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Post by John Brainlove on Mar 8, 2005 14:58:50 GMT
To inaugurate the new Art forum, I thought I'd ask why contemporary art in this country has such catastrophically bad PR. It seems quite bizarre that artists can be demonised to the extent that they are, and strange that the public should feel so alienated from the contemporary art of their times.
Why?
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Post by Durutti on Mar 8, 2005 16:20:56 GMT
Because it doesn't connect.
We live in a world which operates on a very obvious and, if you're feeling unkind, superficial level. People want images and ideas that are eye-catching and immediately and easily understood. Much contemporary art is not. It is too subjective. I am not sure infact that contemporary art has ever been a mass market/populist medium.
I stand to be corrected and exposed as an ignoramous on all these points of course.
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ana milgram
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Post by ana milgram on Mar 9, 2005 10:39:59 GMT
Tricky one, I mean art has a noble history of being mocked in the press at the time but then absorbed into mainstream culture after a while. Then there's the tabloid lazy journalism habit of trying to bring down anything that could be seen as elitist.
I think the problem with contemporary art is that it's trying to appeal to a mass-market, to use the same superficially engaging techniques as advertising, but without even bothering to subvert them. When you enter that arena, you've gonna get fucked, cos the commercial arts are always going to have more money to throw at being efficient.
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Post by stuartmilgram on Mar 9, 2005 12:34:59 GMT
THERE SEEMS TO BE SOME KIND OF NATIONAL MENTAL BLOCK AS FAR AS ART IS CONCERNED.
I mean, can you imagine the press turning around and saying that what Britney made wasn't music? OK bad example, but my point is that when someone doesn't LIKE a particular musician's work, they don't say it isn't music, just that it isn't their taste... but with art they say stupid things like "...but is it art?", especially on the humourous art story at the end of local news programmes. What makes these people think that it's ok to say what art SHOULD be, but not music, or literature... i expect the same people think that poetry has to rhyme though. idiots.
People just don't understand it and yet still think they're in a position to define it.
more later.
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Post by stuartmilgram on Mar 9, 2005 12:37:32 GMT
....I mean, can you imaging the Daily Mail saying that Gilles Deleuze wasn't a philosopher because he didn't use Cartesian logic throughout? Idiots.
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Post by John Brainlove on Mar 9, 2005 15:45:54 GMT
Do you think conceptual art has been bullied by the hostility directed at it by the media and the general public in this country? Or do you think the shift back towards painting and art that functions on a decorative level is just a natural progression/ regression?
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Post by stuartmilgram on Mar 9, 2005 16:10:28 GMT
I don't think it's 'conceptual art' being bullied by the media, etc, but the galleries and "promoters" of art.
They all have mission statements, Board members, owners, shareholders, or whatever who are mainly looking at the provision of 'art spaces' as a business.
If they are publicly funded they have to be seen to be catering to the widest possible cross-section of society in order to secure their funding, not forgetting as many minority groups as possible too. They are afraid, and possibly rightly, that if they showed exclusively 'conceptual' art their audience numbers would suffer.
If they are privately owned then they are going to be mostly interested in work that is most likely to sell, and sadly not many people are going to consider buying my 'brain smoothing machine' when it is finished, not when they can buy a pretty picture.
Fine art is essentially a form of exploritory philosophy at the 'top' end, and like with very dense philosophical tomes, the pulp fiction sells in much larger numbers.
There is a need for the 'top' end fine art, just as there is a need for heavy philisophy, otherwise the culture gradually becomes more unenlightened as a whole. If we start banning or excluding certain types of art we are heading towards a totalitarian state like nazi germany or stalinist ussr, where in both cases there was state intervention against what was seen as degenerate art.
The speech by Hitler in Harrison and Woods (eds.,) Art in Theory 1900- 90, (Blackwell, 1990) is very revealing in it's similarity to some of what comes out of the press today.
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Post by stuartmilgram on Mar 9, 2005 16:12:25 GMT
It should swing back the other way as soon as high profile galleries decide to be seen as 'innovative' and 'avant garde' again in order to stand out from the others.
so, yes, i think it is cyclical
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Post by tafkac on Mar 10, 2005 1:02:07 GMT
I'm tempted to say that the public's impression of British art is largely dominated by powerful individuals like Saatchi, who promote individual vacuous fuckwits like Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and the Chapman Brothers to an unreasonable degree. Or to put it another way, unlike in other media like music, the people that are elevated to classic status are only likely to be appreciated by a very small number of people. I find I simply don't have much knowledge of contemporary British art, other than the well known figureheads, who I tend to despise.
When you're dealing specifically with conceptual art, (which I guess is often the first thing people think of when they hear the phrase "contemporary art"), I think its very difficult to please a lot of people. On the one hand, it seems impenetrable and inaccessible to the general conservative, tabloid reading majority, and on the other, it often seems like an insult to the intelligence of open minded people who are actually willing to engage, unless you are saying something pretty damn profound.
Also, on a personal level, while I enjoy engaging with creative visual media, I find the whole concept of 'art' kind of imperialistic and condescending. I really find galleries a big fat sterile turn off. But that's another story. I wrote an essay about it how the category of 'art' was bollocks a while ago. It was great.
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Post by stuartmilgram on Mar 10, 2005 14:40:47 GMT
Obviously, you can call them what you like, but I think that's an unfair description of Damien, Tracey, and the Chapman Brothers. They are all intelligent people who have differing strategies for engaging with critics and the public. They are all treated as if they were a homogenous mass in the press, but the Chapmans are very different in terms of work and how flippant they are.
People often mistake their humour for insincerity or ridicule, but their work addresses very serious social issues such as torture, cloning, genocide, and global capitalism... i think it's unfair to call them fuckwits. Art doesn't need to be po-faced to be serious.
As for Damien and Tracey, I'm not a big fan of their work, but if we were going to judge a work's success on whether it encouraged critical debate amongst those who would not usually discuss Fine Art...i.e. the general public, then I think Tracey is a winner. When her bed was in the Turner show I had so many conversations about it with lay people. Incidentaly, even though she refused to discuss what it meant it is clear to me that it is an explication of the discussion of perceptually indescernable works of art in Danto's Transfiguration of the commonplace... He cites the exact hypothetical case of someone showing a bed in a gallery as a work of art, as a progression from Rauischenburg's bed (which was covered in poaint and hung vertically.)
That was fun.
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Post by John Brainlove on Mar 10, 2005 17:43:13 GMT
I am a huge fan of Tracey Emin. I think she smashes the stranglehold critical theory has over contemporary art quite spectacularly. If you want blood, sweat, tears, fear, sex, pain, passion and life in your art, you don't have to look any further than Tracey Emin.
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Post by tafkac on Mar 10, 2005 22:01:19 GMT
Its a fair point that thematically they shouldn't be lumped into the same category (though I wasn't trying to make a comment on their work as such there, more the institutional context), and yes, 'fuckwits' is uncalled-for.
However, I went to a Tracey Emin show a couple of years ago, and it left me totally cold. I felt like I was just being bombarded with repetitive, inarticulate drivel, but of course its ultimately a matter of taste, which given the total discursive openness of conceptual art, is likely to be pretty personal. I honestly find the kind of stuff the Chapmans do pretty errrr...trite. But I am VERY hard to impress. As I say, if artists are going to try to dabble in philosophy, they'd better make damn sure they're saying something very original.
I'm not sure I'd ever be arguing from the same premises as you with given background in anthropology, social theory and fairly far-left philosophy (hence the fairly deep seated hostility to 'art' in general.)
It may be diplomatic if I don't go into my opinions on Arthur Danto. They are not positive. I don't have a full appreciation of his work, and I'd be interested if you'd elaborate on the reference you made. I have to say I have no time for anything vaguely Kantian, or almost any theory I've ever read in art history. I don't think he sings from the same score as me. At all.
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Post by stuartmilgram on Mar 15, 2005 12:06:01 GMT
I was looking forward to reading that last post because a couple of people had lead me to believe that it was going to turn inot a good argument, but I kind of accept all of the points you made.
I find Tracey Emin quite dull and cold myself, but I still like to harbour the notion that even though she takes that position of saying her whole life is art, etc. that she is actually a really talented, post-real, performance artist who will in a couple of years time reveal that she never slept with any of the people named on the tent, she wasn't actually drunk on the Turner Prize debate program, and that everything she ever said in her art was a lie, which would, at a stroke, change perception of her entire back catalogue... but of course it would have always been secretly encompassed within the work. But sadly, I think her work probably is dull.
On Danto, I don't really know much about him either, but the resemblance between the bed artwork and the one he described is too striking to not mention whenever Tracey's name comes up. He basically seems to take the stand point that it is important what the work means even to the exclusion of what it looks like, he refers to the excellent Borges short story called 'Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote' in which someone writes some chapters of Don Quixote that are identical in form to the original, but because of their origination, are intentionaly different... by which (when i say intentionaly) I mean their internal order is part of their meaning rather than what were the intentions of the author. Another one of his points is that one of the most fundamental characteristics of any work of art is that it has a rhetorical dimension, meaning that it is designed to instill an emotional reation in its audience. Not sure about that one.
A lot of 'Fine Art', i.e. at the more accademic end of the scale, can be viewed as being akin to the more abstract end of the world of philosophy... it is aimed at an accademic audience of the author's peers, and is therefore often incomprehensible to non-artists, but there is a continuum from there down to the sunday watercolour painter without any descernable talent who just does it for fun (good for them), in the same way as there is a continuum from specialised accademic philosophy down to mills and boon. I think people are entitled to just pick whatever type of art or literature they find the most interesting or satisfying. It is a matter of taste on that level, which is difficult to quantify, because it can be affected by things as simple as blood sugar level.
I think that a lot of artists have a struggle with being 'original' in their work at some point in their career, but i don't think it's neccessary to be original all the time... for me, art is medium/methodology for the exploration of life, philosophy, politics, art history, everything... some times i cock things up, but that's ok if i learn from what happened.
It takes courage (or stupid arrogance i suppose) to put something out there that you're working on where it's open to criticism by everyone. I just weight their opinions depending on my perception of their understanding which gets very subjective. If artists worried about keeping everone happy, very few of us would ever exhibit anything.
I like a good healthy debate about art, bcause i think there's always something to learn. I just don't think tabloid journalism is so much debate as a witch hunt.
It's interesting that people will enter into debate about art that they don't neccessarily understand, but won't debate, say, Hawking's 'brief history of time' which apparently sold millions. Why's that?
Why does the radical left seem to have such a problem with art? Surely art provides a social function, a cultural function, and is an expression of liberty of, well, expression. It's interesting that whenever politics tries to become involved in art the whole debate gets polarised. Dictatorships (e.g. nazi germany and soviet russia, but others too) tend to favour realist painting which is pointless in many ways, because it becomes a bit like just writing Das Kapital or Mein Kampf over and over in different coloured ink... pretty, but pointless.
Then there's the CIA sponsoring people like jackson pollock to shoiw the soviets how 'free' americamn painters were. it gets rediculous.
I believe that having a healthy artistic community is essential for the cultural health of the nation and world. Everyone can do it. There's no trick. You are free to be creative. Creative freedom is an expression of my desire to be free from state 'persuasion' of all kinds.
I will sign off there before i go into "I will not be controlled!!!" mode.
bye
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Post by creakyknees on Mar 18, 2005 19:19:56 GMT
Tafcak seemed to be making some sense as to why the british public 'hate' conceptual art' ...it is seen elitist.
Compared to music where there are so many 'artists' we could name, there are comparitivly few conceptual artists we could name.
As a member of the great unwashed (with regard to this subject), I think that if a punter starts to closely consider a piece of undefined conceptual art by a named artist, and they start to 'see things' then surely that punter is doing most of the art, the punter/public might then just as well go off and make something and give it a context themselves.
I can, project a wide variety of interpretations and surreal stories to everyday objects or events, to sometimes place these into an art gallery can sometimes remove poigniancy, irony and surrealness. Some artists work I know I could do. Others although I could physically do it, I am still impressed by their realisation.
Damien Hirst seems relatively repetative (or is he just obsessed) Tracey Emin was great on some TV show full of straights, I really enjoyed that, but her work seems more alive when her 'bed' was jumped up and down on by the 'vandals' Thatchers statue, should surely not have been restored, it would have had far more impact if they had left it decapitated.
The big question of what is art, is not the same as 'what is music' cos most of the public would feel to timid to produce something and call it art, when does craftsmanship become sculpture etc....is an artist someone who lives their life as an artist (Brian out of spaced).....shouldn't true art be about the importance of the 'piece' rather than acclaim/prizes
I can well appreciate the KLF money burning, cos I know I couldn't do it, cos I know that is still alive, because people will debate whether they really did it or not, because it involves human magic (the magic million number, and the idea of burning money to show you are not worried bout it) , and because if they really did do it, they might regret it later so much, they might become poor or wish they had it for a really good cause, their action still exists in my conciousness, they may not have considered it too much, maybe it was just a human reaction, or was it just cynical. Oh and its also sticking two fingers up to the man, and that which is aesthetically least attractive..money.......Its brilliant.
Ritchie Manic....his life....and the 'did he jump/didn't he' quandry , has he done a Reggie Perrin to Goa?.....Art.
The public hates the idea that art seems to be 'declared' by a very small elite of critics. The Turner prize is when most of the public get riled up.
Its such a shame...the rich public should be buying/commisioning stuff off local art colleges/students, rather than buying from garden centres or style shops.....if any of these critics ever campaigned to support local small artists or encouraged everyone to make their own art, like Jamie Oliver does for with poncey food, then the general public would have a lot more time for conceptual art.
In the 80's I saw lots of squats in London that were fabulous....cos there was no responsibility to the value of the property for resale, and because they had little money, the inventiveness and imagery in some peoples rooms was unbelievable. I think the first squat I stayed in, the person I was staying with, their bedroom, had a large crack low down in one wall.....so to enhance this, a large bough of a tree had been put into the bedroom diagonally from crack (like it was growing through it) with its branches going up to the corners.....the rest of the bedroom was just painted white....and just a bed.....They didn't call themselves an artist, this was just someones bedroom and somehow the fact that some people live like this and others get called artists for it is annoying.
Sorry but I feel very strongly about this, yet I am probably very ignorant and inarticulate about it, I would love to have my mind changed about 'shown' conceptual art though.....perhaps John can help me there.
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Post by stuartmilgram on Mar 22, 2005 11:07:12 GMT
Brilliant. I totally agree that art is best when it is alive, active, fundamental, etc. Too much focus on money and being serious. Of course, I may say something completely different tomorrow.
I really like art because you can engage with it on loads of levels (if it's any good), so you can be 'lazy' and only deal with it at a surface level, or go 'deeper' into it and start thinking about meaning, and how it connects in with art history... like reflecting on a bands influences and then going off to listen to them too, to see what that's all about.
The whole thing about the audience creating the work in the act of interpretation is very astute of you to notice; there is a good essay by Barthes (french writer) about the 'death of the author' which talks about how the author can never be fully aware of the full meaning of their work and the reader 'creates' the work in their reading of it. It's an interesting perspective, and should clearly be integrated into the total meaning of the work. Unfortunately, lots of artists who've gone through art school use it as an excuse to either not bother thinking about what their work means, abdicating responsibility for all meaning (both lazy), or more interestingly pretending to do one of the previous two in the guise of a charcter taking one of the previous two positions. The latter is a bit difficult to do and you run the risk of everyone thinking you're a twat. Perhaps correctly.
I think the japanese performance artists who jumped up and down on Tracey's bed are just the coolest. That's the sort of art i want to see more of too.
I sometimes leave objects in other artists' installations just so no-one knows if it's meant to be there or not. I think it works best if noone notices that i've left it there, or that it doesn't belong because it draws into question how we are ever to know what actually 'belongs' in one of those type of artworks, and at what point it would matter. Probably not that interesting to a non artist that last point. But it's kind of like jumping on stage with a guitar at someone else's gig... very rude. Quiet violence is one of the key ideas in a lot of my artwork.
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