Modern Art is Sh*t

[Bob Butler 54]

(05-22-2016, 12:55 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I really don't know.  But if I am in the right direction, then I would suppose abstract art became passe when photography developed into an art form that could capture that essence.  In today's world of computer-generated imagery, is there any role for two-dimensional physical art?  Visual artists will remain, somebody has to work the software, and I suspect in high demand for video productions and computer game applications.  I don't play many video games but my understanding is some of the imagery found in them are very much Art.

As I said, I'm not a fan of fine art, but appreciate the art of science fiction.  I have a modest collection of hardcopy stuff adorning my walls, and a more extended collection of jpeg files used for desktops and screen savers.  While many share a notion that two dimensional art is dead, I for one sill like to look at the stuff.  While the illustrators producing such art might not be making big bucks or having their works hung in haut art museums, they are making a living and are doing stuff the old masters wouldn't have dreamed of.  

With the exception of Starry Night, I don't collect haut art.  It just leaves me cold, seeming primitive and staid.

Kelly Freas.  "A Bridle for Pegasus."  The book came out in 1973.  Kelly Freas doesn't do photorealistic.  I'm not sure what he does.  It's not photorealistic, it's not entirely abstract, there is an element of abstract swirls of paint conveying emotion, and of color for color's sake, but you can also recognize it as a lady with a guitar on a winged horse.  It also conveys several layers of emotion that reflect what goes on in the book, including an early vision of apocalyptic art.  I'm not one to claim I'm the ultimate critic capable of judging how worthy one artist or style is as compared to another, but I'd rather this be hanging on my walls than most of the old master's stuff.  There is just more there.  Kelly was able to read a book, then let his imagination run wild...  while leaving empty space on the top and bottom for a book title and author's name.  This was a commercial work.

One day when working to spiff up my screen saver, I did a Google search something to the effect of 'science fiction women".  This was one image that came up.  I could say it is photorealistic, or nearly so in its quality and technique.  I'm assuming it was done the old fashion way, with paint brushes.  Thing is, I don't really know.  I can produce similar effects with CGI, not this good in terms of composition and imagination, but...  Anyway, I am dubious about any claim about the old masters having better technique than modern artists.

Video game stuff or the sort of CGI you see in big budget Hollywood films are again things the old masters couldn't have dreamed off.  We now have other stuff for other times and other audiences.  Some of it is still limited by technology.  Computer horsepower limits image quality when the game player is moving the artwork around in real time.  Still, if you don't make the eyes pop you have trouble competing with the next game company down the road.

It might be that artists always have competed for an audience, but audiences and mediums have changed.  Fans of one style of art will sneer at fans of other art styles.  I'm not going to spend a lot of time putting this or that approach down, but clearly things are changing.  Changing, yes, but I for one don't think 2D is dead.

[Odin]

(05-22-2016, 12:12 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: I find Mozart to be somewhat stiff.  Grieg and Tchaikovsky are both passionate.  I would argue that if one wants to listen to the most refined expression of sound ever created by humans Beethoven would be it.  He has the passion of the Romantics and the formality of the Classics.

I mostly agree with this, though I personally put Bach on top. I like Shostakovitch, too.

[Kinser79]

(05-22-2016, 07:25 PM)Odin Wrote:

(05-22-2016, 12:12 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: I find Mozart to be somewhat stiff.  Grieg and Tchaikovsky are both passionate.  I would argue that if one wants to listen to the most refined expression of sound ever created by humans Beethoven would be it.  He has the passion of the Romantics and the formality of the Classics.

I mostly agree with this, though I personally put Bach on top. I like Shostakovitch, too.

Bach has a tendency to ornament his music with gaudiness. But the whole of the Baroque period was like that. Shostakovitch is rather good.

[Eric the Green]

Kinser wrote, " I would argue that if one wants to listen to the most refined expression of sound ever created by humans Beethoven would be it. "

You'd better change your mind. Beethoven has been a top favorite of mine for 60 years or more.

[Kinser79]

(05-23-2016, 02:03 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Kinser wrote, " I would argue that if one wants to listen to the most refined expression of sound ever created by humans Beethoven would be it. "

You'd better change your mind. Beethoven has been a top favorite of mine for 60 years or more.

Eric that is merely evidence that broken clocks can be right twice a day. Also, experience with farm animals in my youth indicates that even blind hogs can find an acorn every now and then as well.

[Eric the Green]

(05-23-2016, 08:29 AM)Kinser79 Wrote:

(05-23-2016, 02:03 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Kinser wrote, " I would argue that if one wants to listen to the most refined expression of sound ever created by humans Beethoven would be it. "

You'd better change your mind. Beethoven has been a top favorite of mine for 60 years or more.

Eric that is merely evidence that broken clocks can be right twice a day.  Also, experience with farm animals in my youth indicates that even blind hogs can find an acorn every now and then as well.

No, kinser, YOU said that whatever the opposite of Eric says, is what you say.

[Kinser79]

(05-23-2016, 11:20 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(05-23-2016, 08:29 AM)Kinser79 Wrote:

(05-23-2016, 02:03 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Kinser wrote, " I would argue that if one wants to listen to the most refined expression of sound ever created by humans Beethoven would be it. "

You'd better change your mind. Beethoven has been a top favorite of mine for 60 years or more.

Eric that is merely evidence that broken clocks can be right twice a day.  Also, experience with farm animals in my youth indicates that even blind hogs can find an acorn every now and then as well.

No, kinser, YOU said that whatever the opposite of Eric says, is what you say.

And where exactly did I say this? I'm going to need citations of course.

I have said many times in the past that the Opposite of what Eric says is usually the truth/reality.

[Webmaster]

Guys could you try to keep this about the topic at hand and not each other?

[pbrower2a]

I did an exercise with brush strokes and ended up with abstract impressionism. I have no idea of what I expressed.

[gabrielle]

[Eric the Green]

The Infinity Mirror Room is great!
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/need-esca...oi-kusama/





The repetition and cosmic scope reminds me of my fave, Bach's Toccata in F.
https://youtu.be/U6fgRfrTb78

HARI SREENIVASAN: There’s a lot going on in the political world of Washington these days, but the hottest ticket in town may be for a museum exhibition by a Japanese artist exploring worlds well beyond today’s headlines.

Jeffrey Brown has our story.

JEFFREY BROWN: It’s called an Infinity Mirror Room, and the stretching out of time and space, an effect created through the use of lights, reflection and objects, is one of the obsessions of artist Yayoi Kusama.

Right now at Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum, people are lining up to experience her world of whimsy, color, shapes, and peeks into the beyond.

Museum director Melissa Chiu:

MELISSA CHIU, Director, Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum: There are fewer and fewer moments today that you’re alone in something that feels universal. You are there in amongst the cosmos in one piece. It’s just light. And it’s a kind of — it’s very poignant and very compelling.

JEFFREY BROWN: Even as the wider world has caught on, Kusama has in fact been a much-loved star in the art world since the early 1960s, after coming to New York from her native Japan.

Her earliest works already displayed motifs that remain to this day, notably the repetition of forms, especially simple marks and polka dots, that Kusama gives a more cosmic significance, as in her series of paintings called “Infinity Nets.”

In an interview with Hirshhorn curators in December, the 87-year-old artist, as colorful as her work, spoke of her attempt to reach the infinite through the repetition of images.

YAYOI KUSAMA, Artist (through interpreter): The same things piled one on top of another creates an expanding world that reaches out to the edges of the universe. That is the simple image I have.

This effect of continual repetition calls out to the human senses, and, in return, deep inside of our hearts, we yearn for true amazement.

JEFFREY BROWN: Curator Mika Yoshitake put together the exhibition.

MIKA YOSHITAKE, Curator, Hirshhorn Museum: Her work is very process-oriented, meaning that there is a very lengthy, you know, physical labor that goes on, that the repetition of certain motifs like the nets or the polka dots, and they — it kind of expands organically.

JEFFREY BROWN: That compulsiveness is there in sculptures of phallic forms: a rowboat titled “Violet Obsession,” furniture that you might not want to sit in, but Kusama herself was happy to, and happy to be photographed in.

In fact, she often brought herself into the picture, a polka dotted, kimono-wearing, downtown ’60s art world figure known for creating happenings on the streets, sometimes with nudes, sometimes protesting the Vietnam War.

She also began to make the Infinity Mirror Rooms, eventually 20 in all, six at the center of this new exhibition, the most ever gathered together.

Part of the attraction of Kusama’s work clearly is the fun house effect. I mean, here I am, with cameraman Malcolm, in a field of pumpkins that stretches on, yes, to infinity.

MIKA YOSHITAKE: It’s about life. It’s about confronting our mortality. It’s about filling a void that she has experienced. And that incessant energy, a desire to connect with people, I think it’s about the clarity of vision and also perception.

JEFFREY BROWN: But Kusama’s story is more complicated. She suffered from hallucinations from childhood, and experienced early trauma from being forced by her mother to spy on her father as he had affairs.

She had a breakdown in the 1970s that forced her to return to Japan. And, for more than 40 years, she’s voluntarily lived in a psychiatric hospital, even as she’s continued to work in a studio a block away, making what she’s referred to as art medicine.

MIKA YOSHITAKE: Art for her is a form of therapy. So she needs the art, or else she will probably not survive. She is somebody who needs to have a ritual every day of, you know, painting.

JEFFREY BROWN: Certainly, her work brought a good deal of pleasure at the Hirshhorn exhibition, especially in the Obliteration Room, a pristine white-walled space in which visitors were invited to join in the art-making by adding dots of their own.

Captured in time-lapse video, the room was being transformed, just as Kusama intended, according to museum director Chiu.

MELISSA CHIU: The word obliteration has a very harsh kind of meaning, but, for her this was, in a way, how she thinks about her art, that her art is transforming her own life, helping her to deal with life, but also potentially allowing others to interact with it here in this room.

JEFFREY BROWN: Museum-goers couldn’t resist, and neither could I.

So, if I put it like this …

MELISSA CHIU: Put wherever you like, Jeff.

(LAUGHTER)

MELISSA CHIU: So, balancing. See how he’s balancing?

(LAUGHTER)

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes. Yes. Yes.

MELISSA CHIU: You could create patterns from randomness. As you can see, some people couldn’t resist and they have tried to create a line with their dots.

But all bets are off. You can do whatever you like.

JEFFREY BROWN: There’s a lot of humor and a lot of pain in the work of Yayoi Kusama, who continues to put in full days at her studio creating new paintings and sculptures, even as record crowds here flock to see the results.

From the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., I’m Jeffrey Brown for the PBS NewsHour.

HARI SREENIVASAN: The exhibition is in Washington through May 14. Then, for two years, it travels to Seattle, Los Angeles, Toronto, Cleveland, and Atlanta.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Wow.

[Remy Renault]

(05-13-2016, 10:34 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: ...The old art is better than the new art  -- to no small extent because the bad art of times long past has long disappeared from sight. How much Renaissance art went into the bonfires of the vanities? Probably few bona fide masterpieces.  Recent oily canvases that people cared little to preserve  went up in smoke. Mediocre canvases -- like student works -- typically got painted over because canvas wasn't cheap.

Neoclassical painting is likely spent as a means of lively expression. Going beyond the achievements of classical artists is practically impossible. Most genuine achievements in performance,  creativity, and academic achievement require about 10K hours (Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers) of preparatory work in childhood and adolescence before one achieves mastery enough to assure that one can churn out masterpieces easily. Beyond 10K one may have questions of possibility.  Starting later gets one quickly to a brick wall (people quit developing intellectual power around age 20, so there is no "growing into" some achievement after age 25). 

I don't think this is necessarily true. Van Gogh didn't begin painting at all until he was 27, and Cezanne was a nobody in his twenties. And fiction writing is far from a young person's game. The prefrontal cortex isn't even fully developed on average until age 25. Not all geniuses are/were necessarily child prodigies. Malcolm Gladwell to whom you attribute the 10K hour rule has also written extensively on late bloomers and has even said himself genius shouldn't necessarily be linked to precocity, even if they do often coexist. And needless to say, there are plenty of people who go back to school later in life and perform better academically than they did as an adolescent. So as for all intellectual development stalling at 20, extensive neuroscience research suggests otherwise. And besides, age 20 is simply an average. Just as some men are 5'5 others happen to be 6'5. Why should neurodevelopment be any different.

[pbrower2a]

(01-12-2020, 06:33 PM)Remy Renault Wrote:

(05-13-2016, 10:34 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: ...The old art is better than the new art  -- to no small extent because the bad art of times long past has long disappeared from sight. How much Renaissance art went into the bonfires of the vanities? Probably few bona fide masterpieces.  Recent oily canvases that people cared little to preserve  went up in smoke. Mediocre canvases -- like student works -- typically got painted over because canvas wasn't cheap.

Neoclassical painting is likely spent as a means of lively expression. Going beyond the achievements of classical artists is practically impossible. Most genuine achievements in performance,  creativity, and academic achievement require about 10K hours (Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers) of preparatory work in childhood and adolescence before one achieves mastery enough to assure that one can churn out masterpieces easily. Beyond 10K one may have questions of possibility.  Starting later gets one quickly to a brick wall (people quit developing intellectual power around age 20, so there is no "growing into" some achievement after age 25). 

I don't think this is necessarily true. Van Gogh didn't begin painting at all until he was 27, and Cezanne was a nobody in his twenties. And fiction writing is far from a young person's game. The prefrontal cortex isn't even fully developed on average until age 25. Not all geniuses are/were necessarily child prodigies. Malcolm Gladwell to whom you attribute the 10K hour rule has also written extensively on late bloomers and has even said himself genius shouldn't necessarily be linked to precocity, even if they do often coexist. And needless to say, there are plenty of people who go back to school later in life and perform better academically than they did as an adolescent. So as for all intellectual development stalling at 20, extensive neuroscience research suggests otherwise. And besides, age 20 is simply an average. Just as some men are 5'5 others happen to be 6'5. Why should neurodevelopment be any different.

Thank you for reviving an old Forum that had gone into near-oblivion. In most cases, genuine excellence in some field of extreme achievement implies that one has done much in one activity at the expense of another, especially if the two activities are incompatible. Thus mastery of baseball pitching and playing a violin are incompatible. If Justin Verlander (arguably the greatest baseball pitcher of his time) plays a musical instrument, then he probably doesn't do it particularly well. Even if one does something that is not at all artistic by any definition but that takes an incredible amount of time to accomplish (let us say becoming a dentist or CPA) such nearly precludes artistic achievement due to the time that his work takes. Ordinary work such as driving a truck, milking cows, selling linens in a store, or bar-tending is incompatible with a high level of artistic achievement. Maybe if one can make a living doing art or performance one gives up the old bread-and-butter job.  

"And all the stars that never were are parking cars and pumping gas" (Burt Bacharach, Do you know the way to San Jose?)... at some point one gives up the dream if one can't make a living at it and never will, and becomes a letter carrier or a manager-trainee in a fast-food place... and gets to live a normal life. Well, we need our dairy workers, truck drivers, retail clerks, bartenders, nurses' aides, and letter carriers -- don't we?  Most of us have no desire to waste our money on artistic schlock or our time and money on watching bad movies and theater performances or listening to tone-deaf violinists. But even with legitimate art, pottery-making is incompatible with playing an organ or with writing novels (including the much-deprecated bad romance and science-fiction novels that have commercial value for inexplicable reasons). 

Late bloomers can happen... maybe someone puts the 10K hours in while in his forties, or puts in the last 5K required hours in in his fifties after having come up short.  I'm not convinced as a rule in child prodigies because what is amazing at age 10 is rarely so impressive at age 30. As an example with a pianist, Daniel Barenboim became a far better musician after pianist after he had some mature experiences. That may be as important as technical mastery.   Maybe someone gets the emotional maturity and must express it in art... who knows?

But back to the quote on the old art being better because much mediocre-to-bad art got destroyed, used for a non-artistic purpose (such as ballast if a sculpture), or painted over. The masterworks were much more likely saved from any bonfire of the vanities. Renaissance works with incompetence such as flawed perspective or bad proportion were often lost or destroyed. Or, if they are devotional, they end up going to some parish church well off the tourist lanes. We have yet to fully assess the merits of modern art, and even I have some critical ideas. First, one does not break the conventional rules of perspective, proportion, or overall realism (such as that shadows do not go in different directions) without compelling cause.

[Eric the Green]

brower's point is good. We compare old classics with new art, and new art comes off badly because it has not yet stood the test of time like old classics have. So there's some wonderful modern art like I posted above, and a lot that will be forgotten.