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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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It's too bad... art is like some wounded beast on the Serengeti, every "well" animal from vole to vulture looking to get a piece of the action.
Art is easy to dismiss and make fun of and there is doubtless good and bad art, but unlike used car shopping it (art) requires a bit of empathy on the part of the viewer to appreciate what the artist is attempting... we are so afraid of being foolish or being taken advantage of that sometimes our defenses place us outside the realm of positive experience.
Ridicule is too often simply the path of least resistance.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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good poetry, NJ.
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rick d
climber
ol pueblo, az
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I am glad some people know about DADA- the anti art movement and duchamp.
Duchamp-
-He took a photo of the Mona Lisa, drew a mustache on it, and put the initials of a french saying "L.H.O.O.Q." which means she has a nice ass.
-Bought a front fork off a bicycle with wheel, drilled a hole in a stool and then stuck the fork in the stool
-bought a urinal and painted "R Mutt" (as shown) on it and submitted it to a art show.
But follow up on the others like Man Ray and Tristin Tsara...
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 4, 2012 - 12:12pm PT
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Many of the "modern" artists were genius' at promotion and projecting a quirky and artistic persona. One of the best of those was Emmanuel Radnitzky, aka, Man Ray.
JL
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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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Regarding the OP, the performance in the performance art is the people who come to see it and there reaction to it.
If you want to watch an intriguing and entertaining movie about the quirky art world I humbly recommend "Exit through the gift shop" by Banksy.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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there actually is an idea behind a blank, white triptych. of course, here you have an interpreter bringing his background to it. most people will take largo's point of view. i would too, were it not for a certain 60s experience.
i roomed with my uncle in chicago at the time. he was an artist, and a serious, if unsuccessful, one. not in the vein of abstract impressionism at all. jackson pollock was considered cutting edge at that time. the outrages of andy warhol and his pop art were just popping up.
my uncle took classes at one of the smaller art academies downtown, and through him, and his friends, i'd get the buzz about exhibits at the chicago art institute and enjoyed many a visit there. yes, truly a great art museum. i'll never forget the andrew wyeth show--that's "real" art, i'm sure most here would agree. i think some critics treat wyeth unkindly. i liked him, and still do, simply because he evokes so much of the starkness you will find in rural settings, similar to the farm country where i grew up.
one of my uncle's friends was a young fellow who was a classic hippie rebel in everything except his haircut, which looked as clean as a brylcream commercial. he loved drugs, he loved to f*#k (his words), and he pretty much scared the hell out of me and my catholic sensibilities. this fellow sat me down one day to an ornette coleman recording. the noodling of coleman's band was a musical version of the energetic chaos of jackson pollock. then, taking over, front and center, coleman's sax blared a loud, single note which eventually overwhelmed everything else.
"you see," this fellow said to me, addressing my worries about god and morality, "that's what god is. god is the white light. god is behind that door. you know what god is." i believe the album cover even had the image of that jackson pollock canvas entitled, "the white light".
think about that triptych the way you think about "the unborn" in your zen philosophy, john. it's a white light, all light, the beginning and end of chaos. and this artist seems to be presenting it as a trinity. but don't pay for the big buck version for your personal art collection. the travesty here is the valuation, and "snobbification", of an idea which is easy to express and essentially free. perhaps that's the real potential for "art" here--to scorn the "artification" of such things.
i don't know what to think of coleman. jazz was never my kind of music.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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an impressive brother, timid.
can an artist retain any residual rights to his creation, the way an author can?
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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in literature, an author has a number of intrinsic rights which can be sold and negotiated. it's why certain publications will declare "all rights reserved". if you sell an article for publication, you could sell the right to publish it only once, but to retain the rights to further publication. many bigtime publishers greedily require all, or most, rights. that's why authors, in a later collection, have to express deep gratitude to various publishers for permission to republish things that they wrote themselves.
perhaps the art market ought to be catching up on this. artists are due compensation if their creativity winds up producing something of extraordinary value. we have to put up with those "fbi warnings" every time we watch a home movie, and listen to all the ballyhoo about the poor moviemakers of hollywood getting ripped off by casual piracy. but some piracy is protected by law.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Written 3-4 years ago)
"What’s the silliest thing you have heard in the past year or two? Take your time. Our candidate comes from Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, who declared in 2007 that “the best art is the most expensive because the market is so smart.”
Now, we are great admirers of the wisdom of the market. But would even the most doctrinaire free-marketeer—one, anyway, not dazzled by the glitter of the contemporary art world—argue that market price determined aesthetic value? The philosopher David Hume famously argued that “durable appreciation,” not any intrinsic quality, ultimately provided the measure of artistic value. Whether Hume was correct is a matter of dispute. But at least he placed the locus of value in long-term public judgment and delectation, not sticker price.
We came across that quotation from Mr. Meyer in “A Second Tulip Mania,” an article by Ben Lewis and Jonathan Ford in the December issue of the English monthly Prospect. The piece is not about horticulture, but culture—at least, it is about the bubble now showing itself in a debased precinct of culture, the world of contemporary art. That’s “bubble” as in “South Sea Bubble”—the early eighteenth-century stock scam that ruined thousands, including many aristocrats—or the mania for tulip bulbs which swept through Holland in the mid-seventeenth century.
Charles Mackay, in his nineteenth-century classic, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, explained how it works. Stage One: enthusiasm evolving promptly into euphoria:
At first, as in all these - mania, confidence was at its height, and every body gained. Many individuals grew suddenly rich. A golden bait hung temptingly out before the people, and one after the other, they rushed to the tulip-marts, like flies around a honey-pot. Every one imagined that the passion for tulips would last for ever, and that the wealthy from every part of the world would send to Holland, and pay whatever prices were asked for them… . Nobles, citizens, farmers, mechanics, sea-men, footmen, maid-servants, even chimney-sweeps and old clothes-women, dabbled in tulips. People of all grades converted their property into cash, and invested it in flowers. Houses and lands were offered for sale at ruinously low prices, or assigned in payment of bargains made at the tulip-mart. Foreigners became smitten with the same frenzy, and money poured into Holland from all directions.
Naturally, the euphoria could not last. Stage Two: sudden disillusionment declining directly to depression, then despair:
At last, however, the more prudent began to see that this folly could not last for ever… . As this conviction spread, prices fell, and never rose again. Confidence was destroyed, and a universal panic seized upon the dealers. …Defaulters were announced day after day in all the towns of Holland. Hundreds who, a few months previously, had begun to doubt that there was such a thing as poverty in the land, suddenly found themselves the possessors of a few bulbs, which nobody would buy, even though they offered them at one quarter of the sums they had paid for them. The cry of distress resounded every where, and each man accused his neighbour. Many who, for a brief season, had emerged from the humbler walks of life, were cast back into their original obscurity. Substantial merchants were reduced almost to beggary, and many a representative of a noble line saw the fortunes of his house ruined beyond redemption.
Sound familiar? As Messrs. Lewis and Ford show, the circuit from euphoria to catastrophe is not confined to the housing market and over-leveraged hedge funds. It applies, with ghastly pertinence, to that carnival of pretense and grotesquerie, the world of contemporary art.
Messrs. Lewis and Ford analyze what’s happening in the world of contemporary art—or, rather, in the world of the contemporary art market—as a “classic investment bubble.” There’s a lot to be said for the analogy—or maybe it’s more than an analogy. The metabolism of the contemporary art market has learned a lot from the “specullecting” practices—part collecting, larger part financial speculation—of entrepreneurs like Charles Saatchi, the advertising mogul who was so immensely successful at insinuating the values and methods of celebrity advertising into the world of contemporary art. First, find some unknown young artists who produce items of nugatory aesthetic but substantial shock value; buy their wares for a song; then open your own museum to exhibit them and devote your immense skills as a PR specialist to talking them up. Presto: huge profits, some of which can be reinvested in next year’s crop of enfants terribles.
But Saatchi seems almost amateurish next to the financial moguls who have entered the art market in recent years. “The Georgian Boris Ivanishvili,” Messrs. Lewis and Ford report, “spent $95m on Picasso’s Dora Maar au Chat—a work of art that he still hasn’t unpacked. When it was flown back to Tbilisi, the airport was closed down and the army turned out to ensure the work’s transfer to a secure warehouse.” Ivanishvili and others like him “didn’t simply shove their wealth into contemporary art, they imported the strategies of financial investment into art collecting.” More. Faster. Richer. Higher… . Pop.
But this bubble is now deflating. Sotheby’s share price has lost three quarters of its value over the past year, sinking from its peak of $57 in October 2007 to $9 in early November—close to its 1980s low of $8. The latest round of contemporary art auctions in London has gone badly. In October, the Phillips de Pury sale made only £5m—a quarter of the minimum estimate; at Christie’s almost half the lots didn’t sell; and an air of denial hung over the Frieze art fair like a fog.
Even as we write, the final phase of the bubble—panic, followed by a sudden burst—is upon us. Leavening the panic is denial, which yields some extravagant rhetorical tergiversations. “The propaganda of the art entrepreneurs,” write Messrs. Lewis and Ford, “has also reached a final level of absurdity. We were told that the decline of paper assets would lead to ‘a flight of capital into art.’” Just last June, the excellent Tobias Meyer informed the public that the art market goes in only one direction: up. “For the first time since 1914,” he said, “we are in a non-cyclical market.” Tulips, anyone?"
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ontheedgeandscaredtodeath
Trad climber
San Francisco, Ca
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So I was just a climber starting grad school in SF, bummed about how much it rains there and how crappy the local climbing is. I was at Mission Cliffs, bouldering alone, and hear the announcement that someone needs a belay partner. Well, she's pretty cute. So I swoop over and offer to climb. We climb, share tacos from the truck and hang out and talk.
Turns outs she's a young curator (at that time for me an unknown profession). We climb, date, get married, have kids, etc. Since then I've hung photos for Dennis Hopper (who was actually a respected photographer), tossed back tequilla shots with Tom Ford (the designer, see gucci), watched my wife interview Annie Lebowitz, partied at the home of the editor of French Vogue, and met countless other artists, many considered important. Super fun stuff to be along for the ride.
I really know nothing about any of it. I will say you get an eye for what work is good. Also, the biz side of art is as important as the art side and one can also get a sense of who can market well.
Anyway, we actually have one of Timid Toprope's brother's pieces in our bedroom! (very small- his work is high end). He's an awesome artist and really good guy. My wife really liked working with him.
So, final quiz: what well known climber and sometimes taco poster also has a brother who is well known and respected in the art world?
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steveA
Trad climber
bedford,massachusetts
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I'm a pretty serious collector of art, but I really never could understand most of the "modern" art.
When I saw this piece in a gallery, I just had to buy it. Turns out it is one of the artist best pieces he ever did.
http://www.durandstudio.com/mom%27s_apron.htm
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Gary
climber
"My god - it's full of stars!"
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no one even comes close to writing the quality of music that say Led Zep wrote or dare I even go there Jimi.
It just seems like 3 cords and some whinning.
You need to expand a bit on the music you listen to.
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Nate D
climber
San Francisco
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cool story, ontheedge.
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AE
climber
Boulder, CO
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Sep 25, 2012 - 03:25pm PT
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I wonder how many here have any firsthand art experience, or have at least taken a basic art appreciation course?
JLP presumes art requires skill - problem is, there are many different aspects of skill beyond the manipulative (which is clearly the realm of craftsmen, whatever their specialty). The "skill" in Found Art is picking the right object, then transforming its context. Easy? Try it.
Most of Western Art history seemed preoccupied with ever-more sophisticated methods for representation, until photography kicked that footstool out from under them. This may have freed artists from that obligation, from which new and more cerebral areas were explored.
Islamic art, by virtue of the prohibition of graven images (no Muhamed here!), found tremendous possibilities in abstract patterns and architecture, so had a jump-start already outside of "realism."
<note: the Realists were actually not per se interested in greater photographic illusions, but in the real-world depiction of working class life, common folk over the paying wealthy class, etc>
Duchamp was in my view far more versatile, clever, thought-provoking, and original than Picasso, who really deserves respect more for output than quality. He helped set the criteria by which modern brokers, galleries, etc. make artists and their fortunes. Check back in 200 years.
Art is what we decide to keep.
Me
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