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Post by Tom-From-Sparks on Mar 25, 2005 1:28:49 GMT
Talking about Sigmund Freud reminded me about his grandson Lucien.
I'm not really knowledgeable in any of his work but saw that his picture of Kate Moss recently wen't under the hammer for an extrodinary amount of money. Now when I saw the picture it really didn't do anything for me at all.
In the Guardian/Observer was a gushing piece few weeks ago about how he's Britain's best living painter.
What's everyone else's view on that?
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Post by Monpot on Mar 25, 2005 1:33:34 GMT
My cousin took one of her sons to a Lucian Freud exhibition once. At the end he said "well it was all just willies and bums wasn't it?"
Then again, this is the same kid who surveyed a row of chickens in the supermarket and commented "It's like a load of vaginas".
Bastard broke my walkman once.
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Post by tafkac on Apr 3, 2005 21:07:36 GMT
I'd completely forgotten about this thread!
Yes! Creaky, I think you have a very healthy attitude towards art. I totally agree with almost everything you said there. Give me a sort of colloquial aesthetic experience, not stuck out of context in some gallery, any day.
I'd say the radical left is often hostile to the concept of art (as distinct from creative activity per se) because its definition is such an expression of academic (dare I say bourgeois) imperialism. Its more hostility to the artworld than art itself. This is my problem with it anyway. I can't stand the creation of transcendent categories - they stifle debate, and give people restricted priorities and expectations. If you're trying to "do art" rather than express yourself, I think you've failed. I don't actually see the necessity to define art, or even use the word. The same with music to be honest. Who has the right to define what is or isn't music, and why bother? We use different types of music for totally different purposes anyway, so why is "its" sonic element the only important thing? (I also have serious problems with the idea of identity or being, but I could go on for ever).
What I've read of Danto is sophistry bordering on the hilarious. I can't begin to take him seriously. Similarly to Barthes, I'd turn the idea of authorship on its head. Derrida made exactly the same point with regard to writing (I imagine this is where Barthes got it from). Once a text is released by an author, their intentions (as if you could pin them down anyway) don't matter at all, and trying to pretend they do is hopeless. They have lost control; there's no "correct" reading, because there's no "outside" position from which do define correctness. In the same way there's no outside position to define art - its always an ideological, political statement which legitimises the authority of a certain canon, or elite. Because post-structuralists never provided anyone with concrete answers, they have often been dismissed, but I don't see how people can pretend the critique of modernism never happened, or was somehow "wrong".
Also a lot of artists and art historians seem to have a conception of taste or artistic merit I don't agree with. There is no such thing as objectively "good" art - each person's taste is formed and continually re-formed by their experience, and being influential isn't the same thing as being "good" or "important". The creation of unquestionable "classics" relies on this conceit. You're not allowed to say Picasso or van Gogh were shit. I remember trying to make this point on DiS when a review described Refused's "The Shape of Punk to Come" as a "classic", when the band were quite specifically trying to suggest that the canon, the museum, the gallery etc. are instruments of cultural imperialism. To a large extent I agree with them. That's why I stopped studying anthropology.
In any case, authorship is a bit of a peculiar western idea, based a. on the preoccupation with free will - that there is somehow an all powerful transcendent subject who does the creating. But where is the "I"? In out heads? Floating around in space? b. on the idea that a work is the product of one particular subject. Surely an artist is only the sum (or product?) of all their influences and experiences? Where does the originality fit in?
People talk about Australian aboriginal "art", but in truth there's no reason to believe it serves a remotely similar function. It is/was often about the re-enactment of a mythical narrative, not the "creation" of a novel "piece". It was specifically not the property of the person who, in our terms "created" it. A western conception of individual authorship has only entered Australia since the arrival of Europeans.
Its all arbitrary. Everything. There is no truth, and "I" is purely a habit. People find this very alarming. I love it.
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