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When Will the Normals Reclaim Art?
Beer can artwork accidentally thrown in bin by staff member at Dutch Museum
You would think that the tiresome joke that is modern art would be over by now.
Alexandre Lavet
That this is museum-quality art is obvious nonsense, but you still have to admire the chutzpah and sales genius of the grifter who foisted this alleged objet d’art onto the “art” world.
Many years ago, I met a young woman who worked at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum of modern art. She said that the maintenance staff had been chastised for leaving crossed mops and brooms over buckets just to see if patrons would stop and examine their ad hoc artwork.
Roger Scruton wrote that religion does not reduce the sense of awe and intuition of the larger reality to sterile propositions, but instead offers an opportunity to join a community to celebrate and find meaning in that shared intuition. He said that art can also be a path to that personal search, that innate awareness of something higher and better that can be induced by the experience of beauty and creative insight.
The attack on genuine art is intended to cut off that pathway in the same way that religion, tradition, common sense and humanism itself are under assault by the anti-humanists of the left. The project of making humanity a petri dish for ideological pathogens requires the complete extinction of an awareness of fuller existence.
Modern art is also a model of leftist rule: What the people want or believe is irrelevant—all-powerful critics tell us what is or isn’t art. Mediocre creators and grifters displace genuinely talented people. The rich pour money into the enterprise to be certified as enlightened and sophisticated. That evil joke is now the blueprint for “our democracy.”
Published in General
When collectors start buying it, perhaps?
Seems odd that there is still no “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment that punctures the entire farce.
I’d say that janitor was the first art critic to enter that gallery in quite some time.
Reading Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man for the first time, with commentary by Dale Ahlquist. Chesterton says, “art is the signature of man,” making the distinction for the Darwinists between man and animals. He starts with one of the few things we can say for certain about the caveman. He was an artist.
And, in my opinion, he produced better artwork than anything the modernists have done.
They haven’t found any cave paintings of salads yet.
I remember the words Anthony Burgess put into the mouth of his main character in the novel Earthly Powers: “I could not see that, but as an artist myself I know better than to reject the insights of another.” However strange or trivial they may seem, I suppose.
So, who knows? Maybe those beer cans actually did represent “All the Good Times We Had Together”.
The short answer is, when people have the courage to say that the emperor is wearing no clothes. This garbage gets foisted on the population starting in grade school, and so the whole modern “art” industrial complex gets perpetuated. When I started teaching in the classroom, in an orthodox, academically rigorous Catholic school, the principal showed me the curriculum that the former teacher had been using for art (she was primarily a mathematics teacher). I looked at the material and told her, “You’re not teaching relativism anywhere else in this school, but that’s what all this is.” Part of the material was designed to acquaint kids with works of great art, and had crap by Picasso, Miro – the usual talentless bums – along with Michelangelo. She looked horrified and told me to do whatever I thought necessary. So I threw out the material and created my own. The parents loved it.
This garbage is firmly entrenched. Can you imagine what would happen to the worth of art museums if it was acknowledged by all that the stuff on the walls is crap? No, the “art” world must go on telling everyone that the emperor’s clothes are spectacular.
I’m not sure those moments will ever end.
True Story: When I was in high school, there was an art show and contest for student artists. Before the show, some students who worked with the janitor cleaned up and put out a garbage can – old metal kind with a lid that looks like a shield. They got a pizza and crumpled up the box and left it on top of the can. It actually won the contest!
There were two problems though. The “exhibit” was unmarked and the people had nowhere to toss their trash.
You forgot the more important use of modern art: money laundering for political bribery.
Example: Hunter Biden.
There were the blank canvasses, which I believe were titled “Take The Money And Run.”
It was either 1985 or 1987 when I was in the French Quarter and watched a street artist do a portrait with colored chalks in a short time. She was “painting” a couple for some undisclosed amount of money, and she was accepting VISA and MasterCard in addition to cash. It was impressive and the results were beautiful, but also it was not much more than a technical display. I don’t know that it could be called “art”.
It’s open to argument, but there is something to the words of John Lennon. He once said he could have gone to Vegas and made a lot of money playing his old hits, but he would have stopped being an artist and would have become a craftsman. He did not mean that as an insult and went so far as to say, “I respect craftsmen, but I have no interest in becoming one.”
I don’t think there is a bright dividing line between artists and craftsmen. Some seemingly routine craft products can have a spark of creative genius.
There is, however, a bright line separating a work of art from a painting or sculpture that could have been produced by accident by a seven-year-old.
If one took a well-fed cow, fed it an emetic, and led it up to the canvas, the result would be indistinguishable from what has passed for art for a while now. I’m thinking of what I’ve seen from Jackson Pollock.
I always told my students that if their four-year-old brother could do it, it wasn’t art.
Did anyone notice that even if it was supposed to be invisible, it could still be touched?
I want to know how big the display should be, and how it should be lit.
How many movers were required to move it, and did They get paid to move it?
If you feed the cow well, the emetic is superfluous.
The buyer was touched for 13,000 pounds.
Respect!
Anybody willing to purchase that deserves to be fleeced.
I like cows, and cows have no illusions about what they are doing.
Brings to mind the term. “B.S. Artist”.
I want to know why I didn’t think of that first. It was already done for musicians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3
I live rurally, in an area that is very diverse.
Originally Lake County was a dual industry region: it held in the 1800’s gold and silver mining operations as well as farms.
Toward the end of the Nineteenth Century, with a railroad system that easily brought middle class city people looking for needed relaxation, fresh air and unspoiled nature, it also became a place noted for spas.
When the two of us moved up here in 2005, I realized that it had more recently become home to creative types. Prices for housing in LA, and San Francisco were too high to let many artists, writers and musicians pursue the Muse. But homes here were reasonably priced, allowing the gifted to devote time and energy to polishing their craft.
Many Lake County restaurants held the works of artists whose oil and acrylic paintings should have been in art galleries in big cities. But those galleries featured edgy works by people who had been more heavily influenced by Rothko, Warhol and others than by anyone who understood human anatomy, proportion, perspective and basic composition. You could walk thru a San Francisco art gallery and view a work by someone who did layers upon layers of paint, and then knifed a wedge out of the various colors. I think such artists got extra points if they glued a cartoon character on top of the resulting mess.
But in contrast, my county’s artists did so much worthy art that exhilarated the mind & heart. Some of these artists should have been celebrated for their work, except that gar-bah-ge had captured the gallery owner crowd.
Gallery owners who wanted to achieve the top profits partnered with people who had finagled a place on the Board of Directors for big city art museums. I knew of a lawyer who spent 2 to 3 years sending out his CV to museums hoping that one of those museums would allow him such a position. One of his closest friends was a gallery owner. If he could snare a spot on the board of directors, the art lining the walls of his friend’s gallery could become installed in that same museum. His resume peddling got him nothing, so he married into the museum world!
Reminds me of that movie, Who the F*(#) is Jackson Pollock? Buncha pretentious morons.
I would guess that what Lennon meant was that if you go to a place such as Vegas and repeatedly play your greatest hits as well as you can for aging fans rather than risk trying to do something new you have become a craftsman. I don’t see anything wrong with that, and apparently neither did Lennon. He just chose a different way.
The whole artist trip can get pretty pretentious. I remember Terry Gross interviewing Scott Adams and asking about licensing his creations. She seemed to think he should have followed the path of the guy who created Calvin and Hobbes and avoid commercialization. He laughed and said that Dilbert & Co. were just cartoon characters whose only purpose for their miserable existence was to make him as much money as possible. When she asked about “overexposure” he told her that never concerned him because if you looked at the map, you would see that the road to overexposure runs right through the middle of filthy rich.