Artspeak
mdeli
1- always use at least two hundred words where twenty would suffice.
2- always use obscure terms especially when writing esoteric theory.
3- when stating your objective opinion make it sound like it is
universally accepted as unquestionable truth.
4- drop names of famous people wherever possible. This advertises
that you are well read.
5- sound very serious. All humor should be obscure, even grave.
Artspeak aims two audiences:
1- to captivate the Artzy fartzy who claims he comprehends the deeper
meaning of what is said. That is until he is asked for the meaning.
2- to intimidate the non-Artspeaker with obscure terms and flowery
inflated syntax with the intent to make him feel intellectually
inadequate and factually uninformed. It serves to prevent any thoughts
that the object in question might really be just another Put-on.
If it needs a long sermon to proclaim its art its probably bullshit.
...no skill no art
Tired of Modern Art? Check out my web page UPDATED November, 01!
RBrac53660
However you are not and you continue to have some diatribe. Attempting to
support drawing however it seems to have a bad taste as far as my mouth is
concerened.
Edward
Brief description of artspeak is QUITE CORRECT.
I have been on his web site as well.
Nice touch.
Contents of most pages are CYNICAL but TURE.
His art? Skills? Technique?
Mmmm.
I reserve my opinion.
It's another subject to discuss, if anyone care.
Edward
------------
mdeli
>You Mani if you were a nice person I might listen to what you have to say.
>However you are not and you continue to have some diatribe. Attempting to
>support drawing however it seems to have a bad taste as far as my mouth is
>concerened.
>
I suggest you brush your teeth with shit. it might just help!
RBrac53660
>Brief description of artspeak is QUITE CORRECT.
What your tawlkin' about Mani's art speak right>?
RBrac53660
Edward
Either you are also hypnotized by gibberish that many fat-arsed lazy
demagogues of "upper Bohemian strata" are juggling with, or you are
incorrigibly naive.
75% of these people make their way by well-constructed language and
thoroughly polished speeches; in most cases there is no particular
knowledge behind it. Just am immense amount of useless bullshit.
Simpletons (interested in some particular issue) swallow this nonsense
and every so often take it for true expert's appraisal etc. etc.
that is applicable for any "pro-" speak (not only artspeak, of course).
Go in "Barnes & Noble" (Borders, Chapters, Indigo - any big bookstore)
and rummage on shelves: 80% of non-fiction books (on any subject) are
garbage, authors are chewing the same stuff or pushing their needless
theories (like the same Hockney, who probably entered personal crisis
and mental constipation [peculiar for some disenchanted old farts]).
Nice serious works and monograph are written without snivelling and
orotund slobbery, but it's very difficult to fish them out from this
flood of grandiloquent galimatias...
Wake up to reality!
Edward.
---------------------
RBrac53660
Or do you have to make it elonggated for your ow self benefit. Now then if you
would like to talk about the condition of being human in a acceptance of techno
condition........
www.geocities.com/winston53660/wbphotog.html
Edward
unappreciative lazybones expressing annoyance about someone replying
them!
This is freaking unbelievable!
If you are too bloody lazy to read; switch to comic books
- it's much easier, you know.
No strenuous brainwork is required.
Just keep on turning pages, look at nice pics and piss with delight...
>
> Now then if you would like to talk about the condition of being human in a acceptance of techno
> condition........
>
And what this is supposed to mean?
"Techno condition", "being human" (???) - looks like bosh from "Star
Trek"
yeah.... a sample of vague speech of true Internet dweller.
------------
Edward
Todd Strickland
The major rules for writing anti-intellectual art drivel are roughly speaking:
1- always repost at least two hundred times when once would suffice.
2- always call any useful art terms "obscure," even if the average high school
student would have no problem understanding them.
3- when stating your biased opinion make it sound like any person who
disagrees is ignorant, untrained, incapable of independent thought,
a huckster, a joker, a con-man, a criminal, a degenerate, or retarded
(preferably all of the above).
4- attack names of famous people wherever possible. This advertises
that you know so much better.
5- sound very condescending. If someone should make a valid point
against your biased opinions, become more condescending; avoid
reasoned debate at all costs.
6- when you come across differing opinions (no matter how concise, well
reasoned, or well expressed) simply dismiss them as esoteric art-speak;
this advertises that others don't need to think about it for themselves.
Anti-intellectual art drivel aims at three audiences:
1- people with lazy minds who enjoy putting down art which
they've never tried to appreciate or understand.
2- makers of quaint and conservative art who are bitter at their
own lack of fame, and tend to blame others for it.
3- to intimidate free-thinking people, who find enjoyment and meaning
in various forms of art, with derisive terms and caustic diatribes
with the intent to make them feel intellectually inadequate and
factually uninformed. It serves to prevent any thoughts that the
object in question might really be worth taking seriously.
If it needs a long sermon to proclaim it's NOT art it's probably
written by Mani.
...no effort no understanding
Todd Strickland
Holly Daize
ex...@gw7.gateway.ne.jp says...
>If it needs a long sermon to proclaim it's NOT art it's probably
>written by Mani.
>
> ...no effort no understanding
>
>Todd Strickland
Todd, you should post this every month from now on.
Or maybe do as someone was doing once before and
post it in response to every one of Mani's posts.
Maybe someone could write a program that would
attach this to every one of Mani's posts automatically.
Joseph Bennett
Todd Strickland wrote:
> mani...@sympatico.ca (mdeli) wrote in message news:<3c23f7f9...@news1.on.sympatico.ca>...
>
>>The major rules for writing Artspeak are roughly speaking:
>>
> 1- people with lazy minds who enjoy putting down art which
> they've never tried to appreciate or understand.
I have never tried to appreciate or understand the swarm of maggots
clustering on the dog shit behind the garage, either.
> 2- makers of quaint and conservative art who are bitter at their
> own lack of fame, and tend to blame others for it.
This "maker of quaint and conservative art" is not bitter at my 'own
lack of fame." I started painting full time too late in life to expect
fame, plus anyone who knows me knows also that I don't give a fiddler's
fart for the opinion of other people, fame or otherwise. Hardly bitter.
More like, arrogant.
> 3- to intimidate free-thinking people, who find enjoyment and meanribes
> with the intent to make them feel intellectually inadequate and
> factually uninformed. It serves to prevent any thoughts that the ing
> in various forms of art, with derisive terms and caustic .....
yadda yadda yadda...
Actually, Todd, we don't have a rat's ass interest in the pursuit of "art"
by people who think "cutting edge" is a competent description of anything.
Also, we profoundly resent being categorized as cretins for believing,
with good reason, that "Bathers" in all its variations presents a
compelling argument that Cezanne couldn't paint worth a healthy crap,
and the repetitious monotony of "Mont St. Victoire" (Sp. too lazy to
look it up!) confirms that he had just plain run out of things to "say"
in your art intellectual language. Similarly, the outrageous parody of
humanity created by VanGogh in his portrait of that woman with her fat,
ugly baby makes one wonder about how many bottles of absinthe he needed
to get to work.
You people are walking ad hominums. You regard with contempt the narrow
minded approach of Mani, which I admit becomes as boring as yet another
piece by Picasso, and express your contempt in ways which proclaim that
you are just as narrow minded, if in the opposite direction.
Look, Todd, go ahead and make your art which requires an "artist's
statement" to be barely comprehensible. Make all you want. Be happy.
But don't think for a minute that I am bitter or disillusioned by
lack of fame or wallowing in some kind of personal angst because when I
stand in front of your latest piece I want to puke!
And please don't think I am busy blaming others for my whatever it is
I am bitter about when I say the art industry today is as artificial as
an Avon face on a 70-year-old matron. It is an industry created by, and
sustained by, hype generated by a media machine that feeds off the
advertisements generated by the industry it serves. Anybody with two
connected neurons knows why there's hardly a page in the paper that
isn't littered with advertisements. And it's pretty obvious who's
calling the real editorial shots.
Instead of telling me how bitter I am and how culturally ignorant,
please instead, explain to me why, in this new Age of the Enlightenment,
that those "quaint and conservative" pieces, things like, dare I say
it...landscapes...are the art that actually continues to outsell the
abstractions and by a wide margin. I simply cannot understand that.
Maybe its because the "free thinking people" are really just a tiny
group with a very large mouth, and access to the media which sucks up,
craves, thrives on, anything and everything "new" regardless of its
worth or lack thereof.
Can that be it?
Finally, Todd, lest you believe that we who create those paintings that
you view with contempt are relentlessly anti-intellectual, let me assure
you that is not the case. Some years back I was invited to join Mensa
by the then-chairman of American Mensa, with whom I had a
writing/working relationship. I took the required test and wound up in
the top two-tenths of one percent of the population, allegedly brighter
than 99.8 percent of the people around me, which proved to me only that
I was really good at taking tests. (I never joined, told my colleague
that o think one is qualified for Mensa is conceit; to actually be
qualified and say no, that is arrogance!) Most of the people I know who
care enough to paint regularly are anything but dummies. They are quite
decent, typically well-educated people who pursue a muse for all the
right reasons and don't deserve the snobbery visited out by the "art
intellectuals." We have in addition to our painting one other quality in
common: We are relentlessly anti-bullshit.
Regards...
Joe Bennett
>
mdeli
Lets hope he posts it every day.
Marilyn
read of what goes on here. Traditionalists are very defensive
shown by the attitude that any other form of art than their own is too
challenging. It must not be critiqued rationally, it must cease
to exist.
MW
mdeli
(Todd Strickland) our top intellectual anti-philistine commando
wrote:
>The major rules for writing anti-intellectual art drivel are roughly speaking:
>
>1- always repost at least two hundred times when once would suffice.
There are always new people here and I repost messages relevant to the
subject when it comes up. Hope it drives you nuts.
>2- always call any useful art terms "obscure," even if the average high school
> student would have no problem understanding them.
---like "the language of modern art" and the reams of bullshit that
accompany that statement.
>3- when stating your biased opinion make it sound like any person who
> disagrees is ignorant, untrained, incapable of independent thought,
-and call him a philistine!
> a huckster, a joker, a con-man, a criminal, a degenerate, or retarded
> (preferably all of the above).
Here's Dan Fox's psycho-babble about my work.:
In my opinion, this work was executed by someone who hates women, has
serious sexual problems, has anal/oral fetishes, and is utterly
consumed by anger. Consistent themes are female dismemberment,
excretion, and mutilated genitalia. Even the entrance to the
Googenheim (on another page in Mani’s site) is a detailed
drawing of an anus.
(check it out) Anyone here shocked by Picasso's occasional poorly
rendered naughty parts, Religious work with added shit and an
occasional doo doo in installment exhibitions? Dan never commented on
my Portrait of a Picassoholic for which I used Marilyn as a model. She
is a constant inspiration and I'm sure Dan has some very important
insites into the important matter.
>4- attack names of famous people wherever possible. This advertises
> that you know so much better.
Never criticize the holy trinity of Modern Academic Art, Cezanne
Picasso and Matisse lest you advertise that you don't like
intellectual kitsch and irritate types like Strickland.
>5- sound very condescending. If someone should make a valid point
> against your biased opinions, become more condescending; avoid
> reasoned debate at all costs.
Read Greenberg to Hockney and the distorted history of 19th century
painting.
>6- when you come across differing opinions (no matter how concise, well
> reasoned, or well expressed) simply dismiss them as esoteric art-speak;
> this advertises that others don't need to think about it for themselves.
I guess my definition of Artspeak really bugs this guy. It always gets
good comments here. It even embitters this uncreative dolt to take the
time to parody it. Try being original it will make you seem less
pompous.
Marilyn
LOL!
Yes Edward,
Winston is not ignorant, he is succinct.
Also he speaks in a code understood
only by 'contemporary' artists as opposed to the
"I hate everything after Corot" crowd.
c u
Todd Strickland
I'm not attacking Mani (or you) because he likes any particular style
of art, or even because he dislikes any particular style of art.
That's his business, and as I believe in freedom of belief and freedom
of expression I'm not about to dictate to anyone what kind of art they
should like or make. I don't view any particular period or style
"with contempt," and anyone who reads my posts will know that I'm as
happy to talk about Vermeer as Pollock.
But it's you Art Nazis who will not let up recently in YOUR attacks on
Modern art, and I'm just a little sick of hearing it. YOU are the
ones who are trying to dictate what is or isn't art. If you're going
to blow that kind of hot air out your asses as loudly and continuously
as you have been recently, don't get all fucking emotional when
someone calls you on it.
For the record, I've never seen any of your artwork and I had no idea
what kind of painting you did before you told me. I find it very
interesting that YOU took my post as a personal attack; it's also
interesting that you characterize your own art as quaint and
conservative; I have no idea if it is or not.
Believe me, I know that there is such a thing as quaint and
conservative Modern art. Even Picasso used to avoid showing at the
Salon des Independents for fear of being associated with "Salon
Cubisme." If you paint landscapes, that doesn't mean that I
automatically write you off as an anti-intellectual twit. But if you
come out in this newsgroup and say that Cezanne couldn't paint worth a
healthy crap, and Van Gough was nothing but a drunken miscreant,
well...
If you want to discuss Cezanne intelligently, I'll do my best to
answer you in like manner. If you don't want to discuss Cezanne, but
would rather say positive and insightful things about Turner, then
maybe I'll join the discussion, if I have something intelligent to
say. But if you want to tell me Cezanne was an idiot, and that I am
an idiot for liking his art, then I'll tell you to shove it up your
fucking ass...
Finally, you may be intelligent, you may be very knowledgeable about
art and other subjects; that doesn't make you intellectual (a term
which, I guess, you wouldn't want to be associated with anyway).
Using your knowledge and intelligence to open up my understanding of
art, to increase discussion and find meaning and worth in art; that
would be intellectual. But you Art Nazis do the opposite; you use
your knowledge to close off interpretation, to attack that which you
don't like, to obfuscate legitimate points of view, and to put down
others who disagree with you.
Todd Strickland
Todd Strickland
I couldn't do that; I'd be following Anti-intellectual art drivel Rule 1!
Actually, I might just have to repost it from time to time, anyway ;-)
Todd Strickland
Joseph Bennett
I liked your response, a commendable mixture of intelligence and
squirrel shit.
Todd Strickland wrote:
> Joe...
>
> I'm not attacking Mani (or you) because he likes any particular style
> of art, or even because he dislikes any particular style of art.
> That's his business, and as I believe in freedom of belief and freedom
> of expression I'm not about to dictate to anyone what kind of art they
> should like or make. I don't view any particular period or style
> "with contempt," and anyone who reads my posts will know that I'm as
> happy to talk about Vermeer as Pollock.
Intelligence!
>
> But it's you Art Nazis who will not let up recently in YOUR attacks on
> Modern art, and I'm just a little sick of hearing it. YOU are the
> ones who are trying to dictate what is or isn't art. If you're going
> to blow that kind of hot air out your asses as loudly and continuously
> as you have been recently, don't get all fucking emotional when
> someone calls you on it.
Squirrel shit! I am not "attacking" modern art, have in past posts said
I have been left breathless by some pieces I have seen. (The concept
of Art Nazi is most interesting and deserves its own discussion...more
later on that.) What I have been attacking here recently, as opposed to
my more normal serenity, is the flow of absolute bullshit that has been
piling up here to the point of becoming insanity. The very last line of
my previous post ought to have established that. References to Picasso,
Pollock, VanGogh and so forth are not attacks. They are simply personal
opinions and cannot reasonably be classified as broad-based attacks on
modern art in general. I just happen not to like Cezanne, whom Marilyn
cherishes and I say, good for her. Most of the world thinks Picasso is
a hero. I think he is a slime bag and I don't like anything he did
after his blue period. Hey! Does that make me an Art Nazi or any other
kind of Nazi?
Here we are getting to the heart of it:
I have a daughter who is represented by a major gallery in San
Francisco, and by an agent on the East Coast, and is selling large
pieces priced at $10,000 (but they will take $8,000, if pressed) and she
hangs stuff like used tea bags on pieces that represent black holes, or
something. I have expressed my opinions to her, and we remain close.
She knows I am not blindly writing off all of modern art.
The heart I mentioned: Take a look at Marilyn's most recent post on
this thread. There we see the standard response of the modernists, to
opinions negative about any of the heroes of modernism. She is
generalizing all over the place and attributing to those who say Picasso
sucks an all embracing criticism of everything modern. Not so. Not so.
By the way, I think Marilyn is great and we have exchanged many personal
emails off this group and I appreciate what she is doing, and what her
daughter is doing in a very successful, and totally modern, career. I
just wish she wouldn't generalize.
And I wish the modernists -- that would include you, Todd -- wouldn't
lump us all into the bin with Mani, who is too extreme and not at all
correct with his monocular fixation on "skill," when he ought to be
focusing on "craftsmanship." I believe you, too, will agree with me,
that whether a modernist or a traditionalist, craftsmanship is necessary
if good work is to be done. Drawing is only one facet of craftsmanship,
and quite possibly, not the most important. I am no more than merely
competent myself, and would be the last to criticize on the basis of "He
can't draw."
Summing up... I am not telling any one what is, or is not art. That
nonsense has been batted back and forth for centuries, has never been
definitively answered and never will be. It is a monumental waste of
time, yet it spawns the relentless flood of art school bullshit that
just fills this group. Don't ever talk to me about an arcane language
of modern art that if I don't like something, it's because I lack the
language to appreciate it. Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit! I don't
like it, viscerally, from my gut. Whenever in my life I have trusted my
gut, I haven't gone far wrong. Whenever I did not trust my gut, I
usually screwed up. I didn't need an arcane language to tell the good
from the bad. And if I happen to think some of the canonized saints of
modernism are shams, scams, frauds or just plain incompetent
beneficiaries of a desperate art industry, that cannot and should not be
taken as a blanket condemnation of all things modern.
It is the generalization that causes problems. That, and bullshit.
My lord, I cannot abide pontificating bullslingers. I don't think you
can, either. Which is why Mani gets to you.
>
> For the record, I've never seen any of your artwork and I had no idea
> what kind of painting you did before you told me. I find it very
> interesting that YOU took my post as a personal attack; it's also
> interesting that you characterize your own art as quaint and
> conservative; I have no idea if it is or not.
Traditional landscapes, and since I am a professional amateur who enjoys
the delightful ability -- after a long and providential working life --
to paint exactly what I want, how I want, I've never set up a web site.
Frankly, I wonder about what I see on the web. My son, a professional
photographer (He actually is a professional in the classic meaning: he
makes his living at it, and a good one.) who specializes in digital
photography for some high profile clients here in Motown, has
photographed several of my landscapes and then put them through the
manipulations of whatever that top rated program is, and still cannot
produce the value subtleties or get the colors the way the real painting
looks. Further, if he could get them to look just right on my machine,
what would they look like on yours? No thanks. If you want, I will
email you one or two directly, but you won't see a Bennett web site.
By the way, my post might have sounded like I had taken your post as a
personal attack. I did not. I took it as bullshit.
>
> Believe me, I know that there is such a thing as quaint and
> conservative Modern art. Even Picasso used to avoid showing at the
> Salon des Independents for fear of being associated with "Salon
> Cubisme." If you paint landscapes, that doesn't mean that I
> automatically write you off as an anti-intellectual twit. But if you
> come out in this newsgroup and say that Cezanne couldn't paint worth a
> healthy crap, and Van Gough was nothing but a drunken miscreant,
> well...
The only intelligent response to my opinion about Cezanne, VanGogh and
others is: I disagree with you. I believe they are extraordinary.
>
> If you want to discuss Cezanne intelligently, I'll do my best to
> answer you in like manner.
I do not wish to discuss Cezanne at all, intelligently or otherwise. It
would be like discussing religion or politics or teaching a pig to sing.
If you don't want to discuss Cezanne, but
> would rather say positive and insightful things about Turner, then
> maybe I'll join the discussion, if I have something intelligent to
> say.
Turner is a hero of mine, and hardly a product of the Salon. There
might be room for talk there.
But if you want to tell me Cezanne was an idiot, and that I am
> an idiot for liking his art, then I'll tell you to shove it up your
> fucking ass...
There you go again. I don't think Cezanne was an idiot. I think he was
a lousy painter, and from the very few paintings he cared to sign, I
think he thought so, too. Also, I do not believe you or Marilyn or
anybody else is an idiot for liking his art. Not every one likes
spinach, but some of us do. It takes all kinds, and in my world,
there's room for all kinds.
>
> Finally, you may be intelligent, you may be very knowledgeable about
> art and other subjects; that doesn't make you intellectual (a term
> which, I guess, you wouldn't want to be associated with anyway).
I have been accused of intellectualizing my bowel movements!
Unfortunately, thinking has been a favorite pastime all my life. Drives
my kids nuts, and is assuring sainthood for my wonderfully patient wife.
> Using your knowledge and intelligence to open up my understanding of
> art, to increase discussion and find meaning and worth in art; that
> would be intellectual.
It is not possible to increase meaningful discussion with modernists
unless you are prepared to stifle any negative personal opinions about
the gurus. Any negative opinion about one of the saints immediately
triggers the Pavlovian response: You are relentlessly against modernism
in all its shapes and sizes! Ergo: You are a mindless cretin. I don't
need this.
But you Art Nazis do the opposite; you use
> your knowledge to close off interpretation, to attack that which you
> don't like, to obfuscate legitimate points of view, and to put down
> others who disagree with you.
Who, exactly, is the Nazi? I am closing off nothing but the bullshit.
And I put down only those who sling it.
Regards
Joe Bennett
>
> Todd Strickland
>
Edward
Hardly anybody would do it better.
Bravo, Mr. Bennett!
I thought of writing few passages in response to bellicose modernists
who are so blinded by own admiration of bullshit (produced by Big Names)
that are utterly incapable to sustain any objective dispute about art at
all.
But you did it much better than I could. (I can't find an inspiration to
reply to truculent defenders of cheesy art.)
Showy calls to be intelligent and "intellectual" in discussing art is
deceptive stance and nonsense.
It's extremely difficult job to argue with people who never really
listen to you or think about what you say (- not long enough to
understand but sufficiently long to cook a brisk response), and who have
a perfect set of mighty tools to browbeat any opponent with flood of
seemingly correct kibosh and drool.
Cezanne? Late Picasso? Wharhol?
There is nothing to discuss. It has been considered within serious
approach by serious people, ... rejected and filed in dusty archive.
- Prestigious? Yes! - amongst the crowd of yahoos swaying around art
world;
- Good investment? Sure! - for have money leftovers after investing in
everything else.
- Art masterpieces? Hardly so. Maybe "pieces" but not "by masters". And
hardly "of art".
-------
Edward
P.S. I agree with Bennet and (partly) with Mani, and of course, I would
never say that all modern art is crap; there are really good pieces in
any genre & style
Edward
It's considered to be a bloody flat joke to play with someone's
inadvertent error - at these days.
Pshaw!
>
> Right, everything he writes is "TURE"
>
Edward
Succinctness is good and appropriate for Polytechnical Encyclopedia ~
As one of great writers said:
Just write SIMPLY. Or SIMPLY do not write!
------------------------------------------
Clarity of thinking results in perspicuity of expression.
The rest is just for undergraduate halfwits intoxicated with playing
words.
Edward.
---------------------
Todd Strickland
> You will notice that Mr. Strickland has no original ideas of his own.
>
> (Todd Strickland) our top intellectual anti-philistine commando
> wrote:
Wow! I didn't realize that I had become the top intellectual
anti-philistine commando!
In that case, Mani, I'll wear your barbs like medals of honor...
Todd Strickland
RBrac53660
Holly Daize
>We are relentlessly anti-bullshit.
>
>Regards...
>
>Joe Bennett
What an astonishing statement coming from
someone who has just dropped such a huge load
of B.S. Arrogance = hypocrit?
Holly Daize
>Who, exactly, is the Nazi? I am closing off nothing but the bullshit.
>And I put down only those who sling it.
>
>Regards
>
>Joe Bennett
How amusing! And how exactly does your BS differ
from Todd's or Mani's, or even my own? Smell,
texture, shape, squishiness...???
Joseph Bennett
Arrogance = hypocrite?
How so? A hypocrite is a two-faced fraud. I am arrogant, but I am
never two-faced.
Frankly, in the English language as I know it, the two descriptives
aren't even cousins, much less synonyms.
Regards,
Joe Bennett
Holly Daize
>A hypocrite is a two-faced fraud. I am arrogant, but I am
>never two-faced.
I've said it time and again, and in this
very forum. People who rail at others about
their faults speak as if they were looking
in the mirror and talking to themselves.
Trouble is they can't see their own reflections.
Or to put it another way, they don't see that
their own words more perfectly describe who
they are when they are ranting at the other
person. I wouldn't use the word fraud, but I
would call the attitude that one espouses
toward others as two-faced when it applies
equally to oneself.
mdeli
>P.S. I agree with Bennet and (partly) with Mani, and of course, I would
>never say that all modern art is crap; there are really good pieces in
>any genre & style
The has been as least as much fine modern art produced in the 20th
cent. as in any other, it just isn't allowed into the modern sections
of museums and is rarely mentioned by our holy critics.
RBrac53660
mdeli
>But it's you Art Nazis who will not let up recently in YOUR attacks on
>Modern art, and I'm just a little sick of hearing it.
Where does it hurt?
> YOU are the ones who are trying to dictate what is or isn't art.
Perhaps you haven't read any of the drivel written by our holy critics
over the past 50 years. I get the strong impression that they are
trying to dictate. So what? Its time for some counter jargon.
> If you're going
>to blow that kind of hot air out your asses as loudly and continuously
>as you have been recently, don't get all fucking emotional when
>someone calls you on it.
Who's emotional. You're the one whose always getting sick. Call me
anything you want, just expect an answer in kind.
>
>For the record, I've never seen any of your artwork and I had no idea
>what kind of painting you did before you told me. I find it very
>interesting that YOU took my post as a personal attack;
I welcome any sort of attack. This is the internet where we can say
what we like. If that enflames your cerebral hemorrhoids blank out my
messages and I'm sure that will sooth your sensitive soul.
>But if you
>come out in this newsgroup and say that Cezanne couldn't paint worth a
>healthy crap, and Van Gough was nothing but a drunken miscreant,
>well...
well what?
>If you want to discuss Cezanne intelligently, I'll do my best to
>answer you in like manner. If you don't want to discuss Cezanne, but
>would rather say positive and insightful things about Turner, then
>maybe I'll join the discussion, if I have something intelligent to
>say.
Your problem is that if someone doesn't like Cezanne or Turner and has
the audacity to say why, you take personally.
> But if you want to tell me Cezanne was an idiot, and that I am
>an idiot for liking his art, then I'll tell you to shove it up your
>fucking ass...
I think Cezanne couldn't draw and was rather stupid and you can tell
me to shove it till you get bored of saying so.
>
>Finally, you may be intelligent, you may be very knowledgeable about
>art and other subjects; that doesn't make you intellectual (a term
>which, I guess, you wouldn't want to be associated with anyway).
Don't be a patronizing ass, save that for your students who can't
contradict you..
>Using your knowledge and intelligence to open up my understanding of
>art, to increase discussion and find meaning and worth in art; that
>would be intellectual.
I don't happen to find much worth in some of the artwork you happen to
like. It hasn't a damned thing to do with what you choose to label
intellectual.
> But you Art Nazis do the opposite; you use
>your knowledge to close off interpretation, to attack that which you
>don't like, to obfuscate legitimate points of view, and to put down
>others who disagree with you.
>
In other words you take it personally and it sickens you.
mdeli
Sontags rather stupid comments, they are OK but fail to point out the
most obvious fact, namely that all any optical devices will get you
is lines. It won't do much for all that lies between. And that's about
98% of any old master that Hockney mentions.
:
"Even if Van Eyck had a camera it would have done little to help him
achieve the Aronolfini portrait. I presume that Hockney imagines that
the dog in the portrait had rigor mortise
Art historians did not take this lying down. Keith Christiansen, a
curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, read an open letter to Mr.
Hockney testifying that he had gone out and bought
a concave mirror at Duane Reade. His verdict? The projection the
mirror threw onto his paper wasn't clear enough for him to make a
decent drawing. Besides, he added, there is plenty of
evidence that artists like Michelangelo, Raphael and Caravaggio had
"no need for fuzzy, upside-down images." They made freehand
preparatory sketches instead.
Susan Sontag went after Mr. Hockney's ideology of picture making. To
say that there were no great painters before optical devices, she
said, is like saying there were no great lovers
before Viagra. It is a "very American" kind of argument. Although Mr.
Hockney was born British, she said, in his thinking "he is one of us."
To argue that there is a "direct line from van
Eyck to television," she said, is to use present-day mass visual
culture as the lens through which the past is examined. It represents
the "Warholization of art."
Linda Nochlin, the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the
Institute of Fine Arts, was as dramatic as Mr. Hockney. At her signal
an audience member brought Ms.
Nochlin's wedding dress onstage, a white shift with blue doughnut
shapes on it. As evidence that artists can draw patterned cloth
without the aid of optics, she compared the dress to a
wedding portrait that Philip Pearlstein, "an eyeballer par
excellence," had made of her sitting in that dress while her husband
slouched next to her in white pants. "This is what I call
scientific evidence," she said.
Then the gloves really came off. David Stork, an associate professor
of computer science at Stanford University, considered the little
convex mirror in van Eyck's Arnolfini wedding
picture, the mirror that, Mr. Hockney suggests, van Eyck could have
flipped over and used as an optical device. First off, Mr. Stork said,
a mirror of that size would never have worked. To
get a lens that would "hold Arnolfini, his wife and dog," he would
have needed a huge mirror, sliced from a sphere seven feet in
diameter.
And that is just the beginning of the trouble. If van Eyck had used
the lens in a camera obscura, he would have had to paint upside-down,
Mr. Stork said. Then there is the lighting problem:
the projected image in a camera obscura would have been too dim. "To
mimic the conditions indoors on a gray day in Bruges," he said, would
require hundreds of candles, and then, even if
the artist were to survive the fire hazard, "the color looks wrong."
Ellen Winner, a professor of psychology at Boston College, kept Mr.
Hockney on the ropes by showing some excellent, optically exact
drawings of rearing horses. They were made by a
5-year-old autistic child named Nadia, who had seen only pictures of
horses standing still. If an autistic 5-year- old can do this, Ms.
Winner said, then "I would argue that a Renaissance
artist could do it, too."
Eventually things started looking up for Mr. Hockney's theory. Gary
Tinterow, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum, suggested that Ingres
might have done some tracing. John Spike, a
Caravaggio scholar, noted that in 1672 a critic described something in
Caravaggio's studio that sounded a lot like a camera obscura. And, Mr.
Spike said, an additional bit of confirmation
came when he was looking at a Caravaggio in London with Mr. Hockney.
An old Frenchman came by cursing at the work. He shook his cane at the
painting and denounced it for being
too much like a photograph. It turned out that nut was Henri
Cartier-Bresson.
Next came the battle of the Vermeer scholars. Philip Steadman, an
architect and the author of "Vermeer's Camera," which argues that
Vermeer had photographic aims, said that
Vermeer's paintings contain perfect renditions of things found in
Dutch houses: chairs with lion backs, globes, paintings, Delft tiles,
virginals, even the ceiling beams. What's more, six
Vermeer paintings are different viewpoints of the same room, and all
have been done on the same size canvas. Why? "Because he has traced
them" from "images created in a camera
obscura," Mr. Steadman said.
Walter Liedtke, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum who was one of
the organizers of "Vermeer and the Delft School," fought back.
Although he did not oppose the idea that Vermeer
was interested in the effects of the camera obscura, he said, he had
evidence that Vermeer's rooms were "pure invention." Vermeer's
attitude, he said, was, "To hell with physics."
Mr. Steadman accused Mr. Liedtke of "mimesophobia, the morbid fear of
slavish imitation."
But what is to fear? Plenty, said Nica Gutman, a conservator of
paintings who worked on the current Eakins show at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art. Many artists find it shameful to be
caught using photographs. Take Eakins and his painting "Mending the
Net." All the figures and the tree, she said, are "precisely the same
as those in the photographs." That is, Eakins
projected them from a photograph onto the canvas and traced them.
Eakins did his best to hide the evidence. And after he died his widow
lied about it, too, Ms. Gutman said.
Do artists still conceal their optical tricks? Some do, but others
simply cannot. Chuck Close is one. He makes paintings that are
undeniably based on photographs. When a class of third
graders came to visit him recently, one of them asked, "Can you really
draw or do you just copy photographs?" He said he finally drew a
freehand Mickey Mouse, "and the kids were, like,
Ooh!"
Mr. Pearlstein, the painter who made Ms. Nochlin's wedding portrait,
said, "I paint people and landscapes from direct observation," but
added that he had sometimes been mistaken for a
photo-realist. It does not sting. "There is no moral issue" with using
optical tools, he said, "only stylistic issues."
Moral issue or not, Svetlana Alpers, a professor emerita at the
University of California at Berkeley, suggested that Mr. Hockney, who
has often used photographs in his work, secretly
wanted to "kick free of the lens habit."
"Why not just go for it, David?" she said. "The old masters did."
Rosalind Krauss, the Meyer Shapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory
at Columbia University, questioned the epiphany that started it all
for Mr. Hockney. To say there is no difference
between the lines of Ingres and Warhol, she suggested, is wrong.
Ingres's drawn line "swells and narrows." Warhol's traced line is
"flaccid, inert and everywhere equally broad," the
essence of technology.
In the end Mr. Close, who joked that the symposium should have been
called "Look Back in Ingres," said he had learned that "some
scientists are just as annoying as some art historians."
Mr. Weschler tossed away his crutch, crying, "I'm cured!"
And Mr. Hockney said: "I enjoyed it. I learned some things." Then he
added, "I will now go back to my studio.""