old art is dead art?
Darren Reynolds
Well, seen as this newsgroup seems to have become a forum for attacking, or
defending, Modern/contemporary art, lets put the boot on the other foot.
Put the other camp on the defensive
I take my cue from an essay in October's Art Monthly by artist David
Barrett. In it he says
'Dead art is not art; it's just dead, in the same way that a corpse is not
a person but a fragment of that person. And why do I say that art in the
National Gallery is dead? Well, the hinge of this argument is the fact that
art is not an object; it is an experience. And the experience of art
includes the context of the work - I don't just mean its immediate physical
environment, but also the social environment in which it is produced and
viewed.'
This final point I completely agree with, and it is a point I've been
banging on about in other threads. You can't take art out of its historical
context. He goes on to say,
'Sure, we can have historical symbolism pointed out to us, but this is like
trying to explain a joke - the point is missed because, as we all know,
it's the way you tell them that counts. The symbols have lost their social
intuition, they speak in tongues, they have become like points on a circuit
whose connections have worn away so thyat the electricity no longer flows.'
Perhaps all those out there with their heads in Renaissance clouds can
explain how the electricity still flows for them in art that says nothing
to us today.
Darren
G*rd*n
dar...@reinwood.demon.co.uk (Darren Reynolds):
| ...
| explain how the electricity still flows for them in art that says nothing
| to us today.
I've never been able to explain it to myself -- not only do
I find a lot of the Renaissance stuff electric, but ancient
pictures on cave walls whose makers are a thousand times
more distant from us than Titian. In the former case, we
could say that contemporary culture somehow encapsulates
and preserves the Renaissance -- after all, Titian spoke a
language many of us can speak or read, used materials we're
familiar with, painted figures out of known mythologies;
but the power of prehistoric art can hardly be explained in
this way.
--
}"{ G*rd*n }"{ gcf @ panix.com }"{
JKearman
In article <AE8D8EFF...@reinwood.demon.co.uk>,
dar...@reinwood.demon.co.uk (Darren Reynolds) writes:
>Perhaps all those out there with their heads in Renaissance clouds can
>explain how the electricity still flows for them in art that says nothing
>to us today.
>
>
Technique, composition, design, style.
Jim Kearman
Darren Reynolds
In article <54a3bf$6...@newsbf02.news.aol.com>,
jkea...@aol.com (JKearman) wrote:
Lessons. The guy's point was that art is an experience. Learning lessons
about technique isn't art. In a way you have emphasised his point.
Darren
Regiment's Hobby Shop
dar...@reinwood.demon.co.uk (Darren Reynolds) wrote:
>Well, seen as this newsgroup seems to have become a forum for attacking, or
>defending, Modern/contemporary art, lets put the boot on the other foot.
>Put the other camp on the defensive
>
>I take my cue from an essay in October's Art Monthly by artist David
>Barrett. In it he says
>
>'Dead art is not art; it's just dead, in the same way that a corpse is not
>a person but a fragment of that person. And why do I say that art in the
>National Gallery is dead? Well, the hinge of this argument is the fact that
>art is not an object; it is an experience. And the experience of art
>includes the context of the work - I don't just mean its immediate physical
>environment, but also the social environment in which it is produced and
>viewed.'
>
>This final point I completely agree with, and it is a point I've been
>banging on about in other threads. You can't take art out of its historical
>context. He goes on to say,
>
>'Sure, we can have historical symbolism pointed out to us, but this is like
>trying to explain a joke - the point is missed because, as we all know,
>it's the way you tell them that counts. The symbols have lost their social
>intuition, they speak in tongues, they have become like points on a circuit
>whose connections have worn away so thyat the electricity no longer flows.'
>
>explain how the electricity still flows for them in art that says nothing
>to us today.
>
>------------------
If old art says nothing to you today, it's because you're not listening.
Sure, we all view art through the filters of our own historic times and
our own personal experience, but that's exactly why we can tell good art
from bad... If art can transcend it's own past and speak to us across the
ages of time and culture then it's become the ultimate time machine, the
ultimate communication tool, the ultimate contact between unconnected
souls. Of course, one of the great pleasures of art history is learning
to decode the symbols of a past culture and to understand them in
context. Although I try to learn about the symbolism in a painting
(an example would be Vermeer) not knowing all the subtlies of the symbols
doesn't mean that I can't appreciate the (still) living art in it.
Can you honestly look at a ten thousand year old painting of leaping deer
and clawing panthers on a cave wall and not have some small understanding
of the mind of the artist? His (or her) stone age life and times are as
far removed from my modern experience as is possible, yet a living
connection is forged everytime I have a small recognition of how he
lived, why he painted, what he was trying to achieve.
I'll be thankful if my art speaks to people ten years from now. To be
able to speak to people across centuries is the mark of genius and the
definition of living art.
AT
>
CAT
>'Dead art is not art; it's just dead, in the same way that a corpse is >not a person but a fragment of that person.......
Does this apply to old music also? If so, I am tossing my Mozart, Beethoven and other dead white men music. It's old. It's dead. =
Discard it! I am also tossing some old dead literature BTW.
CAT
Mdeli
dar...@reinwood.demon.co.uk (Darren Reynolds) wrote:
>Well, seen as this newsgroup seems to have become a forum for attacking, or
>defending, Modern/contemporary art, lets put the boot on the other foot.
>Put the other camp on the defensive
>I take my cue from an essay in October's Art Monthly by artist David
>Barrett. In it he says
>'Dead art is not art; it's just dead, in the same way that a corpse is not
>a person but a fragment of that person. And why do I say that art in the
>National Gallery is dead? And the experience of art
>includes the context of the work - I don't just mean its immediate physical
>environment, but also the social environment in which it is produced and
>viewed.'
Sounds like POMO RAP.
This guy says "Well, the hinge of this argument is the
fact that "art is not an object; it is an experience."
So a Vermeer painting isn’t art or is it? But a Rothko
painting is also an object. The last sentence he
writes applies to anything. So what is dead art?
>This final point I completely agree with, and it is a point I've been
>banging on about in other threads. You can't take art out of its historical
>context. He goes on to say,
One doesn’t have to know anything about a work’s
historical context to enjoy it.
>'Sure, we can have historical symbolism pointed out to us, but this is like
>trying to explain a joke - the point is missed because, as we all know,
>it's the way you tell them that counts. The symbols have lost their social
>intuition, they speak in tongues, they have become like points on a circuit
>whose connections have worn away so thyat the electricity no longer flows.'
If you think that the above represents reasoning I can
only say the short circuit is in your head.
>Perhaps all those out there with their heads in Renaissance clouds can
>explain how the electricity still flows for them in art that says nothing
>to us today.
Another dimwit who imagines there are but two kinds of
art, Renaissance and
modern.
Instead of your cockeyed philosophical pontifications
why no tell us why Matisse paints hands as flippers and
why Guernica deserves more credit than a sloppy cartoon
blown up to wall size,
Mani DeLi
...no skill no art
JKearman
In article <AE8ED3B6...@reinwood.demon.co.uk>,
dar...@reinwood.demon.co.uk (Darren Reynolds) writes:
>>>Perhaps all those out there with their heads in Renaissance clouds can
>>>explain how the electricity still flows for them in art that says
nothing
>>>to us today.
>>>
>>>
>>
>>Technique, composition, design, style.
>>
>>Jim Kearman
>
>Lessons. The guy's point was that art is an experience. Learning lessons
>about technique isn't art. In a way you have emphasised his point.
>
>Darren
>
>
I never used the words "learning" or "lessons." Some of us find the
competent use of technique (in conjunction with composition, design and
style) electrifying.
Jim Kearman
Bruce Attah
In article <AE8D8EFF...@reinwood.demon.co.uk>,
dar...@reinwood.demon.co.uk (Darren Reynolds) wrote:
> Well, seen as this newsgroup seems to have become a forum for attacking, or
> defending, Modern/contemporary art, lets put the boot on the other foot.
> Put the other camp on the defensive
Tee-hee, yeah, sure.
> I take my cue from an essay in October's Art Monthly by artist David
> Barrett. In it he says
>
> 'Dead art is not art; it's just dead, in the same way that a corpse is not
> a person but a fragment of that person. And why do I say that art in the
> National Gallery is dead? Well, the hinge of this argument is the fact that
> art is not an object; it is an experience. And the experience of art
> includes the context of the work - I don't just mean its immediate physical
> environment, but also the social environment in which it is produced and
> viewed.'
>
> This final point I completely agree with, and it is a point I've been
> banging on about in other threads. You can't take art out of its historical
> context.
I could simply dismiss David Barrett as a silly philistine who is looking
for an excuse for his own inability to enjoy good art and his
unwillingness to learn about it, but I will not. Rather, I will listen
for a little longer before seeking to explain where he has gone wrong:
> He goes on to say,
>
> 'Sure, we can have historical symbolism pointed out to us, but this is like
> trying to explain a joke - the point is missed because, as we all know,
> it's the way you tell them that counts. The symbols have lost their social
> intuition, they speak in tongues, they have become like points on a circuit
> whose connections have worn away so thyat the electricity no longer flows.'
>
> Perhaps all those out there with their heads in Renaissance clouds can
> explain how the electricity still flows for them in art that says nothing
> to us today.
>
> Darren
The short answer to this is that David Barret has tried to put a sell-by
date on works of art, but he has failed to tell us what that sell-by date
is. Is ten-year-old art dead? Is ninety-year-old art dead? Or can art
live for two centuries or three?
The long answer is as follows...
David Barrett says, following a respectable tradition whose best-known
proponent is John Dewey, that art is not an object but an experience.
Fine. This is not an unshakeable position, but I do not need to shake it
to show that Barrett is being silly, for it is not his premise, but the
conclusion he tries to draw from it that reveals him to be nothing more or
less than an opponent of art.
Barrett seeks to persuade us that a work of art cannot convey an
art-experience to people who do not share the artist's experience of the
"immediate physical environment [and] the social environment in which it
is produced and viewed," and that, since artists who have been dead for a
hundred years and more clearly lived in a different physical and social
environment from ours, we cannot properly enjoy there art. Any pleasure
that we do get from their art is "a joke" and "the point is missed", so
"the electricity no longer flows".
At first glance, there might seem to be some truth in this, the more
remote in time an artist is from us, the more likely it would seem that we
will be unable to "get" what the artist was about, and therefore, the more
false must be our appreciation of that artist's work. Art produced before
a certain date, we might then expect, would simply be incomprehensible to
us, and therefore "not art". Closer inspection, however, shows that the
situation is rather more complicated than Barrett imagines.
It is easy to imagine that a secular modern might, through an inability to
understand it, fail to appreciate the art of Giotto or, say, Crivelli,
simply because of a gulf between the artists' world view and the
modern's. But what about a devout Catholic with a deep knowledge of
ecclesiastical tradition? Such people do exist in the modern world, and
one would expect that such people would well understand the religious art
of the early Renaissance, and therefore properly appreciate it.
It is possible to conceive that a middle-class urbanite art-lover over in
Britain on a visit from Chicago might totally misread Rubens's landscape
paintings and therefore receive from them an enjoyment that is ersatz, or
even fail to enjoy them at all. But what happens when the spectator is a
European aristocrat with diplomatic experience who, like Rubens, owns a
large estate and spends his leisure time painting it? Surely, such a
person would have a close affinity with Rubens' world-view? Why would we
assume that such a person could not share Rubens's aesthetic delight in
the land?
Now take Mark Rothko. A dead man, yes, but a man of the modern era. Or
is he? When Rothko was growing up, there was no Wittgenstein and no
Satre, let alone a Baudrillard. The cinema was not only black-and-white,
but silent. Automobiles were rare. DNA had not been discovered, the
television was science-fiction and the Great War was going to be the last
ever. In Rothko's USA, the immigrants were from Europe, not Mexico,
Socialism had popular support, and it made sense if you were Jewish to
change your name. In the art world, abstraction was new and exciting, and
America was perceived as a cultural backwater. When Rothko died, the PC
revolution was still more than a decade away, the cold war was raging
unabated, the petroleum crises of the early seventies had not happened,
Nixon had not resigned, "women's lib" was only just getting under way,
Japan was where Malaysia is now. How many of us can imaginatively step
into Mark Rothko's shoes? Anyone under about fifty years oid is unlikely
to feel the "historical symbolism" of Rothko's painting. If you doubt
this, may I suggest spending a little time watching the cinema that was
popular in the 1950s, when Rothko adopted his mature style? That world
has very little in common with the present. So, there is little doubt
that if the art of Crivelli and the art of Rubens are dead, the art of
Rothko is dead also.
Dave Barrett, in seeking to kill off the art of Rubens and Crivelli,
succeeds also in killing the art that we'd expect him to want to keep
alive -- not just the paintings of Rothko, but the films of Alfred
Hitchock, the prose of Vladimir Nabokov and the music of Jimi Hendrix.
And if you think it is only the art of people who died twenty or thirty
years ago that is killed by his argument, think again.
Young artists working in current modes come from all sorts of
backgrounds. Mona Hatoum is Palestinian. Sokari Douglas-Camp was born in
Nigeria. Dhruva Mistry is from India. All these artists, and many more,
produce art that is informed by experiences and knowledge that are quite
unavailable to your average European or North-American museum-goer. Does
this mean that their art is necessarily dead to all eyes except
Palestinian, Nigerian and Indian ones?
Erich Fischl grew up in the US in the suburbs. His paintings have been
about the frustrations of American suburban life. Does this mean that his
art is dead to anyone who has never lived in a suburb? Are the urban
sophisticates who buy his pictures "missing the point"?
David Hockney is gay, and paints the swimming pools and sunlight of
California. Is his art necessarily dead to a heterosexual (or, for that
matter, a lesbian) Polish woman?
Since no-one knows anyone else exactly, or shares exactly the same
world-view as another, David Barrett's argument amounts to a claim that no
art is ever entirely successfully transmitted from artist to audience.
Perhaps that means that all art is "somewhat" dead (if we may put it that
way), but Barrett provides us with no way of deciding if any particular
art is TOO dead to be of any worth.
What Barrett has missed, and what is crucial about art, is that the
successful artist is able to convey the "art experience" not only to
others who have an identical outlook on life, but also to others whose
outlook and experience may differ considerably from the artist's own.
This is done by exploiting what the artist and the audience have in
common. Shared experience and values then become a launch-pad for a trip
to somewhere else that may be unfamiliar to the audience, but is known to
the artist. This is when the most treasured aesthetic experiences occur.
Recognizing this, we realize that a good artist from a previous century
might very well be more successful in communicating an art experience to
us today than a poor artist who is our contemporary. What's more, an
individual may actually have more in common with an eighteenth-century
figure than with some contemporaries: Does Prince Charles have more in
common with Sokari Douglas-Camp than with Peter Paul Rubens? Which artist
would one expect the Prince of Wales to more easily understand?
Yet, the worst failing of Barrett's argument is still to come. It is that
Barrett manages to forbid not only the art of the past and such art of the
present that is foreign to us, but also the art of the future. Barrett,
seeking only to proscribe the pleasure of old art, succeeds in prohibiting
the enjoyment of innovative art, also. For, in order to innovate, the
artist must convey an experience that the audience has likely not yet had,
and in so doing, the create an art-experience that the audience cannot
receive, owing to their not having shared the "immediate physical
environment [and] the social environment" in which the work was produced.
They are guaranteed, if Barrett is right, to miss the point.
In order to produce art that differs from what has gone before, according
to Barrett's argument, the artist must wait for new things to happen
OUTSIDE the realm of art that will create a new "environment" that artist
and audience will share. In this scheme, art becomes an entirely passive
reflector of cultural change. This is an implausible scenario (given what
we know about the impact various works of art have had on life in the
past), and it devalues art.
What David Barrett and (by associating himself with Barrett's position)
Darren Reynolds are arguing for is a boorish unwillingness on the part of
audiences to stretch themselves and an insular reluctance on the part of
artists to try to communicate with anyone besides their closest peers.
They are not making an argument FOR any kind of art; they are arguing
AGAINST all art.
Let us not deny the experience of the millions who enjoy the art of the
past, and clearly do understand at least a good part of what those past
artists intended to share through their work. Let us admit the truth: the
art of the past is not dead.
Bruce Attah.
BTW, Art Monthly is a crap magazine, filled by half-literate misusers of
language and ideas, and totally devoid of any real art criticism. I ended
my subscription to it years ago, and you should do the same.
Darren Reynolds
In article <Bruce.Attah-21...@support-saturn.isltd.insignia.com,
Bruce...@insignia.co.uk (Bruce Attah) wrote:
>
>I could simply dismiss David Barrett as a silly philistine who is looking
>for an excuse for his own inability to enjoy good art and his
>unwillingness to learn about it, but I will not. Rather, I will listen
>for a little longer before seeking to explain where he has gone wrong:
You pompous, patronising... person. Okay, I stay polite.
>
>The short answer to this is that David Barret has tried to put a sell-by
>date on works of art, but he has failed to tell us what that sell-by date
>is. Is ten-year-old art dead? Is ninety-year-old art dead? Or can art
>live for two centuries or three?
When the symbols, codes ecetera are no longer decipherable by it's
audience.
>
>The long answer is as follows...
>
'answer' like its an absolute and not an opinion. Gotta' laugh.
>It is possible to conceive that a middle-class urbanite art-lover over in
>Britain on a visit from Chicago might totally misread Rubens's landscape
>paintings and therefore receive from them an enjoyment that is ersatz, or
>even fail to enjoy them at all. But what happens when the spectator is a
>European aristocrat with diplomatic experience who, like Rubens, owns a
>large estate and spends his leisure time painting it? Surely, such a
>person would have a close affinity with Rubens' world-view? Why would we
>assume that such a person could not share Rubens's aesthetic delight in
>the land?
If he spends his leisure time painting his estate then he should get off
his arse. I certainly wouldn't be interested in seeing a tycoon's painting,
after painting, of his worldly goods.
>
>Dave Barrett, in seeking to kill off the art of Rubens and Crivelli,
>succeeds also in killing the art that we'd expect him to want to keep
>alive -- not just the paintings of Rothko, but the films of Alfred
>Hitchock, the prose of Vladimir Nabokov and the music of Jimi Hendrix.
>And if you think it is only the art of people who died twenty or thirty
>years ago that is killed by his argument, think again.
All these people say something to us today because they all came out of the
modern, industrial age. Your argument that, because some one claims that we
can't experience five-century-old art in the way we were meant to,
precludes understanding of any art pre-this-year doesn't hold water. If you
want to tie it to a date try the mid/late-19th cent. It was then that the
western world changed dramatically. Cities were born, as was the railway,
christianity died, the middle-class grew and there was the whole industrial
revolution. Art that came before came out of another, alien, era.
>
>Young artists working in current modes come from all sorts of
>backgrounds. Mona Hatoum is Palestinian. Sokari Douglas-Camp was born in
>Nigeria. Dhruva Mistry is from India. All these artists, and many more,
>produce art that is informed by experiences and knowledge that are quite
>unavailable to your average European or North-American museum-goer. Does
>this mean that their art is necessarily dead to all eyes except
>Palestinian, Nigerian and Indian ones?
Well I seem to recall a certain Picasso being criticised for taking African
masks out of context, seeing them purely in formal terms.
>
>Erich Fischl grew up in the US in the suburbs. His paintings have been
>about the frustrations of American suburban life. Does this mean that his
>art is dead to anyone who has never lived in a suburb? Are the urban
>sophisticates who buy his pictures "missing the point"?
Every one in the west can relate to his environment and his influences. I
live in Britain but share basically the same culture as Eric Fischl -
watched the same films, tv, experienced the difference between urban and
suburban etc... I might not live in small town America but I still 'get'
Blue Velvet. No one pre 19th century could - pre-city.
>
>David Hockney is gay, and paints the swimming pools and sunlight of
>California. Is his art necessarily dead to a heterosexual (or, for that
>matter, a lesbian) Polish woman?
I'm not gay, but can relate to Hockney's paintings more than I could
Ruben's. The fact he is gay is one aspect of his personality. But he has
been shaped by the same culture as the rest of us. His work isn't merely
about being gay.
>Yet, the worst failing of Barrett's argument is still to come. It is that
>Barrett manages to forbid not only the art of the past and such art of the
>present that is foreign to us, but also the art of the future. Barrett,
>seeking only to proscribe the pleasure of old art, succeeds in prohibiting
>the enjoyment of innovative art, also.
Only if you experienced it through a time machine. The art would be coming
out of the times in which it was created so the creater would share the
same influences as his/her audience. His art would be responding to the
culture in which he, and his audience, live. So what's the problem?
>
>What David Barrett and (by associating himself with Barrett's position)
>Darren Reynolds are arguing for is a boorish unwillingness on the part of
>audiences to stretch themselves and an insular reluctance on the part of
>artists to try to communicate with anyone besides their closest peers.
>They are not making an argument FOR any kind of art; they are arguing
>AGAINST all art.
>
And you live in the past. You and people like you appreciate past art
inasmuch it is technically better than art of today. That is the only
context in which century old art is seen. Just read the postings in this
newsgroup and you'll see that past art isn't being appreciated, but is
merely put forward as evidence for the prosecution of contemporary art.
That's all it is.
>
>BTW, Art Monthly is a crap magazine, filled by half-literate misusers of
>language and ideas, and totally devoid of any real art criticism. I ended
>my subscription to it years ago, and you should do the same.
I'd rather read that than this. And I'll decide what magazines I read. You
do patronise.
Darren
Bruce Attah
In article <AE925E36...@reinwood.demon.co.uk>,
dar...@reinwood.demon.co.uk (Darren Reynolds) wrote:
> You pompous, patronising... person. Okay, I stay polite.
Ho, ho.
But seriously...if my scoffing tone has put you off seriously considering
the very deep flaws in David Barrett's argument, then allow me to request
that you pause a little to reflect on them for a while longer.
Your position is that:
> All these people say something to us today because they all came out of the
> modern, industrial age. Your argument that, because some one claims that we
> can't experience five-century-old art in the way we were meant to,
> precludes understanding of any art pre-this-year doesn't hold water. If you
> want to tie it to a date try the mid/late-19th cent. It was then that the
> western world changed dramatically. Cities were born, as was the railway,
> christianity died, the middle-class grew and there was the whole industrial
> revolution. Art that came before came out of another, alien, era.
("These people" refers to Hitchcock, Nabokov, Hendrix and Rothko, who all
produced most of their work 25 or more years ago.)
You say:
> Every one in the west can relate to [Fischl's] environment and his influences.
> I live in Britain but share basically the same culture as Eric Fischl -
> watched the same films, tv, experienced the difference between urban and
> suburban etc... I might not live in small town America but I still 'get'
> Blue Velvet. No one pre 19th century could - pre-city.
I will start by saying that the claim that an 18th-century person would be
unable to understand 20th century art is profoundly different from the
claim that a 20th century person would be unable to understand 18th
century art, if only because there is no possibility of presenting 20th
century art to an 18th century person, but, more relevantly to your
central argument, because the 20th century person has imbibed from infancy
18th century (and older) ideas. Most people are quite unconscious of how
much of their thinking owes to 18th century figures such as Rousseau.
For this reason, and for other reasons that I will mention, I am skeptical
of your claim that, from the perspective of individuals who lived in them,
cities of the 1890s were sufficiently like cities of the 1990s for our
imaginations to reach back without difficulty to understand the art of
that period, and that cities of the 1790s are so different from ours that
an understanding of the art of that era is impossible. (Cities, of
course, did exist before the nineteenth century, and have existed for
three thousand years, at least -- and town rats considered themselves
superior to country rats even in Roman times.) Having read Defoes's Diary
of a Plague Year and a few other books of the Restoration era, I am quite
convinced that urban life, even in the 1690s (let alone the 1790s), was
sufficiently like our own for us to understand and respond to the art of
that time without "missing the point". Reading the classics (in
translation -- I do not have Greek or Latin), too, has shown me that,
though life two millenia ago was very different from life now, the
thoughts and feelings of the people who lived then are not unfathomable.
To get to a point where the literature conveys an inner life of people
that is truly incomprehensible to the modern, Western-educated mind, we
need to go to pre-Hellenic Greece, to the Middle East of Biblical
(including New Testament) times, and to older and geographically more
remote cultures. At that point, we discover texts that even after
translation seem hopelessly foreign, religious and philosophical systems
that baffle and defy our attempts to impose cohesion and customs that we
find hard to understand how any society could bear.
Yet even lives much closer to us in time and place are not utterly
transparent. A mere quarter of a century is a difficult gulf for the
imagination to breach, as the visible falsity of most modern
reconstructions of the fifties, sixties and even seventies testifies. I
know you say that the art of Hendrix, Nabokov and Hitchcock "speak to us
now", but I chose those examples precisely because they do. What of the
artists who were popular a generation ago who no longer excite any
interest? The absence of New Seekers records from our jukeboxes and the
faded popularity of cowboy films tell us that the world has changed.
Similarly, imagining our contemporaries in other parts of the world (even
other parts of the Western world) is problematic. Sometimes, we assume
that our perceptions are more similar to those of others than they really
are, and at other times that they are more different. Brits and Americans
are constantly criticising each other for imagining each other falsely --
misunderstanding political events, stereotyping inaccurately, quite
thoroughly missing the point. If this happens for people who would seem
to be fairly similar (both developed Western nations speaking English),
what about people who seem different?
I remember when Salman Rushdie's book, the Satanic Verses first came out,
reading a review in one of the broadsheets in which the reviewer grumbled
that the book was unnecessarily obscure in its references to Hindu culture
and religion. Aside from the narrow-minded failure to realise that
Rushdie's "obscurantism" would have been a matter for praise had the
allusions been to scholastic or classical lore, the author of the review
did not even notice that the religion being discussed in the book was
Islam. (This was before the furore of protest broke out.)
When Ben Okri's book, the Famished Road was published, a critic objected
that the tale was too fabulous; it was not "magic realism", according to
that critic, but "magic hemi-demi-semi realism". A number of others
responded that the book was in fact very realistic, and that one would
have had to live in a city like Lagos in Nigeria to recognize the fact.
The book simply described a world vastly different from the world that the
Western imagination is trained to see.
Those are clear-cut cases, I would say, of people "missing the point"
because of cultural differences between author and reader in circumstances
where both author and reader are speakers of the same language,
beneficiaries of the same sort of Western education, and resident in the
same country.
When I asked if art that imports influences from outside the West was
necessarily "dead" to Western audiences, you provided, in lieu of an
answer, another example:
> Well I seem to recall a certain Picasso being criticised for taking African
> masks out of context, seeing them purely in formal terms.
If Picasso's own remarks count for anything, his fascination with African
masks came from a sense that they really might possess magical power.
Their strange form, in his imagination, represented the strange forces
that indwelled them. He commented of a contemporary that the other did
not understand African sculpture because he was "not superstitious".
There is nothing in Picasso's work that would imply that Picasso's
interest in this sculpture was "purely formal" -- indeed, there is support
for the idea that Picasso was "superstitious" about his formal
experiments, so it would seem that the unnamed critic who called Picasso a
formalist "missed the point".
Aside from the examples I have given, I am sure you can think of cases
where readers of books, listeners to music and viewers of pictures have
"missed the point" that a contemporary was trying to make because of a
failure to recognize that certain assumptions or attitudes were not
shared. Differences of class, ethnicity, nationality, education,
religion, ideology and private experience can all cause such
misunderstanding if they are not recognized -- and even if they are.
What's more, misunderstanding can arise even where these differences do
not exist, if the artist is a poor communicator, or the audience-member a
poor "reader". Yet, the possibility of misunderstanding does not render
art dead, as I will argue later.
It seems to me quite obvious that people in today's world are bound to
misunderstand one another: how are people brought up agnostic-Anglican to
fully understand neighbours who have had an evangelical Baptist or
conservative Catholic rearing -- especially if they are mistaught at
university that Christianity is dead? How are any of these supposed to
imagine the inner life of one who speaks Punjabi at home and regularly
attends the local Sikh temple? Can an atheist, whose mode of thinking
has more in common with Defoe's unsentimental faith than might at first
seem, ever hope to understand a New-Ager? Religion is just one of the
barriers that might come up between an artist and a viewer today. There
are others.
Almost everyone in today's Europe lives in a city or a town. The tiny
rural minority live a life that is, in some ways, incomprehensible to the
urbanite -- and is becoming more difficult year by year for the
city-dweller to imagine, as it becomes rarer and more thickly wrapped in
mythology. In many parts of Europe and North America, the Industrial
Revolution had no more than superficial impact on rural life-styles until
quite recently. Can a city-dweller be certain of true comprehension of
the work of a rural artist? It seems doubtful. Even urban life is far
from homogenous. A move from Richmond to Clapton within London is like a
move between different worlds, and there are people in each of those
worlds who never so much as glimpse the other world. Niggas With Attitude
and Burt Bacharach represent nearly-opposite ends of an urban cultural
spectrum. How many can honestly claim that they fully understand both?
To the extent that we do understand the art of those whose lives, inner
and outer, are different from our own, the combined power of communication
and imagination is responsible. The barriers between artists and viewers
that are raised by differences of experience can be pulled down low by the
artist who takes the trouble to explain himself or herself to others who
might not easily understand. Then it is for the viewer to exercise
imagination to step over the lowered barrier. The less work is done by
the artist in this respect, the more the viewer is likely to be required
to do. So, I argue, art reaches people other than the artist's closest
peers. So, too, I believe, art is able to reach across centuries.
This, I am convinced, is why it is as possible for a 20th century English
middle-class atheist to understand and appreciate Crivelli's paintings as
it is of for the same personto understand and appreciate Tupac Shakur's
music. The drugs and the guns of the latter's art and life are no less
remote from the lives of most inhabitants of Hampstead Heath than are the
devils and saints of the former's, and those people's knowledge of both
comes to them via the same channels -- the "media" of printed text and
projected image. If I may inject a personal note, the world portrayed by
L. S. Lowry, in which the factory bell rang across a city much as a Moslem
call to prayer might fill the air from a minaret, and people lived on
lard-and-sugar sandwiches seems to me quite as exotic as the half feudal,
half mercantile world of the Renaissance, if not more so.
I do not believe that you, Darren Reynolds, would be immune from the error
that some critics made when they attributed Dhruva Mistry's bright
colouring of his early sculptures to his Indian background, nor do I
believe that you would be able to tell whether Sokari Douglas-Camp's
sculptures are realistic or fantastic, let alone what, if any, symbolic
significance she has imbued in them, beyond mere "Africanness", unless you
made some study of forms and ideas that are completely alien to your
experience. Yet both of these artists have degrees from London art
schools. If you agree with me that these limitations exist to your
comprehension of the art of your contemporaries, and that such limitations
affect all of us, then I hope you will also agree with me that there can
be no straightforward equation of pre-industrial-age art with
incomprehensibility and industrial-age and post-industrial-age art with
comprehensibility.
Once having acknowledged this, and having recognized that understanding
any art is likely to require an effort of imagination on the parts of both
viewer and artist, and observing, further, that many ideas that originated
in the Renaissance are at the core of our modern understanding of the
world, we are left (it seems to me) without a good reason for insisting
that all pre-19th century art is "dead" to us.
In the light of the foregoing, I believe that David Barrett's argument
against such art is itself "dead", in the sense of untenable. I believe,
too, that the argument is motivated by a personal antipathy to such art,
rather than a straightforward process of reasoning. One reason I believe
this is that his criticism of contemporary art gives me the impression
that he likes some stuff that is presented as art for the very fact that
it is not art.
An example would be a review he gave of a show of Damien Hirst's recent
work in a 1995 (?Aug) edition of Art Monthly. There, he observes that
Hirst's glass cabinet filled with surgical instruments, Steel, is an
object so ready-made that it does not even need to be "made ready". The
artist's Duchampian intervention of placing the object in a gallery has
not had a Duchampian transforming effect: the evocative power of the
object comes from the object itself. He notes that this is true, too, of
the shark Hirst famously used elsewhere. Barrett realises that Hirst has
done even less art-making than Duchamp -- yet, he does not go on to equate
Hirst to a Victorian showman, presenting strange or disturbing things
untransformed so that they can be gawped at. Barrett goes on to discuss
Hirst's spin paintings. These are made by dripping, pouring and splashing
paint onto a canvas as it rotates on a drum. This time, the natural
comparison is with Pollock, but once again, Hirst is doing less art-making
than his forebear. The effects achieved are more automatic, more
guaranteed, less under the artist's control -- what's more there is no
pretence of deep involvement or spiritual significance: the paintings are
given long, wilfully asinine titles that mention prettiness and
psychedelia. Barrett calls this stuff "painting for the people", though
what people he imagines would be grateful to receive such painting is
uncertain -- perhaps the audience of "the Word". He recognizes the work's
emptiness and triviality, comments on its meaninglessness, and concludes
by admiring it. It seems to me that to admire the presentation of such
trifles as "art" is to implicitly dismiss or condemn any effort to create
art that reaches beyond the trivial into a realm where more substantial
aesthetic reward is promised and given. So, I would suggest that Mr
Barrett's real reason for detesting the art of the 18th century and
earlier is not its age or supposed strangeness, but its aims.
Bruce Attah.
Jeffery Measamer
Darren Reynolds wrote:
>
> In article <54a3bf$6...@newsbf02.news.aol.com>,
> jkea...@aol.com (JKearman) wrote:
>
> >dar...@reinwood.demon.co.uk (Darren Reynolds) writes:
> >
> >>Perhaps all those out there with their heads in Renaissance clouds can
> >>explain how the electricity still flows for them in art that says nothing
> >>to us today.
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> >Jim Kearman
>
> Lessons. The guy's point was that art is an experience. Learning lessons
> about technique isn't art. In a way you have emphasised his point.
>
than most modern and contemporary art, don't let that cloud your
judgement of my way of thinking. If an artist is Great or "important",
their art will have meaning to generations of people. Perhaps they will
have meaning only to the common viewers and not the artistically gifted.
I continue to believe that J.M.W. Turner was one of the greatest
artists of all time. If one can look at his burning ships, and great
hulking trains without being in awe, then that person if missing the
true meaning of art.
Is a pile of bricks fine art?
Remember, these are our opinions, don't take yourselves too
seriously.
Jeff Measamer
W.S. Parker
JKearman wrote:
>
> In article <AE8D8EFF...@reinwood.demon.co.uk>,
> dar...@reinwood.demon.co.uk (Darren Reynolds) writes:
>
> >Perhaps all those out there with their heads in Renaissance clouds can
> >explain how the electricity still flows for them in art that says nothing
> >to us today.
> >
> >
>
> Technique, composition, design, style.
>
> Jim Kearman
I will be happy to agree with you in spirit. BUT I think two of these
words are unnecessary.
IMHO "design" is all that's necessary. The others are encapsulated
within it. They also are overused and a little old fashioned (19thc.).
Comp. sounds formulaic and style sounds vague.
Design is everywhere and *best of all it is supremely exemplified in
Nature*.
The others are paltry human inventions.
Mdeli
Art isn't dead.
There is more fine work produced today than ever, it
just isn't the crap generally found in the modern
sections of museums.
The zealots of Modern Academic Art imagine that all art
that doesn't conform to the tenets of our holy critics
is merely photographly representational and
traditional. This is nonsense.
Contemporary art is alive and well.
Mani DeLi
---no skill no art
Mdeli
dar...@reinwood.demon.co.uk (Darren Reynolds) wrote:
>And you live in the past. You and people like you appreciate past art
>inasmuch it is technically better than art of today. That is the only
>context in which century old art is seen. Just read the postings in this
>newsgroup and you'll see that past art isn't being appreciated, but is
>merely put forward as evidence for the prosecution of contemporary art.
>That's all it is.
Past art isn’t appreciated? I see, its just there to
feed your paranoia.
There is a key point in the above that is totally
missed by the modern Academic Art faction here. It is
in the statement, "And you live in the past. Etc."
The innuendo here is that if you like classic art
that:
1-You don’t like any art done today.
2-That you only like what was done in the past.
I have continually stated that in my opinion that there
is more fine work done today than ever before. It just
isn’t the crap which you see in the Modern section of
our museums.
The fact is that the Modern Artzy Fartzies don’t know
what is going on in contemporary art that goes beyond
considering the products of their preferred clique of
phonies.
Modern Academic Art is not only a failure in light of
past art. It is a failure in the light of the best
Contemporary art.
Mani DeLi
…no skill no art
Kajojacobs
Bruce...@insignia.co.uk (Bruce Attah) writes:
>Part of the high price that Rembrandt's paintings fetch reflects the long
>history of admiration for his work and a widespread desire among
>collectors for old things. Therefore, I think it makes most sense to
>compare the price of an unknown contemporary rather than an unknown
>modern. That said, I'd still bet that a good modern clone of Rembrandt
>would fetch substantially more than a Rothko clone
I do not pretend to be a student of antiquities or of investments, but I
hold the view that once a painting leaves the artist's studio, it becomes
a
commodity and the market determines it's value. Admiration and the desire
to
own enter in to the value of the work, but investment ($$$) is the bottom
line. Those who can afford to bid on such paintings (in the
Rembrandt/Rothko class) are primarily concerned with investment and/or
scoring points for their own
collections - which may or may not focus on one period of art or another.
~Karen Jacobs~
Andrew Werby
Bruce...@insignia.co.uk (Bruce Attah) wrote:
>The short answer to this is that David Barret has tried to put a sell-by
>date on works of art, but he has failed to tell us what that sell-by date
>is. Is ten-year-old art dead? Is ninety-year-old art dead? Or can art
>live for two centuries or three?
>
[As a working artist, I must admit the attraction of this idea. Why not
pull-date our work, so that nobody with any pretensions to hipness
would dare show anything over a week old? It works for the fashion
industry, so why not for us? Like taking out the garbage: "Oh, don't
come in yet, I've forgotten to change the art." The way to start this
off is to resolutely mock any art one sees that isn't absolutely fresh-
"Isn't that the same art I saw you in last week?" (Can't you afford
anything newer?) It would help if the art itself disappeared after a
short time on its own- come to think of it, this is a major advantage of
computer printers and their fugitive dyes...]
>The long answer is as follows...
>
>Barrett seeks to persuade us that a work of art cannot convey an
>art-experience to people who do not share the artist's experience of the
>"immediate physical environment [and] the social environment in which it
>is produced and viewed," and that, since artists who have been dead for a
>hundred years and more clearly lived in a different physical and social
>environment from ours, we cannot properly enjoy their art. Any pleasure
>that we do get from their art is "a joke" and "the point is missed", so
>"the electricity no longer flows".
[My remarks above notwithstanding, I have to agree with Bruce that this
is utter hogwash. A wonderful thing about visual art is its ability to
transcend the barriers of language, culture, and environment, so that
one may intensely appreciate as art the work of some unknown maker in a
remote period of time, from some distant part of the world.
Unfortunately, most critics, including Mr. Barrett, have a literary
mindset that makes them look for a story in every image, and they feel
frustrated when this is not available. By focussing on the proverbial
thousand words instead of the picture itself, they miss the whole point
of visual art, the physical, sensory experience. Admittedly, the nature
of their job makes them vulnerable to this form of blindness; they have
to find something to write about, and purely visual experiences do not
lend themselves to interesting writing. It is as if, after reading a
novel, I had to hum my reaction to it. If I were a particularly gifted
musician, I might arrive at some approximation of the novel's emotional
effect, but I would probably end up preferring those novels which lent
themselves to this sort of treatment, and knowing the author's favorite
tunes, and knowing the music popular in the time and place in which the
novel was set would help a lot. While this might be an interesting
sidelight, it hardly touches the issue of what makes the novel successful
or otherwise. Perhaps some genius critic will someday devise a language
in which visual art may be discussed on its own terms, but I haven't read
anything that approaches this as yet.]
Andrew Werby - United Artworks
dar...@usa.pipeline.com
Yay-yay!
As an artist in a co-op gallery with several others, I often see a HUGE
discrepancy between what the people want to buy (usually decorative, but at
least with some beauty) versus what show judges, academics, etc. like
(usually crap). But consider the good side - astronomers are discovering
even more planets around other stars, and maybe all of us artists can go to
one of them... (tickets might be a bit expensive <g>)
Daren Wilson
www.thenerve2.com/newcolor/darenw (look!)
W.S. Parker
dar...@usa.pipeline.com wrote:
>
> Yay-yay!
>
> As an artist in a co-op gallery with several others, I often see a HUGE
> discrepancy between what the people want to buy (usually decorative, but at
> least with some beauty) versus what show judges, academics, etc. like
> (usually crap).
So we have two kinds of art so far:
1. decorative BUT with some beauty (i.e. crap with some beauty?)
2. usually crap
IS there something else on your planet co-op?
Do you leave out a third and possibly others kind of art?
Kajojacobs
In article <553g0u$g...@news1.t1.usa.pipeline.com>, dar...@usa.pipeline.com
writes:
>
>As an artist in a co-op gallery with several others, I often see a HUGE
>discrepancy between what the people want to buy (usually decorative, but
at
>least with some beauty) versus what show judges, academics, etc. like
>(usually crap).
Beauty's in the eye of the beholder - but you knew that. I sure hope my
value isn't tied to my beauty (referring to my paintings, of course - I,
personally, am very beautiful.) Some *beautiful* paintings make me gag
while other viewers drool all over them. A painting's redeeming value has
nothing to do with beauty, unless, of course, it just matches the sofa
perfectly!
~Karen Jacobs~
Mdeli
kajoj...@aol.com (Kajojacobs) wrote:
> Some *beautiful* paintings make me gag
>while other viewers drool all over them. A painting's redeeming value has
>nothing to do with beauty, unless, of course, it just matches the sofa
>perfectly!
Some of the paintings I own aort of match my couch. I
guess they are beautiful.
"A paintings redeaming value has nothing to do with
beauty," but it has everything to do with ugliness if
its value in most Modern Academic Art you are looking
for.