Comments on Non-Objective Art
Drakejake
written two
articles on a new museum for non-objective art near New York City. (The
Dia:Beacon in Beacon, N.Y.)
In these articles the author lists the "artists" he considers "great"
and also lists a number of their works. I consider these so-called
art works to be a scam committed by untalented people against wealthy
individuals, organizations, and the government--anyone who buys these
things. A scam is a scheme to get money from others through fraud.
It is ceretainly fraud to claim that these objects are art, much less
that they constitute "great art."
One way of categorizing objects is into useful objects and art.
These are mutually exclusive categories. An automobile, for example
the Ferrari Dino, may be beautiful, designed and produced with skill,
enjoyable to drive, etc., but that doesn't make it "art." It is a
useful, practical object intended to accomplish a specific purpose,
i. e., transporting people and things. A painting of this
automobile, however, would be art. A representation of a Ferrari
created by applying paint to a canvas with brushes is not a useful
object. It is intended to be looked at and cannot be used to
accomplish any practical or physical task: It cannot transport
anything, open a can, or be used to brush teeth. It is intended to
be hung on the wall or displayed in some other way, and looked at.
The idea is that pleasure can be derived from gazing at this flat
surface and admiring the skill of the artist and the harmonious
proportions of the automobile which is depicted.
The essential characteristic of a practical object is its function or
purpose, what it can do. The essential characteristic of a painting
or sculpture is the object or objects it represents or depicts. An
object which is neither functional nor which depicts objects through
paint, canvas, carved wood, molded metal, etc., is literally nothing,
i.e. junk or garbage.
Suppose that the artist who paints the picture of the Farrari,
accidentally dribbles paint on a drop cloth lying on the floor in
front of the easel. The dripped paint forms arbitary patterns of
spots, splatters, lines, etc. If the artist takes that drop cloth
and frames it, has he created a work of art equivalent to the
painting of the automobile?
No, he hasn't. He has created garbage or waste, a mere by-product of
creating the painting. Calling a drop cloth art, framing it, putting
on a wall, selling it, etc., doesn't make it art. Anyone who would
buy a used drop cloth, thinking that it is a work of art, is either
deluded, confused, or scammed. And yet non-objective art is based on
this kind of scam, the fraud of telling people that garbage is
valuable art.
The claim that splatters on a canvas or arbitrary chunks of metal are
art is implicitly based on the claim that art has no meaning and that
merely calling something art makes it so. If a car is dismantled and
the engine block is taken to the dump, it is clearly junk. But the
advocates of non-objective art claim that if that same piece of metal
is cleaned up, spray-painted gold, placed on a pedestal, and called
art, then it rises above the category of garbage. It is now in the
same categoy as Rodin's The Kiss or an ancient Greek stature of
Adonis. If anyone can make junk into art by putting it on display
and calling it art, then art has no objective characteristics and
really is nothing. Art then becomes a way of thinking about things,
a way of looking at things, the product of arbitrary choices, rather
than anything real or objective.
I oppose so-called non-objective art not only because it destroys the
concept of art, but also because it has no connection to humanity or
human intelligence. Only human beings can create art works, if that
term is used in a rational sense. Only human beings can create works
such as Michelangelo's David or Vermeer's "The Artist in his
Studio." Such creations require knowledge and skills which lower
animals do not possess. Thus art is a purely human product. But
lower animals can and do create non-objective art. For example,
Cheetah, the elderly chimpanzee who appeared in the Tarzan movies,
regularly paints and his works are sold for $25 each. Cats and
elephants have produced similar works of "art" by splattering paint
on a flat surface. Looking at the matter objectively, Jackson
Pollock was operating on a sub-human level when he created his so-
called splatter paintings by pouring paint on canvases. A monkey or
a two year old child can produce the same results.
Philosophically non-objective art represents an attempt to destroy
the very concept of art by equating it with garbage. From the socio-
economic point of view, non-objective art is a successful attempt by
unskilled, unambitious people to con gullible wealthy individuals and
institutions out of millions of dollars. Art critics, such as the
one who works for the New York Times, are accessories in these
scams. When taxpayers, who are too smart to do this voluntarily, are
forced to pay for piles of scrap metal installed in front of a
courthouse, it is a crime. When wealthy people adorn their homes
with the same thing, it is poetic justice. Such "installations"
or "constructions" merely adverise their owners' mindless fatuousness.
The connection between non-objective art and modernist, deconstructionist opera
productions is clear. First, the director/designers often incorporate
non-objective art into their sets, objects which have no relevance to the story
or the action. Second, these modernist directors implicitly claim that
anything they choose to insert into the productions or incorporate into the
staging is apropos, valid, and artistic. According to these people, it is
quite appropriate to dress characters in I Puritani in Nazi uniforms or have
naked men sitting on toilets in Fidelio. Appropriateness in opera productions
is up to the arbitrary whim of the director and need not have any connection
with the music, the story, the characters, or the period in which the opera is
set. This is the same kind of irrationality that lies behind the claim that
wires strung arbitrarily across a room is art and can tell us something
important about the space/time continuum or the post-Modern sensibility.
Jake Drake
geopelia
"Drakejake" <drak...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20030526122122...@mb-m02.aol.com...
You should see the stuff that is considered "art" in New Zealand! The only
thing more ridiculous than the art is the amazing price some fools will pay
for it. We are actually expected to admire white on black graffiti!
Geopelia
>
>
>
>
J.Venning
news:6YHAa.31393$3t6.4...@news.xtra.co.nz...
> You should see the stuff that is considered "art" in New Zealand! The
only
> thing more ridiculous than the art is the amazing price some fools will
pay
> for it. We are actually expected to admire white on black graffiti!
> Geopelia
Very tame, compared to what we had to accept as art - a handful of goldfish
being churned in a food blender.
J.
REG
goldi-lox.
"J.Venning" <Ven...@tdcadsl.dk> wrote in message
news:3ed34e54$0$5184$edfa...@dread11.news.tele.dk...
M. Slater
>Very tame, compared to what we had to accept as art - a handful of goldfish
>being churned in a food blender.
Not very original. Dan Aykroyd did his famous Bass-o-Matic sketch in the mid
70s on Saturday Night Live.
Mark
gleitzeit
The theme of Narcissus in Jaisini's "Blue..." may be paralleled with
the problem of the
two-sexes-in-one, unable to reproduce and, therefore, destined to the
Narcissus-like
end. Meanwhile, the Narcissus legend lasts. In the myth of Narcissus a
youth gazes
into the pool. As the story goes, Narcissus came to the spring or the
pool and when his
form was seen by him in the water, he drowned among the water nymphs
because he
desired to make love to his own image. Maybe the new Narcissus, as in
"Blue
Reincarnation," is destined to survive by simply changing his role
from a passive man to
an aggressive woman and so on. To this can be added that, eventually,
a man creates a
woman whom he loves out of himself or a woman creates a man and loves
her own
image but in the male form. The theme of narcissism recreates the
'lost object of desire.
"Blue" also raises the problem of conflating ideal actual and the
issue of the feminine
manhood and masculine femininity. There is another story about
Narcissus' fall, which
said that he had a twin sister and they were exactly alike in
appearance. Narcissus fell
in love with his sister and, when the girl died, would go to the
spring finding some relief
for his love in imagining that he saw not his own reflection but the
likeness of his sister.
"Blue" creates a remarkable and complex psychopathology of the lost,
the desired, and
the imagined. Instead of the self, Narcissus loves and becomes a
heterogeneous
sublimation of the self. Unlike the Roman paintings of Narcissus,
which show him alone
with his reflection by the pool, the key dynamic in Jaisini's "Blue"
is the circulation of
the legend that does not end and is reincarnated in transformation
when autoeroticism
is not permanent and is not single by definition. In "Blue," we risk
being lost in the
double reflection of a mirror and never being able to define on which
side of the mirror
Narcissus is. The picture's color is not a true color of spring water.
This kind of color is
a perception of a deep-seated human belief in the concept of eternity,
the rich saturated
cobalt blue. The ultra hot, hyperreal red color of the figure of
Narcissus is not supposed
to be balanced in the milieu of the radical blue. Jaisini realizes the
harmony in the most
exotic color combination. While looking at "Blue," we can recall the
spectacular color of
night sky deranged by a vision of some fierce fireball. The
disturbance of colors creates
some powerful and awe-inspiring beauty. In the picture's background,
we find the
animals' silhouettes, which could be a memory reflection or dream
fragments. In the
story, Narcissus has been hunting - an activity that was itself a
figure for sexual desire
in antiquity. Captivated by his own beauty, the hunter sheds a
radiance that, one
presumes, reflects to haunt and foster his desire. The flaming color
of the picture's
Narcissus alludes to the erotic implications of the story and its
unresolved problem of
the one who desires himself and is trapped in the erotic delirium. The
concept can be
applied to an ontological difference between the artist's imitations
and their objects. In
effect, Jaisini's Narcissus could epitomize artistic aspiration to
control levels of reality
and imagination, to align the competition of art and life, of image
with imaginable
prototype. Jaisini's "Blue" is a unique work that adjoins reflection
to reality without any
instrumentality. "Blue" is a single composition that depicts the
reality and its immediate
reflection. Jaisini builds the dynamics of desire between Narcissus
and his reflection-of-
the-opposite by giving him the signs of both sexes, but not for the
purpose of creating a
hermaphrodite. The case of multiple deceptions in "Blue" seems to be
vital to the cycle
of desire. Somehow it reminds one of the fates of the artists and
their desperate
attempts to evoke and invent the nonexistent. "Blue" is a completely
alien picture to
Jaisini's "Reincarnation" series. The pictures of this series are
painted on a plain ground
of canvas that produces the effect of free space filled with air.
"Blue," to the contrary, is
reminiscent of an underwater lack of air; the symbolism of this
picture's texture and
color contributes to the mirage of reincarnation.
By Yustas Kotz-Gottlieb New York 2003, Text Copyright: Yustas
Kotz-Gottlieb ALL
RIGHTS RESERVED Send private comments to author Gtt...@aol.com
The Art of Paul Jaisini by Yustas Kotz-Gottlieb
http://jaisini.artbabyart.net/
geopelia
"gleitzeit" <gtt...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:ce0b30d2.03060...@posting.google.com...
Is there a website to see the picture please? Should I click something in
the website above? Geopelia
Valfer
I beg you not to quote the complete message when replying to it. I
question not your intentions, but your methods.
Thank you,
Valfer
geopelia
"Valfer" <Val...@MSN.com> wrote in message
news:ad3a18ad.03060...@posting.google.com...
If I'm to blame, I am not very good on the computer yet. Sorry, I'll try to
do better
Geopelia
Valfer
reply to a message, you can delete the original text and send only
your reply. This prevents these long messages from being posted more
than once.
I very much prefer to read what you have to say than the second-hand
material of the original poster.
Valfer
"geopelia" <phil...@xtra.co.nz> wrote in message news:<JLRCa.6603$JA5.1...@news.xtra.co.nz>...
geopelia
"Valfer" <Val...@MSN.com> wrote in message
news:ad3a18ad.03060...@posting.google.com...
I've deleted it all except the top line. Thanks. Geopelia
Valfer
New item: I saw last night a splendid documentary about Dame Kiri Te
Kanawa. I specially like the wisdom with which she approaches of the
end of her singing career. There is no grasping for fading glory and
no denying of the diminishing of her vocal powers. She described in
great detail the present state of her voice and why she considers
retirement with no regrets. Truly a great woman! Hers is a lesson to
be learned by all professional singers. It is wise to know how and
when to begina career, and it's also wise to know how and when to end
it.
Valfer