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It sounds to me, LIGuy, that you haven't ever attempted to paint a picture. I'll bet that at some point in your life, you decided you just couldn't do it well enough to ever be satisfied.
I'm pleased with the results of my efforts. But I will admit I was surprised by how early others were willing to buy my work and how much they were willing to pay. I concluded my mediocre art can be valued by people whom don't know how easy it is to produce modern abstract.
Take, for example, Ilya Bolotowsky. Ilya Bolotowsky - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia His work is so simplistically reproducible and uninspiring that 'Vertical Diamond' couldn't be sold at a church auction and ended up at Goodwill and sold for $10.
The lowest price I got for any of my work was $75, during my first showing of 8 pcs.(6 sold, most for $250), while still in college. My largest piece was commissioned a few years later...36x60 for $1,750...and I'm not even an artist. LOL!
So, you see, I know first hand modern art is a load of crock!....unless it sounds to you I'm some sort of intuitively talented master.
How the artist perceives his skills or what he thinks of his work does not decide what others think about the work. Obviously, 8 other people thought yours to be satisfactory.
Even if you find your ability false, obnoxious, or fraudulent, with that much success at the first go, if I were you, I would seriously keep it up as a second income. Do something else that you find more challenging as your first means of making money.
I never thought of myself as being a crackerjack musician, and never particularly enjoyed the musician's life, but as my second income, there were years where making music paid me more than my first . Obviously, others came away with thoughts different than mine for the 30 odd years I played. The visual arts were always my primary career, and I have always thought of myself as being an artist first, musician secondly. These days, I only play for myself.
It sounds to me, LIGuy, that you haven't ever attempted to paint a picture. I'll bet that at some point in your life, you decided you just couldn't do it well enough to ever be satisfied.
I'm pleased with the results of my efforts. But I will admit I was surprised by how early others were willing to buy my work and how much they were willing to pay. I concluded my mediocre art can be valued by people whom don't know how easy it is to produce modern abstract.
Take, for example, Ilya Bolotowsky. Ilya Bolotowsky - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia His work is so simplistically reproducible and uninspiring that 'Vertical Diamond' couldn't be sold at a church auction and ended up at Goodwill and sold for $10.
The lowest price I got for any of my work was $75, during my first showing of 8 pcs.(6 sold, most for $250), while still in college. My largest piece was commissioned a few years later...36x60 for $1,750...and I'm not even an artist. LOL!
So, you see, I know first hand modern art is a load of crock!....unless it sounds to you I'm some sort of intuitively talented master.
Thanks for the link to Bolotowsky. I'd never heard of him. I certainly find him inspiring. Too bad you don't. I don't think you really know a lot of the things you think you do. Other valuable pieces of art have been found in such places. It's not about how hard it is to make but about how much people want to look at it and obviously someone wants to look at it. That you don't means that and nothing more. Most of the pioneers in the field of abstract art who get repeatedly trashed in this and similar threads were all successful traditional realistic painters. Picasso, Mondrian, Klee, etc. I think this belies your assertions that modern art is a load of crock and that the people who do it couldn't hack it as traditional painters. When I see things done by old masters that I like it's not because they were so good at rendering what they saw or imagined but because of composition, color, etc. I always imagine that if they were with us today that they would be doing the kind of art that people like you disdain. Let's face it, in their time they would have been burnt as witches. Anyway, I really don't buy most of the specific things you said or your overall message. And you know what, I don't think you do either.
It's funny you should pick Bolotowsky, LIGuy...
Here's a life drawing sketch he did in the late 30's, at a time when he had been producing his geometric abstracts for about 10 years or more.
This work is a nude, so I didn't want to cut and paste it here. But you can compare his work to a bunch of other life sketches done during the same period at the same place. Bolotowsky's skill at realistic rendering is easily equally as good as the best from the other artists, and is as traditional as it gets.
I personally think it's tighter and much more controlled than any of Picasso's representational work, but his abstracts were also very controlled and deliberate. Iliya was very highly skilled in both.
Isn't the point of the film, is there such a thing as the sublime? Is objective truths in Nature. Does Beauty bring us to the sacred? The film reminded me of CS Lewis "The Abolition of Man" where he argued the same points as did the narrator Scrunton. That Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. Is it true in our utilitarian, consumer world, objects must be useful to be deemed valuable? It seems quaint today to suggest there are standards for human behavior and if so, does it imply there are standards for art? I thought the film made some jarring statements about how crass we have become, the example "form follows function" reveals this heartless notion that utility reigns supreme. That our post modern culture is loveless, random, ugly, and obliterates meaning. Can art take tragedy and reveal redeemable acts? Does beauty illuminate us to the sphere of contemplation? And is the sublime the divine transendental world of God? These may not be exact quotes but hopefully close to some of the points from the film that I would have liked to hear these posters discuss. Can art be meaningful in a world where we think meaning doesn't exist except in the eye of the beholder? And if your opinion is as meaningful as the next then doesn't that cancel out meaning in any discernible way? Doesn't it do the same for art? It seems it has to me? Everyone is as important as the next, all ideas are equal, all groups are equal, tradition discriminates, so does taste, a urinal is art, etc etc. We live in a world where to make discernible differences is forbidden. Art reflects our aspirations and sadly what it shows is we have lost our, should I dare say it, soul?
GOOD ART IS GOOD ART.....a toilet seat used to frame a rotted and moldy hamburger is bad art...Art should be something constructed out of material that will last- When I create a piece...I make sure that it will last for 300 years...art is a preservation of a concept.
GOOD ART IS GOOD ART.....a toilet seat used to frame a rotted and moldy hamburger is bad art...Art should be something constructed out of material that will last- When I create a piece...I make sure that it will last for 300 years...art is a preservation of a concept.
I agree. Permanence, or the lack of it, is a determinator. Buyers want something that will stick around for a long time, especially if it costs a lot of money.
A lot of the 'high concept' art of the 70's and 80's, during a time when a challenging concept was more important that how permanent the piece actually was, has mostly come and gone in the art market, leaving no ripples behind when it sank.
A lot of those high concepts were chosen for shock value foremost, eventually creating a situation that was a dead end for both the artist and the buyer. Shock is passing; what shocks today can become ho-hum in the future, and the artist who pursues it eventually runs out of shocking things to present.
But why can't modern art be beautiful and idealistic? Have artists forgotten that art was always intended to please and inspire the human mind, not advertise agendas or shock and insult it?
whatdayathink?
- - I guess it depends on if you consider "Art" [meaning "fine art" or even visual art] as a thing in & of itself, or as a tool, like many others, poetry,writing,music, etc etc. If you canonize "Art" as a static entity which can thus somehow be defined by a single purpose, then I can understand your angst. Perhaps some art was "always intended to please & inspire", but certainly not all. Visual art was also magic, decoration, grafitti, prayer, & protest since someone traced with a finger or picked up a stick, stone or piece of charcoal and began to "draw". At some points,subject matter for many artists was dictated by patrons.
I see art as a tool with the purpose defined by the artist. My personal leanings are that art, once made public[Art], should aspire to communicate with the viewer. Beauty is by definition attractive and is one way to engage the viewer & even the most horrific of subject matter can be beautifully rendered. But as a tool, art can be ugly, discordant, weird, and still powerfully engage the viewer. I don't agree that it has to please, be idealistic, or beautiful.
I personally have difficulty when art is used as personal expression without attempting or caring to engage the viewer. I may find it interesting on a psychological level and valid in that sense, beautiful by accident, but bristle at an expectation that I automatically find it "Art". There is a valid purpose, but unless it is also to communicate rather than to serve only some inner need, it seems ??aggressive?? to expect someone outside yourself to recognize the product as "Art".
As I found trying to write this, defining "Art" as opposed to visual art as a tool, is difficult! Is the division when something is made public?
Well, Modern Art was led for many decades by extreme Leftists who had a hidden agenda to their "art" - which was to hurl society into a dark existential chaos (mission accomplished, mostly). They masked this as being "intellectual" and as representing "reality".
Well, Modern Art was led for many decades by extreme Leftists who had a hidden agenda to their "art" - which was to hurl society into a dark existential chaos (mission accomplished, mostly). They masked this as being "intellectual" and as representing "reality".
That's true only to a degree. Many of them were completely apolitical. But most of them were intellectual, and while some groups, such as the NYC artists of the early 50's, hung around together and often hotly debated late into the night, politics was seldom the topic of the debates. Almost all of their talk centered around their art vs. other's art.
Art as politics has been a theme for centuries. Most of the art produced through patronage, especially the art of the Renaissance and on into the Empire art had political elements in it, especially in the portraits.
Much of the politics portrayed was of the time; it doesn't matter at all who the King married now, but back then, it was vitally important. Portraits were always visual bragging rights in some way or other.
Avant grade art vs. establishment art, especially in fine art, is always pushing and pulling between the two, and there is little politics involved outside of the divisions that are within the art world. Fine art buyers of avant garde art have differing politics, but the art they buy does not necessarily reflect their political leanings at all.
The same goes for propaganda art, the stuff seen on posters. For every avant garde poster produced from one political thought, there's another that is pure establishment art, produced by the same thought.
Well, Modern Art was led for many decades by extreme Leftists who had a hidden agenda to their "art" - which was to hurl society into a dark existential chaos (mission accomplished, mostly). They masked this as being "intellectual" and as representing "reality".
Wow, I thought I'd heard it all. And then I read this. Just goes to show.
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Yeah, right
