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Contemporary artists!
Unosuke:
I love how the quality of a lot of modern art is how well you can bullshit the explanation behind it. I could nail a 2x4 to a shoe and come up with some crap about existentialism and the working class, and have it be considered high art.
Lines:
--- Quote from: jhocking on 10 Apr 2008, 08:18 ---Yeah, he clearly means contemporary art.
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That's what I thought. Especially because I didn't outright hate the images he posted as soon as I saw them. ;)
a pack of wolves:
--- Quote from: n0t_r0bert_b0yle!! on 10 Apr 2008, 01:33 ---Yeah, that last thing is a cool idea but totally impractical. It would cost money to manufacture and then buy the 'vehicle'.
Money
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You're missing the point. With those vehicles for homeless living Wodiczko raised issues about how a life has been created within cities which requires a great deal of equipment and planning to live optimally, something the people who fall into it don't have. It also raises ideas about the practicality of art, and removes it from the situation of merely creating things which can be (and in my opinion often are) reduced to mere decoration to a position of creating objects designed for use, not admiration behind a glass case. It also brings up questions about the way homelessness is approached, as something to be fixed and the people in that situation should be brought into mainstream society. Is this correct? Wodiczko's work doesn't answer that question but it is something that should be considered, perhaps what's needed is help for people to live any life the best they can and not attempt to make them fit into a mould of what a good life should be.
--- Quote ---I love how the quality of a lot of modern art is how well you can bullshit the explanation behind it. I could nail a 2x4 to a shoe and come up with some crap about existentialism and the working class, and have it be considered high art.
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Go on then, do it. The reality is that you can't, there's no way you could come up with a good piece of conceptual art. You may not understand, and that's fine, but that claim is just as ridiculous as people that say hip-hop requires no talent since MCs just talk or rock and roll is just simplistic noise that anyone can do. Funnily enough none of these people are ever multi-platinum artists, which always suggests to me that they're utterly wrong.
jhocking:
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.
(durr I mixed up the artist's name until I saw Jimmy's post.)
ruyi:
--- Quote from: Linds on 10 Apr 2008, 06:27 ---
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I saw this at SF MoMA! I thought it was so clever, it gave you like a God's-eye view of Eve when you looked at her body directly from the front.
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