Modern Art woo

[Azathoth]

Much of modern art is shite. If I could get paid a shitload of money for piling up a few bricks I would do it too. I personally think this chap has more talent than Hurst and Emin put together.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3WHhW4V ... re=related[/youtube]

[Animavore]

Much of modern art is shite. If I could get paid a shitload of money for piling up a few bricks I would do it too. I personally think this chap has more talent than Hurst and Emin put together.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3WHhW4V ... re=related[/youtube]

Holy shit! That's fucking amazing.

[lofuji]

I have mutually contradictory views about Dali - which I am happy to hold. I also think his skill and craftsmanship are awe inspiring.

To go to your original point - I didn't recognise the pic as Pollock, but he did so many similar paintings it may well be..or possible an aerial map of somewhere..?

For me, Dalí descended into charlatanism after about 1940, but his best surrealist works [e.g. The Metamorphosis of Narcissus, The Persistence of Memory and the one I posted, The Lugubrious Game], are quite stunning in their visual impact, the more so when you see them in the flesh and realize how small they are. The Persistence of Memory, for example, is only about the size of a typical computer monitor screen and gives the impression of a view down the wrong end of a telescope. However, they are quite shallow. I sense no emotion in his work, as I do with Picasso. Compare his self-portraits with those by a master self-portraitist like Rembrandt. Dalí's seem very narcissistic. By the way, have you seen any of his earlier work? It seems to have been heavily influenced by Matisse, of all people.

The Pollock is Lavender Mist #1 from 1951. Yes it does look like some kind of aerial photo, although I'm sure that's not what the artist intended. I chose to post a Pollock because he'd been specifically criticized earlier in the thread. My point was that it's unreasonable to criticize someone's work when all you've seen is a photograph. For example, Chuck Close was brought up earlier in the thread. I'm not familiar with his work, but when I hear that his paintings are 20 feet high I realize immediately that the monumental scale is part of what you would expect to experience, just as Dalí's shrunken visions are part of the experience of viewing his work, so I automatically reserve judgement until I actually see his work. I thought the allusion to Magritte would have been picked up on.

lofuji

[Gawdzilla Sama]

As the primary Pollock hater here I have to point out that I have seen his work in the flesh, so to speak. Less impressive in person than in print for me. He, IMNSHO, is a joke.

[devogue]

Modern art can be breathtakingly beautiful.

Modern classical music, however, is invariably a pile of steaming shite.

I know this because I threw together a piece of shit ten minute composition for full orchestra across a long weekend punctuated by cigarettes, cocaine and alcohol in my third year of a BMus degree, anything just to hand something in, and I got a First Class for it.

I bullshitted about Stockhausen and Boulez being influences in a cover essay with loads of bollocks about pointillism and dual tonality blah di blah di blah...

My second year dissertation, which was a carefully worked out, technically perfect exercise in counterpoint and fugue with a tonal basis which I thought was fucking cool was trashed by my lecturers and awarded a third. That was the point at which I gave up on music in an academic sense - I don't think I've ever really got over it.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Modern art can be breathtakingly beautiful.

Modern classical music, however, is invariably a pile of steaming shite.

I know this because I threw together a piece of shit ten minute composition for full orchestra across a long weekend punctuated by cigarettes, cocaine and alcohol in my third year of a BMus degree, anything just to hand something in, and I got a First Class for it.

I bullshitted about Stockhausen and Boulez being influences in a cover essay with loads of bollocks about pointillism and dual tonality blah di blah di blah...

My second year dissertation, which was a carefully worked out, technically perfect exercise in counterpoint and fugue with a tonal basis which I thought was fucking cool was trashed by my lecturers and awarded a third. That was the point at which I gave up on music in an academic sense - I don't think I've ever really got over it.

I don't hate everything modern. Some is quite nice. But flinging paint and trash at a canvas results in something below the level of a painting elephant.

[Rum]

Modern art can be breathtakingly beautiful.

Modern classical music, however, is invariably a pile of steaming shite.

I know this because I threw together a piece of shit ten minute composition for full orchestra across a long weekend punctuated by cigarettes, cocaine and alcohol in my third year of a BMus degree, anything just to hand something in, and I got a First Class for it.

I bullshitted about Stockhausen and Boulez being influences in a cover essay with loads of bollocks about pointillism and dual tonality blah di blah di blah...

My second year dissertation, which was a carefully worked out, technically perfect exercise in counterpoint and fugue with a tonal basis which I thought was fucking cool was trashed by my lecturers and awarded a third. That was the point at which I gave up on music in an academic sense - I don't think I've ever really got over it.

Maybe that's the point Dev. Theory is far from everything. Technical proficiency isn't everything either. Maybe the first exercise - explosive and fuelled by alcohol and coke actually was better - more spontaneous and alive than the second, which potentially could have been rather laboured and plodding (maybe!). That is art for you. Some people do it one way and some another.

I improvise in a jazz 'style' on guitar. What comes out is very dependent on mood and what is happening at the time. If I wrote it down I think that would be apparent.

[Rum]

I have mutually contradictory views about Dali - which I am happy to hold. I also think his skill and craftsmanship are awe inspiring.

To go to your original point - I didn't recognise the pic as Pollock, but he did so many similar paintings it may well be..or possible an aerial map of somewhere..?

For me, Dalí descended into charlatanism after about 1940, but his best surrealist works [e.g. The Metamorphosis of Narcissus, The Persistence of Memory and the one I posted, The Lugubrious Game], are quite stunning in their visual impact, the more so when you see them in the flesh and realize how small they are. The Persistence of Memory, for example, is only about the size of a typical computer monitor screen and gives the impression of a view down the wrong end of a telescope. However, they are quite shallow. I sense no emotion in his work, as I do with Picasso. Compare his self-portraits with those by a master self-portraitist like Rembrandt. Dalí's seem very narcissistic. By the way, have you seen any of his earlier work? It seems to have been heavily influenced by Matisse, of all people.

The Pollock is Lavender Mist #1 from 1951. Yes it does look like some kind of aerial photo, although I'm sure that's not what the artist intended. I chose to post a Pollock because he'd been specifically criticized earlier in the thread. My point was that it's unreasonable to criticize someone's work when all you've seen is a photograph. For example, Chuck Close was brought up earlier in the thread. I'm not familiar with his work, but when I hear that his paintings are 20 feet high I realize immediately that the monumental scale is part of what you would expect to experience, just as Dalí's shrunken visions are part of the experience of viewing his work, so I automatically reserve judgement until I actually see his work. I thought the allusion to Magritte would have been picked up on.

lofuji

I missed the point of the original Pollock post - or possibly misread it. Yeah - I have seen some of them in the flesh and I was not too impressed myself, though some work I suppose. My sense of them was how crude and lacking in finesse they were, but then they were 'action' paintings - an awful lot of them done, especially later on, when he was pissed as a fart. As you probably know that was what killed him eventually. I have also seen some of Dali's stuff up close - and his early stuff too. What struck me was that he was uncertain of where he was going and had not yet found the style for which he became so famous. It was as if somethign 'clicked' for him at some point. There was a dedicated exhibition a few years ago in London I made it to see.

[devogue]

Maybe that's the point Dev. Theory is far from everything. Technical proficiency isn't everything either. Maybe the first exercise - explosive and fuelled by alcohol and coke actually was better - more spontaneous and alive than the second, which potentially could have been rather laboured and plodding (maybe!). That is art for you. Some people do it one way and some another.

Ah - I understand how that may have come across - I can assure you that my coke fuelled opus was a collection of shortcuts, don't-give-a-fuck harmony, extreme dissonance and atonality, haphazard instrumentation, over-cooked trills and ornaments for effect and their "look" on the paper, pointless time changes - just total fucking dirt, a load of shite that I just wanted to get out of the way so I could carry on fucking about (I hated how my degree got in the way of my extreme hedonism) - it was the musical equivalent of throwing shit at a wall and calling it art - to this day I have no idea what it sounds like.

Now I understand how the above may sound more romantic and spontaneous but I consider the toil and effort in my first piece to be a culmination of all I had learnt over ten years of studying musical theory and technique put in to practice. It was the first time when I truly felt like an artist, but it was built on solid foundations - strict rules regarding harmony in counterpoint and fugue (very advanced harmony) which had been developed and honed by musicians over centuries - I felt a real sense of pure, exhilarating craftsmanship fitting my own imagination and original musical themes in to a form of music it had taken me years to master (btw, if you want to hear seriously shit hot fugal music listen to Bach or the Kyrie in Mozart's Requiem). I think it's the same sort of feeling JimC has when he contemplates Mathematics - "I understand this shit, and it's fucking wonderful!". Really good classical music should soar and fly and tell a story, carrying along its listeners - at its best (not me, btw) this is made possible by creating an illusion of simplicity through a foundation of hard graft and careful composition.

To have such effort thrown back in my face and derided as being "derivative" or "a pastiche" was fucking soul destroying, especially as I had worked in much of the modern theory I had learned over the first two years of my degree to give it a contemporary feel. That's why I said "fuck it" and gave up, and I haven't regretted my decision to forsake a career in music because the academic music world is full of twats pinging and ponging, wanking over triangles and recording farts to be played back in a loop through a fucking euphonium.

I improvise in a jazz 'style' on guitar. What comes out is very dependent on mood and what is happening at the time. If I wrote it down I think that would be apparent.

Improvisation is wonderful - it is spontaneous, exhilarating and where the best music comes from - even when I wrote my fugue I came up with the original thematic material by improvising.

[M]

I like these and I'd love to see them IRL. The talent is obvious. I also like Pollock, where it isn't so obvious. What I don't like are things like 2 traffic cones and a teapot called something like "Crusade and domain part 3". That stuff just makes me pull a face.

[Bella Fortuna]

I really like those portraits as well - I assume they're large, where they would look abstract close-up and the subject only emerging the further away one stands.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

I really like those portraits as well - I assume they're large, where they would look abstract close-up and the subject only emerging the further away one stands.

Very large. I don't know about those particular pieces but his portraits are often 10-20 feet high.

There are a couple of examples with people in shot for comparison on hi wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_close and I have seen far larger works than the ones shown there.

[Trolldor]

I like these and I'd love to see them IRL. The talent is obvious. I also like Pollock, where it isn't so obvious. What I don't like are things like 2 traffic cones and a teapot called something like "Crusade and domain part 3". That stuff just makes me pull a face.

I take it you don't shop much at Ikea then.

[twattybanjo]

A definition of what "art" is is needed before you can discuss "modern art" seriously.

To pick a work that has been discussed in this thread, Emin's bed, I found it really quite moving. I would have been more than happy to dismiss it as shit if that's what it was but it had quite a profound effect on me.

I like the definition that anything offered as art should be accepted as such. The arguement over quality can then commence but at least we can all agree it's art.

Emin's bed was offered as art and I accepted it as such and it moved me.

[M]

I preferred her tent, don't know why.