Tag: art

And I wasn’t even going to bring up the GWB art exhibit, too.

So Jonathan Jones of the UK Guardian is grinding his teeth over the fact that George W Bush not only somehow continues to not be whipped through the streets, but that the former president is apparently happily painting pictures of perhaps limited technical skill, but remarkable emotional resonance.  To wit: the paintings show a remarkable ability to infuriate Jonathan Jones, who like most critical bullies is visibly at a loss on how to react to artists who legitimately do not have to give a sh*t about what critics say about their art. Equally amusing is that Jones has clearly not yet come to terms with the aggravating detail that GWB, thanks to his previous career, is likely to eclipse the name of Jonathan Jones in posterity as it applies to the art world. I presume that this particularly grates on the man, given that from the outside it appears that Jonathan Jones himself would have rather liked to have been an artist.

Continue reading And I wasn’t even going to bring up the GWB art exhibit, too.

Will wonders never cease: USEFUL criticism of GWB from someone on the Left!

This may be the first criticism of George W Bush from an obvious liberal that didn’t make me bristle.

Of course, Jerry Saltz was offering art criticism, there – and I will say this for Mr. Saltz; he knows how to separate out his personal views with his ones on art. I think that the critic isn’t taking into account Bush’s understandable, if hopefully temporary, over-emphasis on mastering newly-learned techniques (a common enough problem for beginning artists), but that’s merely a minor dispute. Artwork intended to be a gift can be an awkward subject for analysis, particularly if there isn’t a really strong existing emotional resonance between the artist and the giftee; artifice is really to be expected. I wonder whether Saltz is being reasonable to think of the Leno picture as representative of Bush’s current level of skill.

Still, Jerry Saltz does raise a very good point: this new endeavor of George W Bush’s gives the rest of us the opportunity to see something that normally we don’t: how someone who was once the most powerful man in the world sees that world. He wants to see more of it, and so do I.

You know, I think that GWB is getting better at painting.

I’m glad to see that he’s getting on with it.

Particularly since it still infuriates some people to see GWB happy and active, bless their hearts.

Via @AoSHQ.

Street Art Watch: we have met the enemy, and it is… pulling out a checkbook?

This is not an easy piece to summarize fully – the bare bones is that it’s about Banksy, an anonymous street artist struggling to reconcile the paradox that good art about people not being able to make it in this world often allows the artist to make it in this world* – but the conclusion is of interest in its own right:

…the language of resistance — of the vanguard on the streets leading the way — is the language of the elite. Banky’s adolescent messages reflect the adolescence of his audience. His audience likes the images they believe he paints of them:  as childlike idealists fighting against villains, but how do they fight? All they do is scramble from museum piece to museum piece, hoping to see it before guards or rival street artists arrive. It is a game for children, like those in Banky’s art, a treasure hunt for the idle rich.

The old game between workers, artists, and institutions is over, and the institutions have won. Continue reading Street Art Watch: we have met the enemy, and it is… pulling out a checkbook?

Whither conservative art? – Note the lack of scare quotes.

Gotta admit, I’m with my colleague and buddy Ben Howe on this one… with ‘this one’ being defined as A Movement on Fire, which is an upcoming film (maybe) that clearly wishes to be a Tea Party rallying cry, but instead comes across as… well.  As Ben put it:

Instead of pulling people into a story that espouses the underlying tenets of liberty, it slaps them across the face with all of the subtlety of a campaign commercial. Rather than taking the viewer along for a first-person view of how our present can develop into their future, the filmmakers opted to skip directly to the bottom of the slippery slope without describing the tumble with enough detail to create a real connection for the viewer.

Continue reading Whither conservative art? – Note the lack of scare quotes.

‘But is it ART?’

Apparently not anymore:

A cleaner with the best intentions accidentally destroyed a piece of art worth more than $1 million when she removed what she thought was a “stain” from the installation. Spoiler alert: It wasn’t really a stain.

The piece of art, titled “When It Starts Dripping From The Ceilings,” features a series of wooden planks and a (formerly) discolored plastic bowl. The artist, the late Martin Kippenberger, intended for viewers to understand that the bowl had been discolored by water running over the pieces of wood.

(H/T: Hot Air Headlines) I just had an interesting conversation with my wife over this.  One that eventually led me to look up the topic of cycladic sculpture, which is pretty damn cool. Continue reading ‘But is it ART?’

My thoughts of the day on art.

As follows:

  • If you see a piece of art, and your first reaction is to launch into a heated criticism of the artist (either his technical skills or his personality) who created it, you probably do not respect the power of the original artwork’s message.
  • If you see a piece of art, and your first reaction is to launch into a heated criticism of the artwork itself, then you probably do respect the power of its message, whether you are prepared to admit it or not.
  • Artists typically prefer it when all criticisms are portrayed as being part of the second bullet point, and never the first.  Aside from everything else, it helps insulate them from societal expectations that they not be d*cks.

That’s it.