Nietzsche perhaps

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yes, but if everything and anything is art, then nothing is also art and art is nothing.




lol yeah, I think of a 'blood-spattered bride' image. There's a really crap australian 'artist' who does this stuff. it's funereal.

yes, but if everything and anything is art, then nothing is also art and art is nothing.

Well, its a non-hierarchical view of Art, a pantheistic view, if you will. It doesn't rule out hierarchies of value to be imposed later, but it says they cannot be imposed a priori and different systems of value may be used at different times and places. (For instance, some religious traditions cherish icons while others are iconoclastic.) It says that the activity of a six year old with a grudge and a crayon is not essentially different from that of a more sedate and "mature" artist with a conte crayon. Both are making art if they call it that. Values come later. Art as an Ideal is everywhere and nowhere, just like God. We all reflect the Divine one way or another. Nobody likes everything.

(and so we see that "Nobody" is one of God's names. God likes everything, imho, because only God sees everything, and I trust everything turns out alright in the end. We are all mistaken and we all go to Heaven, imho. I know, I know it's a view not unlike that of the Greek prostitute in "Never on Sunday" who would always end her version of one of the tragic tales of Aeschylus or Euripides with "and then they all went to the seashore." I'm a mystically inclined agnostic with no allegience to any particular scripture. I never expect to "know." Does God act as a particle or a wave? Both or neither I suppose. )

I know this can get tedious. Don't worry, I won't keep it up forever!

I recognize that you have a conservative orientation, rather like that of Clement Greenberg in his last years (I knew disciples of his and heard him lecture) or like Hilton Kramer now, (I had some chance to argue with him in graduate school) to name two of the most important American advocates of a conservative view of art. I know how long this would take if I continue to pursue our differences! I just want to make a few points in favor of acceptance of diversity.

I am really enjoying finding this kind of discussion here in Aspieland. I feel so at home here, it's a joy!

If you're wondering why I'm overdoing it here like this, well I couldn't manage the organization or the tolerance for nt society to actually do this for a living, at least not so far, what can I tell you?

I love painting for many reasons. It's been one of my main special interests forever (along with folk-rock, especially the Byrds and Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and religion and ....sex and liberal ideals (talk about cognitive dissonence! ) and of course I work completely alone. The social part of an artist's life is very important and I try but that is the chief reason I lag behind my peers. I'm still trying to "emerge" though. I say never give up!


perhaps this post belongs in the getting to know you section.

I know I didn't get to the part about shock in art, maybe next time someone tickles me!


Let's just say it isn't new, going back at least to Gustave Courbet in the 1840's if not to Delacroix.

In May 1961 Manzoni, a painter tied to the celebrated Fontana, defecated into 90 small cans and had them sealed with the text Artist's s**t. In the following years they have spread to various art collections all over the world and netted large prizes. Many of them have also exploded, maybe because of corrosion and expanding gases.

Manzoni was a a follower of Duchamp. One of his cans sold for 124,000 euros at Sotheby recently (Manzoni died in 1963)
Here is one of his cans

Like Duchamp's urinals these are probably a sign of a crisis of figurative (?) art. It's not easy to discuss the problem. But certainly art has had much to do with two entities: power (especially monumental Art: were pyramids art or simply a statement about power?) And money. The two things are correlated in complicated ways.

oh all these threads peter out eventually..like flotsam and jetsam floating on the sea, ultimately they sink.



I don't know who those people are, I'm guessing they're academics. My opinions are based on my experiences at art school in my late teens and twenties. I always felt like I was in a mausoleum when in an 'art' galllery, still do. If you've seen the fillum "ghost world", the main character spends some time in art classes and my experiences in art school were something like that.




welcome to the planet of wrong.




gotta rub shoulders with the right people ea, it's who you know, not what you know. do the parties! so have you got some samples of your work to post?




sorright, nice to meet you.




sure, not new. It's not so much the shock value that strikes me as the 'corpse'. i know corpses aren't new in art, and shock isn't new either, but somehow i'm convinced by this corpse and i can identify the body.

To clarify a little the connection between between art and power:
Here are three example of gates, delimitating territory and discouraging or solemnizing trespass.
The gate of a prison. People who are in prison are already outcast: no particular need to legitimaze, through ornamentation, the borders



[img]Here is presumably the gate of a private proprerty: you may enter, though selectively, the separation is made more gentle. You may find e everywhere this kind of gates. They may be extremely ornamentated, like in the art nouveau of which this is an example.



Finally we have the Brandemburg Gates here all the puissance of the state must be represented, the monumental aspect is much more relevant.
[IMG]h
Pyramids are not properly gates but represnt the distance between the common man, the toiler and the dynasty
The statue of liberty also is not a gate, but the woman has a sword. It's a menace hanging on air for those who want to enter the harbour.

Of course, that's clearly Johnny Cash at the prison gate, (Folsom Prison?) and he wants to get in, if only for the afternoon. And he wants us to know that he is not only a Country music star, he is an ex-con and he is proud of it.

This is a good illustration of the ambiguity of such terms as "inside" and "outside" and the frequent reversals that turn outsiders into insiders and vice-versa.

Art reinforces hierarchies of all kinds but just as frequently it is subversive and overturns them.

http://www.artspacenh.org/cwos/2007/dir ... fm?id=1644

This url should take you to a little page with a few words about price and 2 drawings and a large painting. Everything is sale cheap
because I just want to get them into people's hands and out of my studio but these are respectively a color pencil drawing I finished last week and the drawing I use as an avatar here (which is from 1992, when I had no idea about Asperger's....but it shows me at 40 listening to the Columbia record player I was listening to at age 11 when time seemed to open up between the first and second cuts of "Turn!Turn!Turn!"(the name of the drawing, after the album with a sound of a wordless choir and a message of hope, an ecstasy I am prone to from time to time. I built the image up from pieces, and as I found myself staring at that phonograph again I was in love and felt that I was back there again. This is a long story for a parenthesis!)

The color pencil drawing,completed last week, is a hymn of love for the very same woman, my closest friend and sweetest dream(the name of this one is "My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums")

The painting, which is oil on canvas, 72 inches by 52 inches, is from a series of resurrections, the "Rising" series, there are a lot of reasons for that, but at bottom it is that hope...that this is a time of sudden awakenings, bewildering but wonderful too. I am not a Christian and you notice God is not pictured, but painting demands rebirth.

In art we invest our passion in objects. The word for art is not communication. It is, I think this evening, cathexis.

I am a bit pretentious this evening but it's been a hard day. Seeing those pictures posted on the site above after several days of delay is the first encouraging thing that has happened since morning.

The pyramids may eventually be the most enduring art, perhaps along with the sphinx. Imagine a cataclysm worldwide, these structures are located in the middle of a desert, and will probably remain untouched. Some space traveler could find them ten thousand years from now.

ea,

i like your choice of materials. i only ever liked 'drawing' type materials, graphite, charcoal and best of all, oil crayons. never liked 'painting'.

some lively organic images there, hope it sells well. thanks for showing us your stuff.

Thanks,postperson!

Material endurance is not in itself a criterion to define art.
An image like this

0r like this

will probably stay there as long as European society o Japanese society exist, bu they cannot be defined art, perhaps they are monuments, warnings, admonitions but I would't they they are art.

I think art has something to do with representing things that do not exist.( which is why the artists declaration that something is , or isn't, art , is so crucial to ,and such a powerful part of, the process)
Belief in "things that do not exist" is essential to us as humans. Belief in the non-existent as part of reality.
When people believed in God art very largely tried representing God.( though less and less exclusively as belief in god diminished)
Since so many people stopped believing in God art has had to find other non-existent things to represent.
Which is surprisingly difficult.
I think that's why I feel so in awe of australian aboriginal paintings, the older ones, because they still represent "something that doesn't exist" with so much conviction.
I think art is produced to try and keep this belief in what does not exist alive....
..( and in that sense is perhaps what you meant ,Paolo, when you said art was an affirmation of artists cosmos in face of the common sense, taken for granted world ??)

well, it depends..... If you define "art" as something that is morally good or unambiguous much of the stuff in museums or on movie screens or in literary seminars would not pass muster. Consider Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto, which declares the very influential art of the Italian Futurists as devoted to the notion that the future belongs to speed, war, mechanization and industrialization and the oppression of women. I'm not saying I like any of these things personally, but "art" is morally neutral, like science. It can be good or bad, it can be good and bad, it can be good in some ways and bad in others. Art is a type of language. Is English good or bad or something else?

As for these monuments to man's inhumanity to man, they also serve to remind us that the meaning of human objects changes with their history. The building in Hiroshima that was ruined by the bomb (still in better shape than much of the rest of the city at the time, of course) is preserved as a momento of that horrible day, something of which the original architect and builders can have had no concept

I don't think those images of concentration camps or Hiroshima are art . I think they're documentary. Part of the cult of the real/existent.

They are architecture, rendered as art by an act of history...

I don't believe "history" ( or an act of )decides what's art. I think the artist does ( by saying it IS art, or by describing himself, the producer, as an artist).
Did the photographer see the pics as art or document ?
But it's true that feminist analysis has had something to say about this. Digging up lost works by women and declaring them art, tho I expect the woman writer/ARTIST had thought so too. Just it was forgotten or ignored.
Can something become art after the fact, that is when "even" the creator did not think was making art?
Pots stay pots.
Aboriginal pics ? What do the creators think they're doing? Since came off rocks and sand and onto wood and carton is quite clearly art, and the rest is lost or retains role of mythological signpost etc.
Picasso used african masks from ceremonies for HIS art, but that does not transform the masks into art.
I don't think you can turn architecture into art either if it wasn't originally. ( Gaudi, Miro etc ).
Though even then a building is a building is a building; if it's useful I'm not sure it counts as art, UNLESS an artist gets to work on it ( wrap in plastic bags or whatever!) By that argument the bombers and the SS were artists??! !! !( of course some of them thought they were!!)

In what way can HISTORY "render" something art?