Child's painting sells for $86.9m

[mistermack]

The donkey hoax is quite interesting. I came across this page in English :

Donkey Hoax

Glad you do a lot of reading.

I did read your linked page first time.
I just thought that that page added a bit. I like the picture of the building, it's just the sort of place I would fancy a drink at. And I was wondering what the "Traiteur" sign meant.

Actually I don't think the donkey did all the work.
Someone must have filled in the sea and sky, with the donkey just providing the inspirational free expression of the daring brush strokes in the middle.

Mainly because they waved a carrot under his nose.

[Thumpalumpacus]

hahahah

[Audley Strange]

That's the nub I think. Fuck those guys, I've met a few pompous academiacs (sic) at shows attempting to hold court with their middle-brow windbaggery, but loud mouth know it alls are the bane of every human pass time.

However, I do wonder if even the critics and dealers are getting an unfair hearing here. I'd be interested to know how often those who are bitching about art criticism regularly read art criticism. I go to shows and installations from time to time and I never read any of them, ever.

Yeah, I don't read a hell of a lot of it at all because it does tend to have a climbing-up-their-own-ass quality I find irritating ... but I think it's important to understand currents in art history in order to see the reason some pieces have the impacts they do. So it's nice to know about things like texture and palette and schools and that stuff.

My view is probably pretty annoying because it seems wishy-washy (it does to me, at least) but try as I might, I can't really muster up the fire-and-brimstone energy to really worry too much about it. At the end of the day, it's art, it's subjective, and the opinion of some literati with a brand-new Roget's and a fresh degree is not high on my list of concerns. So when I do read their stuff, it's with a somewhat-jaundiced eye. I know a few polysyllabic words, too, after all.

No your view seems perfectly reasonable to me. . To claim to hate modern art or it's a con is to stick some arbitrary line in the sand that is in essence like being a cultural Amish, insofar that after a certain date, or period of history everything was rubbish.

Now if people want to rail against a rarified con game in the arts, have a look at modern academia's attempt at literary criticism. They know lots of big words, sometimes they can even put them together in an order approaching sense. In fact so pervasive are such pretentious obfuscators that everything after Dickens is context and content free noise that even a child could cobble together, I mean look at Joyce's Finnegan's Wake or Burgess A Clockwork Orange or Hobin's Riddley Walker, look at Burroughs aimless ramblings, it's just gibberish. Don't even get me started on poetry, I mean could anyone really seriously take a look at Ginsberg's Wichita Vortex Sutra and come to the conclusion it meant anything without deluding themselves?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Some serious babble.

[Hermit]

Some serious babble.

The relevant bit being this?

Modernist faith in technological progress was an explicit theme of the film, but was signaled in a minor episode in which the egomaniac playboy Tony Stark, in one of his many callous attempts to irritate his aid and love interest Ms. Pepper-Pots (Gwyneth Platrow), replaces a small Barnett Newman painting hanging on his wall with a comicbook art poster of himself as Iron Man. This telling gesture points out the continuity between the modernist vision of a utopian present break with the past, for which the abstract expressionist movement, with its focus on pure form as its sole content, provided a defining aesthetic, and the post-modern cyborg fantasy embodied in Tony Stark as a man kept alive by the same nuclear-like technology that also produces “world peace” in the film through American military dominance. The utopian social vision inherent in the high art of modernist painting and the lowbrow culture of popular comics are here revealed to inhabit an ideological continuum despite the film’s vindictive gesture of supplanting the former by the latter.

Yes, I agree; the author is very serious, and his output is babble. While I sympathise with his general drift, this film review is babble indeed. The pretentiousness of his waffle is accentuated by a couple of clangers that went undetected by proof reading. Climatic? Roll?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The Barnett Newman in the film looks like a black rectangle on a white rectangle. It would be a picture frame if art wasn't so head-up-ass.