vince’s ear

This is just amazing abstract art, isn’t it? It’s reminiscent of Cy Twombly but much, much better. The picture above has hung in a gallery in Brooklyn, New York. If it had hung in a gallery in Old City, Philadelphia, it probably would have gotten the same praise as it did in New York. I can hear it now:

“It speaks to me.”

“Just fabulous,” [as they swish their wine in their plastic cups.]

“Genius, pure genius. Just look how the artist has made such an intellectual statement. The vibrant reds are so emotional, it reduces us to a warm and fuzzy art snob glob of goo just staring at it.”

“I go to art school.”

“This artist is better than any new millennium abstract painter, and certainly better than Cy Twombly and other such scribble artists.”

Of course nobody told them who the artist is, and they probably didn’t read the info on the painting or the “artist’s statement” if any. Mostly, they were interested in hearing themselves talk, giving their avant-garde critique while wearing their berets and scarves.

I’ll give them the fact that the artist above is better than Cy Twombly. Also it is true that the artist has made much more an intellectual statement than any of these folk are capable of giving, and the artwork is done with more skill and the outcome produced is more aesthetically pleasing than any of them are capable of. But only if they knew who painted it:

A DOG!

Yeah it fooled them as I’m sure it fooled most of you. A dog painted this, and sure, for a canine it’s great. I amend my statement- for any abstract artist it’s great! I would die laughing if this little trick was played on the real people who hang around Old City on 2nd street and frequent the First Friday exhibits.

Not everybody is like this, don’t get me wrong- and the art shown is wonderful. It’s just the talentless spectators who cram into these galleries and look down their noses at people. Most are just interested in themselves and couldn’t care less about the art on the walls. But then again, I mostly don’t want to hear their b.s. about the art anyway: “It speaks to me!” It speaks does it? What does it say? It’s a canvas splattered with pink paint selling for $4,000. It doesn’t speak, it screams- “bad taste and overpriced!”

What gets me is that any dog or gorilla could accomplish most of what’s being paraded around as “modern art.” The minimalists of the ’50s were making a statement. They said since art history has been a constant reduction, why not skip straight to zero. That’s funny, and interesting, and they were the first to do it. Some art student today who paints a canvas blue and tries to sell it is not funny, or original, or talented. They may be talented otherwise, but splattering paint or making a blank canvas is not talent, and it’s not art. It’s been done!

I read an article the other day about how art has never really been representational and it’s actually always been abstract. I beg to differ. Since hieroglyphics, and cave art, people have always represented reality in recognizable ways. In ancient Eastern writing, the word for house looks like a little house. (I don’t speak or write in the languages, but you catch my drift.)

Art can be decoration, or can be a symbolic statement of some sort. And, risking getting away from my statement here, I will say abstract certainly has it’s place. Kandinsky comparing art to music is fantastic. He was a genius, and his art is beautiful. You can hear the symphonies and harmony while looking at his vibrant colors and shapes. His art had meaning, as does most of the art of the early abstract artists of the 20th century. Just don’t paint a canvas blue and call it, “A walk in the park while pondering the universe,” and think it’s art.

Even Jackson Pollock said most of his attempts have failed when splattering his paint. Some paintings turned out great and showed real energy and made a statement in force. Other times they just looked like paint splattered on a linen canvas on the floor.

So call it what it is. And don’t call it what it isn’t. Kudos to the art students who really come out with great art. Just don’t think that all art is abstract these days. If the underlining principle behind what the minimalists were saying was true, then art has already reached zero and it’s time to pack up and go home. There isn’t anything left to do. But that simply isn’t true.

If anything, abstraction is the fad. It was a trendy fashionable rage that had it’s time. It’s over now- get over it. But don’t despair. If you cannot paint, paid thousands of dollars for art school and you have no talent, then your paint splatters won’t get you far anyway. But if you have real talent, then create beautiful art. Forget about trends and fashions, and just paint.

If you sit down at a bar and order a “single plum floating in perfume, served in a man’s hat,” then you are a pretentious art snob and you will probably purchase that $4,000 pink blob. You will show all your friends at your cocktail parties and they will call you a genius. The trendy talentless art system needs you. So, give it your support.

If you are a paint splattering art student, study Tillie Cheddar the dog’s artwork. You could learn a thing or two!

Tillamook Cheddar homepage.

A while back I stumbled upon a website with a 16 question quiz entitled “Art or crap.” This funny little quiz shows 16 images which you must decide are either, well, the title pretty much explains that. You are scored as you go and beware, you may feel a little foolish. In fact the exercise seems to add to the argument that much of modern art really is foolish and requires very little skill, to say the least. A blue canvas is only a blue canvas whether it is on a museum wall or not. While they may call it priceless, I may say it isn’t even worth the price of the materials.

Kitsch Art

But is one person’s trash another’s treasure? I suppose beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You must ask yourself what you, as an observer, consider art to be. Can you stare into a blank canvas and see beauty? Is this what the artist intended, did the artist intend for you to do anything?

We must think of extremes here. Does a few crayon scribbles on a canvas splattered with paint rate the same respect as a well thought out painting which took years to make? Obviously not, but I suppose its all about the artists intentions.

We must not forget “Art” can be a pretty broad term. Not everything can be lumped into one giant group. Consider the little Christmas statues that somebody designed and are mass produced, or the statues of religious icons sold commercially. It takes some skill in coming up with these little trinkets and sometimes people have to paint them by hand. Examples such as these can be labeled as “kitsch.” Here the term applies to commercially produced items, which in reference to the art world can be considered lower quality. The basic formula is the repetition used to mass produce.

This unfortunate label can be attached to artists who have basically saturated the market with a basic model for their work. Artists such as Thomas Kinkade have used and abused their style to the point where the value lessens which each new addition. He has copied his own style time and again, failing to come up with anything new and has become too commercial.

Another aspect of kitsch art can be a subject of some controversy. This is the idea that artwork can carry the stigma of kitsch if it has become too pretentious to the point where it seems to try too hard. The photo-realism of William Adolphe Bouguereau leaves no mystery about its subjects and almost insults the intelligence of the viewer by making every grain of sand visible. It’s a shame so many believe this, because his paintings obviously took a tremendous amount of skill.

You have these little crafts you can get at a Christmas Bazaar and anything you can buy that is mass-produced, whether its hand-painted or not. Kitsch can be anything considered to be tasteless or inferior. These items are on the low end of the totem pole.

If you wanted to put levels to art you may say that such kitsch artists and commercially driven producers would be at the bottom. Next you may find graphic artists, then illustrators, animators, and then fine artists with the exact order being debatable. These ideals seem to have been the norm in the art world. And speaking of the norm and the status quo, what if you wanted to break away from all that?

The Dada Movement

Here we have a movement based on defying conventionalism and values. Pioneers such as Marcel Duchamp (see one of his readymades at the top, and his “Mona Lisa With a Moustache” below) strove to break free from the art world and produce their own chaotic “anti-art.”

The funny thing about rebellious anti-art movements is that they always end up getting assimilated into the system. The Dadaists did not consider their works to be art, but of course its all considered art today. Some say this was the prelude to abstract expressionism.

Marcel Duchamp was also famous for taking a urinal, writing the fictional name R. Mutt on the side of it, calling it “Fountain,” and putting it in a museum. It was this type of “found art” that made him noteworthy, and his practices would certainly be emulated. A point of interest here is that he was a trailblazer and the first to do this type of thing. Anybody who takes a wheel and screws it into a stool these days is not an artist and their work is, well, kitschy.

Minimalism

Dadaism as a movement did not last very long and after several years came big movements such as surrealism with Rene Magritte and his mysteries. Magritte would paint a picture of a pipe and write underneath it “This is not a pipe.” It didn’t matter to him whether or not people understood his pictures. Perhaps he was making a statement on art in general.

Eventually came abstract expressionism with its emotionally charged realism-defying principles. Artwork didn’t have to be about any specific subject at all. It had to do with expressing yourself with basic human feeling. So instead of painting a landscape of a city, one might draw a few lines and splatter a whole bunch of paint on it.

Minimalism can be considered a reaction to this. If art is going toward the direction of leaving actual representative form behind, we may as well predict where art can lead us. Throughout art history of the 19th and 20th centuries you had a pattern of subtraction as far as visual arts went. Why not just skip ahead and make art nothing.

And that is what the minimalists seemed to do. If a number be assigned to their art it was certainly zero. Art in its most primitive form is essentially nothing, a blank canvas, a black square. In contrast to the abstract expressionists, the minimalists did not consider their art to be expression at all. It simply was what it was: plain cold geometric forms. A blue canvas was simply a blue canvas.

Art of the Future

While the minimalists certainly had a strong message, it is impossible to predict the art of the future. Is the art world patterned with endless subtraction? After a blank canvas is there anything left to subtract?

Art is much more complex than this, of course, and there are all kinds of schools of thought on the subject. All I can say is art is what you make of it. If you want it to be art, it is what you think it is. If you are an art dealer and some crazy artist is charging a million dollars for a pile of junk and you want to put it in a museum, more power to you.

Perhaps art gets bored with itself and the art market must constantly change. As with anything there are fads and fashions and whats hip today is forgotten tomorrow. As artists I think we can follow Warhol’s prediction that in the future everybody has fifteen minutes of fame.

So be optimistic. Paint, sculpt, splatter, tear, create, destroy and call it “priceless” while you’re at it.

But is it art? You tell me.

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