Re: [Leica] Good Pitchurs

[Jim Brick <jim@brick.org>]

Thanks George,

Jim


>>At 06:05 PM 11/04/98 -0400, Bruce Slomovi wrote:
>>Kudos for having the humility to express your feelings in a humorous way.
>>However I would just like to ask you this.  Did you always like the things
>>you like now? 

At 07:42 PM 4/11/98 -0600, George H. wrote:
>A few years ago here in Canada there was quite a controversy over a
>painting bought by the national art gallery.  It is a long, tall piece that
>had to be placed in a special two-story room.  It has three vertical
>stripes -- two blue ones at either end, and a red one in the middle, all
>the same width, running lengthwise from top to bottom.  The gallery paid a
>couple of million bucks for it.  What a joke!  People were outraged at the
>waste of money, when funding for the arts was being cut back.  A comment
>reported by the press when some schlep dared to suggest that anyone could
>paint two blue stripes against a red background (or one red stripe against
>a blue background for that matter) was that it truly was a "magnificent
>blue and a magnificent red" Yeah, right! In the eye of the beholder, or
>just a high-stakes con game?  Like I said before, put some shaving cream on
>a portrait subject's face, muss up the hair a bit, pass it off as "fine
>art" and add two zeros to the price tag.  Sorry, but a lot of what goes as
>art these days is just overpriced rubbish, and not just because I don't
>like it.   
>   Honest "Ed" in Toronto, (a patron of the arts, and quite a remarkable
>man by the way) went to the junk yard, picked up some old machinery that
>someone threw out, cleaned it up a bit, spray painted it, put it on a fancy
>marble pedestal, and showed it off in his Royal Alex theatre, without a
>nameplate to identify the artist.  I remember seeing it, but at the time I
>had no idea who had done it or why it was there.  I vividly recall that I
>wasn't at all impressed, in spite of the lavish surroundings.  Recently I
>discovered that it was a con.  In an interview I heard him give, he said he
>was tempted to put a high price tag on it, but his wife asked him to get
>rid of it, because he was mocking modern art.  (His son is an art collector
>and dealer.)  Honest Ed had seen some of the expensive stuff that sold
>under the pretext of contemporary art, and decided that he could do just as
>well himself.  Indeed he could.
>   I thought this might be an interesting anecdote to toss into this
>discussion.  I'm amused when someone tries to tell me that I should reserve
>my judgement on a work of art if I do not understand it.  To truly
>appreciate a work of art I should try harder to suspend my immediate
>judgement and to understand the underlying message that the artist is
>trying to make.  Not likely.
>
>
>-GH
>