Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/04/11
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 06:05 PM 11/04/98 -0400, you 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? 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