seem "edgy."


But I ask these questions in seriousness, I want to understand what critics see in the works of these men.

9/17/2008 6:50:55 PM

9/17/2008 6:54:43 PM

there's no way I can not shit my pants over this:



now, pollack, sure whatever...

9/17/2008 6:58:16 PM

^^ yes I am an art n00b.


A banana. I have one in my refrigerator. I've got one in my stomach that will be shat out as fecal matter in a matter of hours. Explain how that is art.

I'm projecting my prejudices to show where I stand, but not as a barrier to understanding. I'd truly like to see the insight people have to offer, but showing me a picture of a banana and saying that you shit your pants only means that you ate a bad banana once and it has caused some form of lower intestinal malfunction that prompted a rapid fecal evacuation.

9/17/2008 7:04:04 PM

not worth the time

9/17/2008 7:06:45 PM

Pollack and Warhol? or my ignorance?

9/17/2008 7:07:21 PM

Quote :

"or my ignorance? "

9/17/2008 7:08:16 PM

thanks


To the outsider, modern art just seems like an excuse for people to stand around trying to prove how enlightened and cosmopolitan they are, hiding behind the obfuscation abstract art seems to provide. I'm going to give fans the benefit of the doubt and assume they see something deeper, I'd just like to know what it is.

9/17/2008 7:10:51 PM

Pollock:

Quote :

"In a famous 1952 article in ARTnews, Harold Rosenberg coined the term "action painting," and wrote that "what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. The big moment came when it was decided to paint 'just to paint.' The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from value — political, aesthetic, moral." Many people assumed that he had modeled his "action painter" paradigm on Pollock."

Quote :

"Clement Greenberg supported Pollock's work on formalistic grounds. It fit well with Greenberg's view of art history as being about the progressive purification in form and elimination of historical content. He therefore saw Pollock's work as the best painting of its day and the culmination of the Western tradition going back via Cubism and Cézanne to Monet."

Warhol:

Quote :

"Pop art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture. It has also been defined by the artists' use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques that downplay the expressive hand of the artist."

9/17/2008 7:31:17 PM

Quote :

"I'm going to give fans the benefit of the doubt and assume they see something deeper, I'd just like to know what it is."

They don't see anything deeper.

Quote :

"Decomposition is the postscript to the death of a human body; disintegration is the preface to the death of a human mind. Disintegration is the keynote and goal of modern art—the disintegration of man’s conceptual faculty, and the retrogression of an adult mind to the state of a mewling infant. To reduce man’s consciousness to the level of sensations, with no capacity to integrate them, is the intention behind the reducing of language to grunts, of literature to “moods,” of painting to smears, of sculpture to slabs, of music to noise. But there is a philosophically and psychopathologically instructive element in the spectacle of that gutter. It demonstrates—by the negative means of an absence—the relationships of art to philosophy, of reason to man’s survival, of hatred for reason to hatred for existence. After centuries of the philosophers’ war against reason, they have succeeded—by the method of vivisection—in producing exponents of what man is like when deprived of his rational faculty, and these in turn are giving us images of what existence is like to a being with an empty skull."

9/17/2008 7:38:02 PM

Quote :

"not worth the time"

Quote :

"Pollack and Warhol? or my ignorance?"

Don't you know? Half the fun of "getting" modern art is the way you can lord it over the simpletons.

9/17/2008 7:40:43 PM

a large part of art is supposed to be that it makes you feel whatever way the artist wants. so maybe warhol was just really sleepy most of the time and had a tendancy to feel sorry for things

9/17/2008 7:41:53 PM

Understand, I'm probing here, not just trying to be an asshole;

comma however:

Quote :

"gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from value — political, aesthetic, moral"

Complete liberation is the removal of any requirements on the artist as I understand it. That really does sound like kindergarten. How is refrigerator art from the unbridled mind of a 5 year old any different from Pollock other than the fact that he was fucking Peggy Guggenheim.

And I just realized I've been mis-spelling Pollock, which makes me feel like an ass, but I was a bit intoxicated earlier so . . .

Quote :

"Pop art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture."

Isn't that the polar opposite of art? Or did Warhol simply make a living out of selling out and then pointing out the irony of it, made all the more ironic by the fact that he actually made money doing it?

Is the sum of modern art to project the obvious and then claim its counter in order to look "informed"? Because that is what I'm picking up.

9/17/2008 7:42:41 PM

higher mathematics will never make any sense to me

so i don't bother with it

3/10/2009 7:05:33 PM

There are some serious lols in modern art, like this fine example of the suprematist movement. Even after reading a dozen interpretations of this one piece, I basically can't get over the fact that anyone has the audacity to ascribe notability to something you can find a hundred of doodled in the margins of any students' notebook.

3/10/2009 7:13:31 PM

3/10/2009 7:16:43 PM

^^ Which is what I'm getting at. Art, or at least the more egregious forms of Modern Art, from my perspective, seems to be more of a clique than anything serious. I'd like to believe something else, but if the whole point of modern art is to remove all constraints, why paint at all? Why not make an artistry of doing absolutely nothing.

3/10/2009 7:25:08 PM

ahahahaah

pretty much the entire Suprematist movement seems like it's realllly reaching, and the interpretations all seem like geometric / topological descriptions transliterated into amusingly broad metaphors of life

THE BLACK SQUARE SYMBOLISES SIMULTANEOUSLY AN EMPTINESS AND UNIQUITY FROM ITS SURROUNDINGS... "k"

[Edited on March 10, 2009 at 7:32 PM. Reason : lol]

3/10/2009 7:25:42 PM

Quote :

"How is refrigerator art from the unbridled mind of a 5 year old any different from Pollock"

liberation is different from only being able to do something... a 5 year old cant do anything else. A grown man could, and often "had to" for it to be considered art, so being freed from that is more meaningful that a 5-year old that can ONLY do that.

[Edited on March 10, 2009 at 7:32 PM. Reason : d]

3/10/2009 7:32:20 PM

that's sort of like saying it's exciting to watch structural engineers, who were previously compelled by the demands of society to construct bridges and buildings, chill in a sandbox with tinkertoys, if only because they could be doing so much more.

why isn't the fact that I'm 24 and still don't have a degree a compelling work of art, then?

there a number of cases of the disgusting celebration of underachievement and painful overanalysis in modern art, at least in my opinion. the people who would disagree are generally just trying to impress chicks who think they're into art.

[Edited on March 10, 2009 at 7:45 PM. Reason : .]

3/10/2009 7:44:44 PM

except structures have to be a certain form to a certain degree to make sure they are a functional building... art doesn't.


I am not a huge fan of Warhol, but I do like how stark most of his stuff is, really bold and bright and basic. I think you can look at a picture of a banana and then look at his work and see that its not the same.

3/10/2009 7:50:19 PM

Art has to be expressed via some medium and is constrained as such in much the same way that a building has to resist the temptation of gravity. To lesser and greater extents, perhaps, but art has many other constraints placed upon it: political, physical, practical and so on. I view examples such as Suprematism (my low-hanging fruit in this argument) as retreating from the constraints of practicality to explore what amounts to a sandbox full of tinkertoys. It's not so true about Warhol or Pollock and I'm not trying to make the same insinuations there, but I'd love to hear someone defend Suprematism

3/10/2009 7:58:59 PM

nah, i won't be mean in a serious art thread.

i like pollack's stuff, for the most part, but only because i know about how he used to paint. warhol's stuff is ok, but doesn't impress me all that much. i think it's got an interesting vibe, but that's about it. (i can't even explain the 'vibe' i'm talking about)

[Edited on March 10, 2009 at 8:23 PM. Reason : k]

3/10/2009 8:19:18 PM

Advertising campaigns have a vibe. Of course, Warhol sought to parody this concept, but is parody of pop culture and hipness enough to create art?


To diverge slightly more from Pollock and Warhol, and continue down the Modern Art road (or are we Postmodern Art now?), I'm wondering how people here view the Guillermo Vargas Exposición N° 1 as a work of art. Let us ignore the animal cruelty aspect of it. Here is a blog link that describes the exhibit itself a bit better than the kneejerk reaction I had in Kiwi's thread:

Quote :

"The piece, Exposición N° 1 by Guillermo “Habacuc” Vargas, took place at the Códice Gallery in Managua, Nicaragua in 2007. Habacuc hired two kids to capture a dog on the street which he used for this piece by tying it up in the gallery. He used dog food to write the words “Eres lo que lees” (you are what you read). The exposition included the burning of 175 pieces of crack cocaine and an ounce of marijuana while the Sandinista anthem played backwards.(wikipedia) The sensation: It is rumored that the dog starved to death. The gallery states the dog was only tied up for a three hour period and that he eventually ran away. Vargas refuses to comment on the fate of the dog, but states no one tried to free him. He has signed a petition against himself along with 4 million other people to ban him from repeating the piece in the 2008 Centro-American Biennial of Art."

http://strangersouvenez.wordpress.com/2008/07/13/rolodex-guillermo-habacuc-vargas/


Thoughts?

3/26/2009 12:47:39 PM

Quote :

"^^ yes I am an art n00b. A banana. I have one in my refrigerator. I've got one in my stomach that will be shat out as fecal matter in a matter of hours. Explain how that is art."

I have a canoe shaped teak bowl in the center of my island that gets a constant rotation of colorful fruits and vegetables. It is aesthetically pleasing; therefore I consider it to be art. I could just as easily put the fruit in the pantry, but instead I put it on display as the centerpiece of my kitchen island.

Why then, can't a painting of a banana be considered art?

[Edited on March 26, 2009 at 1:07 PM. Reason : l]

3/26/2009 1:05:56 PM

what about a big ole hairy dick? or a clamburger?

3/26/2009 1:10:58 PM

That would be conceptual art. If you guys hate modern art, you should see some of the shit that passes in the conceptual art world.

3/26/2009 1:12:06 PM

Its some of the shit that I write off as cliche now, but assume that it was fresh and original when it was made.

3/26/2009 1:17:21 PM

it ain't about the picture your looking at. if you can't get past that you'll never understand it.

3/26/2009 1:20:24 PM

IT'S A PICTURE OF A FUCKING BANANA. IS NOT ART, IS NOT PURSE, IS NOT SHIRT

IS FUCKING FRUIT

3/26/2009 2:00:05 PM

you guys are right, i do not understand the banana picture

3/26/2009 2:03:28 PM

rawr rawr, art is supposed to be one thing, rawr rawr

3/26/2009 2:03:59 PM

it makes me hungry though


rawr rawr, so orginal

3/26/2009 2:05:48 PM

Quote :

"There are some serious lols in modern art, like this fine example of the suprematist movement. Even after reading a dozen interpretations of this one piece, I basically can't get over the fact that anyone has the audacity to ascribe notability to something you can find a hundred of doodled in the margins of any students' notebook."

so yeah, you entirely missed the point of the piece you posted.

3/26/2009 2:13:44 PM

Quote :

"you guys are right, i do not understand the banana picture"

But why are you trying to understand it? It's not a theory. It's a drawing. You either like it or you don't. Sure, there may be some underlying themes or social commentary, but trying to decipher every piece of art into a verbal explanation is kind of retarded to me.

3/26/2009 2:43:17 PM

eh, suprematism and its commentary are really intellectual masturbation. I, too have partaken in this act. i wrote a 10 page critique of this poem by e.e. cummings for one of my lit classes:

Quote :

"l(a le af fa ll s) one l iness "

i got a great grade, the teacher sucked my dick and i thought i was so smart at the time. but now, it just seems pretty fuckin gay.

3/26/2009 2:45:58 PM

because i try to understand everything

3/26/2009 2:54:05 PM

^^^ But that isn't an explanation of what the art is. It goes back to my assertion that many modern art / post modern art / conceptual art fans don't have anything to say about the art . . . just that I don't get it.

Quote :

"it ain't about the picture your looking at. if you can't get past that you'll never understand it."

I understand that, but if the art requires an excessive amount of interpretative explanation from the artist, at what point does it cease to be art and simply pretentious bullshit? I mean, are you creating art, or just a cover-sheet for your convoluted verbal interpretation of life?

Quote :

"I have a canoe shaped teak bowl in the center of my island that gets a constant rotation of colorful fruits and vegetables. It is aesthetically pleasing; therefore I consider it to be art."

Is the only requirement for art that it be aesthetically pleasing? I have been told that my ass is aesthetically pleasing to some women. Is my ass therefore art?

I'm not saying that a painting of a banana isn't art, I certainly don't assert that my ass is; what I'm asking is, "is it good art?" If you think it is, why do you think it is? What do you get out of it? If you're certain that it isn't, why isn't it?

3/26/2009 2:56:39 PM

you have to look at it through the perception of the era. if you had just faced a tenstrip of acid, looking at fucked up paintings of mick jagger and walking through a mirrored room full of square helium balloons might be pretty fucking awesome.

3/26/2009 2:59:22 PM

Quote :

"trying to decipher every piece of art into a verbal explanation is kind of retarded to me."

QFT

not every piece has some great deeper meaning.

3/26/2009 3:00:10 PM

Quote :

"I understand that, but if the art requires an excessive amount of interpretative explanation from the artist, at what point does it cease to be art and simply pretentious bullshit?"

i mean, its like anything. the more you get into it, the more obvious certain things become. when you do something like art for yourself, you notice patterns, well worn lines of interpretations, things like that - that an artist might try to avoid.

not saying that the art world isn't full of bullshit artists just like the music world is, but the further a good artist goes the less opaque and more esoteric some of their work becomes.

to me andy likely could have been commenting that he could just put up a picture of a banana and people would buy it because of his persona. not as cut and dry as that, but you catch my drift.

[Edited on March 26, 2009 at 3:15 PM. Reason : x]

3/26/2009 3:04:59 PM

Maybe the banana was more relevant in the 1960's and that's why you people don't get it.

Quote :

"Is the only requirement for art that it be aesthetically pleasing? I have been told that my ass is aesthetically pleasing to some women. Is my ass therefore art?"

Aesthetically pleasing is not a requirement for art.

Look, First Friday is coming. April 3rd. Go to Artspace or Glenwood South and walk through the galleries. A lot of it will appear to be junk (to you). A lot of it may appear aesthetically pleasing without any further meaning. Some of it you'll get, some of it you won't. It's like explaining music to someone who has never heard music. How can you describe a note in a relevant (non-scientific) way to a person who has never heard a note?

[Edited on March 26, 2009 at 3:11 PM. Reason : l]

3/26/2009 3:11:09 PM

not all modern art is pretentious and trying to be overly-serious

it's like saying all movies are dramas

rauschenberg is straight fucking hilarious

btw

Quote :

"Is my ass therefore art?"

i'm fairly certain mine is

3/26/2009 3:11:54 PM

i like modern art

i think it helps to try to divorce the art from the perceived pretentiousness of it

i often think that attempting to "get it" often detracts from nearly all art, whether it's painting, literature, or film

3/26/2009 3:25:48 PM

Quote :

"to me andy likely could have been commenting that he could just put up a picture of a banana and people would buy it because of his persona. not as cut and dry as that, but you catch my drift."

I'll buy that but, to me at least, that falls into the realm of social commentary and not great, or at least lasting, art.

Quote :

"Look, First Friday is coming. April 3rd. Go to Artspace or Glenwood South"

I'm in Southern Alabama till at least the end of the year . . . hence my reaching out to TWW for cultural engagement I suppose I'll resign myself to the sage words of that work of pop art, C. Montgomery Burns, "I'm no art critic, but I know what I hate."


^ See, I keep running into a wall of pretentiousness when I try to discover modern art. Not so much in here, but in other places. Oh well.


No commentary on the Vargas work?

3/26/2009 9:18:29 PM

3/26/2009 9:20:06 PM

Quote :

"Complete liberation is the removal of any requirements on the artist as I understand it. That really does sound like kindergarten. How is refrigerator art from the unbridled mind of a 5 year old any different from Pollock other than the fact that he was fucking Peggy Guggenheim. "

Context makes that difference.

Pollock, as a member of the art community with the ability to do what would have been considered normal at the time, instead chose to ignore constraint and make scratchy-looking shit-colored messes.

I'm not saying he's a genius, but I'm pretty certain that's what makes it art when comparing it purely to a young child's drawing of blobs.

3/26/2009 9:41:46 PM

Pollock's gestural painting attacked "painterly" conventions
Warhol's use of manufacturing techniques in his art production questions the value of the art object in an age of mechanical reproducibility

modern art frequently concerns itself with the discourse of art

[Edited on March 26, 2009 at 10:40 PM. Reason : -]

3/26/2009 10:39:32 PM

Quote :

"No commentary on the Vargas work? "

I thought I'd missed some posts about pin-ups

3/26/2009 10:51:52 PM

set em up

3/26/2009 10:52:32 PM