Orright, I am going to make this brief. Rocketdork actually gave voice to a good chunk of my thoughts on Art as a whole. Here is my take on it. First, my biases (as many as I remember):
1. I, like RD, got a chance to visit the Louvre back in '97. Fascinating place, but it was a lot to take in, and in the end the 2 biggest things that fascinated me was the pyramid at the entrance and the amount of safeguards placed on the Mona Lisa. In other words, abstract and esoteric are not among the keys to my heart, generally speaking. Thusly, I have to work (sometimes VERY hard and unsuccessfully) at avoiding the tendency to shun what is outside my frame of reference 'cuz I do not understand it.
2. There is the religious element (which I expect is why you are shy of me in Barbershop Politics). You remember the uproar a lot of the fundamentalist, catholic and evangelical Christians had over Serrano's "Piss Christ" as well as the works of Robert Mapplethorpe (I recall it was over NEA funding). I suspect (and I had me some learnin's to do as well at that time) many of my contemporaries had forgotten some of the verbal imagery God used in the book of Ezekiel (specifically Ch. 23) to speak out against Israel turning away from Him ( Yes, God is an Artist....).
Suffice it to say that my kids won't be hearing those excerpts at storytime anytime soon.
On to the Show...
...which upon further prerusal of the thread will really be short. You yourself pointed out the potential idiosyncracies of some of your brethren with the following:
My perception of a lot of artistes are that they are so consumed with making their bit for Art's sake that anything will do for material. I also think that in many of their cases, this is their form of therapy - often cheaper than the professional class of workers shelling out buckazoids for counseling and Prozac. Probably elements of truth in both assertions, probably incomplete data as well.miftah wrote:And most artists would be pretty naive to actually care whether history regards them anyway. There's way too many of us to be making art for immortality.
Referring back to an earlier comment I made in this thread, all disciplines have their share of crap practitioners (just ask Bio!
). That's why we have "price points".Some of the best constructs we have done as a species attempt to marry form with function. Most of the macroflora and macrofauna in nature have an artistic aesthetic married to their functional form.
That may be true of the urinal previously referred to, but it still serves as a tool. You can have a well crafted screwdriver, but in the end it is meant for turning screws. I have a hard time personally going beyond that, but either that is who I am, or there are bits I am stifling, and in this case I think it is a 50-50 split. Art to me is something set aside for a noble purpose (not necessarily in a noble form) to help you consider the best and the worst of the human condition - the middle bits are boring.
As for pissing people off - fine, but if they think about why, that is better - but too much to expect that all that are mad will consider the why.
Actually, I really appreciate the Art history lesson you provided citing Duchamp. I imagine that art was getting rather stale being guarded by librarians, sorta like what happened at the time of Jesus with the religious authorites of the time.
Beyond that, I know that I don't know.
