“Michelangelo carved his “David” out of a rock. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art just offers us a rock, — a rock — all 340 tons of it.”
– Robert Florczak, Prager University (H/T, Timothy Sandefur.)
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A change of directionSeptember 9th, 2015 |
 26 comments to A change of direction |
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Cultural decline has been going on for a long time.
The arts have been in the vanguard of the decline.
It seemed clear to me that the decline was in full swing with the Dadaist movement effectively a century ago. The first step in curing this would be to stop all State funding or support of ‘art’, be it the National Gallery in the UK, any theatre, cinema, college or University or provision of public space etc.
The only ‘dictatorial’ that I would support would be to remove the ludicrous crap from Trafalgar Square and have perhaps three statues of three (of many) great men, Reginald Mitchell, Sydney Camm and Roy Chadwick, hands raised to hold a Merlin (bird) aloft, as a pun on the RR Merlin engine.
How about replacing the House of Commons with a statue of John Milton? I’d probably be willing to part with a few thousand pounds personally to see it done. Have to check with the wife first though.
I’d also support demolishing David Cameron’s house under eminent domain laws and putting a wind turbine there. Wind energy is at best performance art anyway so lets make the most out of it.
“The Los Angeles County Museum of Art just offers us a rock”
I’m sure there’s a “David” in there somewhere.
If someone thinks it is art (and they are not the artist) who am I to disagree with them. What Paul and Mr Ed see as decline I prefer to see as freedom and free expression, even if a lot of it passes me by (and I like a lot of modern stuff – although only if I see the point).
But I would agree with Nr Ed that we should not be funding art, as if people are doing art they want or to sell to others, the government is only going to skew the market. I suspect the result of this would be that there would no notable change in the direction of art though – government funding is perhaps keeping a few artists in the game, but the major modern ones make their money from private sales. Bluntly, whatever you think of Damian Hirst, he is a much better man than Vincent Van Gough, in that he earns his own keep (and if he has had government money, I guess he has repaid that investment in tax if not directly).
And I would suggest that the only people qualified to comment on the lump of rock are either those who have seen it in situ (we may be missing something) or competent geologists…
What Watchman said.
I’m with Watchman here.
I do like the rocks in the Rice University engineering quad. It warms my heart that they’re exactly what you’d expect if you asked civil engineers to design art. “What’s art?” “I don’t know! I was hoping you knew! I just know about making big heavy things!” “What if we put big heavy things at angles? Angles are art, right?”
Expatriate curmudgeon Fred Reed said that if modern art were installed in a junkyard, its proponents would be unable to find it.
Odd how easy this “freedom” and “free expression” in art is.
After all I can do it – and I have no artistic talent at all.
A chimp can do it as well – for example witness their “paintings”.
True works of “freedom” and “free expression” – and you do not need to worry about which way up you hang them.
Turning to another matter….
Two people did the Vietnam War memorial.
One (expensively educated – Art School) lady designed the wall.
The other person did the sculptures of the three soldiers.
The lady approached him…..
She asked if the models had any problems with the plaster – stopping the stuff getting in their eyes and so on.
Yes that is correct…..
It never occurred to the lady that the man had created the statues – she assumed he must have had models and poured stuff over them to make a mold and……
Of course the man had not been to “art school”.
By the way……
When the Sunday Telegraph did a story on the man they had a piece of art on the front cover of the art section.
But the work of art was not by the man.
It was a modern work of art.
I stopped buying the Sunday Telegraph soon after that.
I had just had enough of them – even when they had a decent story, such as a man with nothing but hard work and talent who trained himself to do real works, they ruined it.
The man had seen the culture collapsing all around him – and, unlike me, he decided to do something about it (not just grumble) – do something about it with his own hands.
Repairing works of art that were decaying – and creating new works.
What, in the end, is modern culture?
It is destruction.
For example the destruction of Penn Central station – and its replacement with a very large box building.
Or the sending of the scores of the MGM musicals – to landfill.
Yes that was done – in the 1960s.
I highly recommend doing away with all taxation (that is, the compulsory theft of revenue. Revenue should be on voluntary basis, but that’s not taxation).
Barring the abolishment of taxation, I recommend doing away with public funds funding the arts, on principle, not because we get shit in exchange for hundreds of thousands of tax dollars, (which is usually the case). Because after all, the public works of Michelangelo and Da Vinci were subsidized by government/political figures, and who can argue against their brilliance?
Paul Marks wrote:
“I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci
Paul,
I have been to DC and seen the Vietnam memorials. The wall is very moving. Both work.
Watchman,
I would say that art is more than mere communication, i.e. free speech. The word ‘craft’, once upon a time, meant power. Art is much the same. But it’s also synonymous with guile, “crafty, artful”. “The craft” and “the arts” were also synonymous with erudite occult learnings. (Incidentally, grimoire (book of spells) means grammar. Ditto for glamour, glamour being a type of attraction spell, and to cast a spell literally meant TO SPELL.)
I’m still at a loss to discern whether it’s better to be shifty or shiftless, lol. It would seem that having some state of shift is unavoidable. Either one shifts or one does not shift.
All silliness aside, it does seem that art is in the eye of the beholder, but so is our collective idea of, say, health and wellness. Just because we can’t nail concrete ideas of health and wellness to the wall doesn’t mean that the subject is solely subjective and that we can apply no facts to the subject of human flourishing and well being. Perhaps the same can be said of art. I for one think that a crucifix in a jar of piss has plenty to say, but is that “art”? That is, is art nothing more than mere symbolic ideas? Isn’t that the same job as written words?
Is there no distinction between the admirable quality of rhetoric of Christopher Hitchens and Dr. Sam Harris and the meaningless screed of an internet troll? Are both “art” merely because words convey information? I suggest that non-arbitrary standards can be applied to even a subject as subjective as artistic expression. When “experts” can’t tell the “genius” of an abstract painting from a painting painted by an elephant (as shown on the TV show 20/20), there’s room for the interjection of some reality I think.
Robert Florczak’s argument is absolute nonsense. Yes there is a lot of rubbish art being produced (Banksy being but one example), but there has also been great art produced since the end of WW2. Mark Rothko’s Seagram Murals, and Damien Hurst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” being just two examples.
His example using Jackson Pollock is ridiculous. I don’t know much about art but I could tell straight away that the painting he showed was not by Jackson Pollock.
He also completely ignores photography, film and television which are THE art forms of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
A good book to read vis a vis modern art is Wolfe’s “The Painted Word”. Essentially modern art stopped being about the physical art and became the idea being presented. This kind of intense mental masturbation is a absolutely a function of government of both the arts and art education. Naturally, like Hitler’s subsidization of art, the artists getting the money will want to support their benefactor which is why most art these days is political in nature and in particularly supportive of the political left.
Are car and motorcycle designs art? If so this is an example of art that pays for itself. A great looking car or bike is more likely to sell well. The original four pipe Kawasaki Z900 bikes were surly a work of art along with bikes like the Ducati 916 and the Triumph T959 Daytona. I have to say that I am baffled by the appeal of the modern BMWs though, everyone who has one says that they are brilliant bikes but they look like a bunch of random shapes thrown into a massive ungainly heap.
Meh. De gustibus non est disputandum.
I object to a rock being moved to a museum. What should happen is that a museum be built around a rock, so as not to disturb it.
As it is public money, it probably makes no difference which way round we do it, but I dislike nature being bothered.
Paul,
If art is easy, why are we not all selling our art? Art is really difficult (and in many cases, only once an artist has success does it becomes easy, because they are a brand). I cannot gather why you are failing to treat art as you would any other form of commodity and realising that its value is what someone is prepared to pay for it (in money or in time), and that therefore the value of art is to those prepared to pay that value, not to those who do not think it has that value. Art has to be a market and work in the same way as say cheese (there are some cheeses I do not really like, but others really value – to the point of having to go to Selfridges to buy them when I can get what I want at the local co-op (other local supermarkets may be available, but not in my neck of the woods)).
Thailover,
I wouldn’t be happy using absolute ideas of value or worth in art, as that has two consequences. One, it stops innovation and exploration – and I like some of the modern stuff, so I wouldn’t want that (I even like some of the political stuff – although I sometimes read it differently from the artist, because they loose the right to control the message when the release the book – just like literature or art); two, this gives us a set of values around which morals or some other form of correctness can be constructed. And if we give values (rather than simple rules such as do no harm) any respect at all then people can use these as a basis to impose their own views. Recognising that art may be odd or apparently valueless is not just a case of letting others be, it is also a step against allowing the conditions of censorship and totalitarianism to rise.
After all, it is not the dictatorships of the world (where the government does control art) that produce the new and difficult art, or new forms of music, or different genres of literature. The fragmenting of art (in its widest sense) is part and parcel of freedom – I may not want to lie in Tracey Enim’s Bed, but I am certain I want to live in a world where the freedom to produce this is guaranteed, because it means I can choose not to like it and pass by to whatever I like better.
It is too easy to write that art is just subjective and leave it at that. For the movement against classical ideas of beauty or ideas about representational art were not just advocated by those who wanted some more liberal world. They wanted to destroy what they saw as evil, bourgeois culture; they often wanted to destroy the notion of art of somehow enhancing life by representing a set of values or spirit. There is nothing neutral about this.
Sure, if people want to spend their own money on splatter-paintings, mounds of human excrement or lavatories, and call it art, that is their lookout. But when public, taxpayers’ money is spent on this tripe, and given some official seal of approval, however, tacit, it is poisonous.
When my goddaughter was three she could make a pretty good attempt at a Pollock or a Rothko, but sadly Rembrandt and Klimt were beyond her. However if she was feeling a bit silly she could do a fair Picasso.
Civil engineer here. Don’t see what the fuss is about. For, I dunno, twenty grand, you hire a general contractor and tell him to jackhammer away all the bits of the rock that don’t look like David. Jeez.
Johnathan, September 10, 2015 at 3:10 pm, esp. first para.: Very, very good.
The thing is, visual art and verbal art engage both our emotions and our intellect, to the extent that they are done well; done well by traditional standards up until the early 20th century, at least.
Whereas music in itself has no intellectual component (except in the case of song, where words and music go together). Although many of us music-lovers do find that many pieces cause us to “picture” various things, or to feel as if we were experiencing various events, as well as to respond emotionally to the pure sound. (I could give you a long, long list in the “experiencing” category. Sigh … so much beauty….)
It is possible to delight in color next to color, shapes against shapes; these have no intellectual meaning in themselves. Part of the enjoyment that we get from seeing a fine work of traditional art comes precisely from seeing these colors and these shapes played off against each other, dancing together. “The Birth of Venus” and “Civil War” both evoke that aspect of visual pleasure, I think.
I have rather hoped that Pollack was trying to get the “pure emotional” content that we find in music — that he was trying to “paint music,” so to speak. Thus “music for the eye,” colors together expressing nothing, but pleasurable just the same, shapes expressing nearly nothing (unless you have the mind of a mathematician *g*), just there to be enjoyed as shapes.
Maybe. I don’t know, of course, never having invited Mr. Pollack to come to a party and misbehave in my fireplace.
Still, even if that was his aim I don’t think it was terribly successful. And I’m glad if Mr. Rothko’s juxtapositions of colored rectangles (whether hard- or fuzzy-edged) made him happy, but frankly, they don’t do a thing for me.
Personally, I do think it’s fun to create an “abstract” of colors and shapes that turns out to have just a hint of narrative to it. But High Art it’s not. (Even reasonably good lowbrow art it’s not. )
I don’t see how a shark in formaldehyde is any different from any other pickled lab specimen.
. . .
Good discussion, by the way. Thanks to the folks who pointed out that “art” is becoming more and more a way of symbolizing ideas and less and less a way of illustrating events or persons or scenes. Hadn’t looked at it that way, myself. Food for thought.
I have remembered what a “link” is – and have actually watched the film now.
Nothing much to add to it.
Other than to say that the gentleman’s hope that the government schools will teach people about traditional art will not come into effect.
If parents want their children to learn – they are going to have to teach them themselves, or pay to have them taught by others.
Voluntary charitable foundations also have a role to play.
Although such institutions are vulnerable to “capture” by Progressives.
Johnathon,
Art is subjective, or you are imposing your values on someone else. For someone like me (happy with most modern art, but my most prized picture is a study of a bird so good that most visitors think it is a photo) I am going to lose out regardless of what values are imposed, and I tend to resent other people telling me that something I like is not art.
But state support for any form of art is equally an imposition of values – and considering that people clearly produce and buy art without government approval, I am not sure what the point of state support is unless it is an attempt to impose views. However, one of the great things about subjectivity is that artists and sponsors can say what something is about but they cannot control the interpretation of it – so I actually quite like some deliberately socialist art (and more so music), because I can interpret it differently. So whilst I agree state support for art is pointless or even an attempt to control minds, I also think that this is one of the least dangerous ways states can set out to influence people. They could do something truly dangerous like subsidise opera instead…