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Contemporary artists!
Jimmy the Squid:
I don't know if he is still active, in fact it's possible that he is in fact dead, but I really like the work of James Gleeson.
BEHOLD!!
Darkbluerabbit:
You guys know who's pretty badass?
Horst Janssen. He died in 1995, but in the grand scheme of art history, I'd consider him a recent artist.
Demented alcoholic Germans do pretty cool art. Etching is also probably the most awesome art form (slight bias).
Jimmy the Squid:
I also really like Damien Hirst's work
This one is a little big so I'll just link it.
Emaline:
--- Quote from: Darkbluerabbit on 10 Apr 2008, 22:40 --- Etching is also probably the most awesome art form (slight bias).
--- End quote ---
Oh for serious. Do you etch? Or printmake, anyways?
a pack of wolves:
--- Quote from: jhocking on 10 Apr 2008, 11:12 ---Oh I wouldn't say that he's utterly wrong, but he's certainly overly simplistic and being dismissive based on ignorance. On the one hand, there certainly is a culture of celebrity artists where the actual merits of the work are far overridden by the fame of the artist. It's an emperor's-new-clothes kinda situation; once somebody really important has paid an insane amount for a given person's work, that artist is now anointed as a superstar and nobody questions the situation. I'm not saying that someone like, say, Damien Hirst is a bad artist (I rather like his work,) but I would dispute whether his work is really worth $100 million a pop.
That all said, it's quite unfair and uninformed to dismiss the entire art-world based on narrow views of it's extremes. It would be like dismissing the entire tech industry on the basis of Steve Ballmer. In this specific case, the sort of work he refers to was mostly done by a handful of artists in the Dada and Fluxus movements (these were the people who did things like put a urinal in a museum.) First off, they weren't so much making art as they were attempting to set off a revolution in the perception of art by doing ridiculous things. Second, as influential as they were, don't you think it is a tad biased to judge an entire sector of modern culture based on a couple small fringe groups, the only surviving member of which is Yoko Ono?
Ultimately, much of mainstream dismissal of art comes from envy. Basically, people wish they were rich and famous, and snipe at people they are envious of. This is just human nature, and it's like in any other area of life. Personally, I'm secure enough that I prefer to focus on improving myself, rather than being envious and attempting to make myself feel better by lowering those I am envious of.
--- End quote ---
I agree about the culture of celebrity artists, I don't much care for it myself. Particularly since I haven't seen Hirst do anything I found interesting in years, although I did really like pieces like the shark and the pharmacy. Good work on death. The thing I was objecting to was the idea that conceptual art doesn't require any effort when it's actually very tough work as Linds pointed out. Hirst spent years working on ideas about death before he got to the stage where he was producing the work that made him famous, he used to go and draw cadavers frequently when he was in art college. Same thing with Dada and Fluxus, there was a massive amount of work behind a piece like Fountain even if Duchamp didn't sculpt it himself. I suppose I'm just a bit touchy on the subject since art is the family business for me, even if I didn't go into it myself most of the hardest working people I know are artists.
Even though he died in 2001 I guess Juan Muņoz is recent enough. The retrospective running at Tate Modern at the moment is incredible, it's hard to get a handle on his sculpture just through photographs though since so much is how they're positioned in the gallery and how they force you to position yourself in an interaction with them.
And although I'm obviously biased I like my sister's work a lot, this a group piece called Siege and Counter Siege her old collective Something Haptic did in Hoorn, Netherlands:
www.ruthbarker.com
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