Notes from a philistine
The BBC reported yesterday on a boy in Detroit who stuck a piece of chewing gum onto the corner of an abstract painting estimated to be worth $1.5 million, thus leaving a stain that will now need to be removed. A look at the painting, The Bay by Helen Frankenthaler, suggests to me that the BBC missed out on the real news story here, which is that someone might actually be willing to pay $1.5 million for a piece of “work” which might…I emphasize might…garner praise from a nursery school teacher.
Given the utter absurdity of the art world, I wonder if anyone stopped to think that the gum might have actually addded value.
Given the utter absurdity of the art world, I wonder if anyone stopped to think that the gum might have actually addded value.
2 Comments:
James,
I confess that I don't know the first thing about Frankenthaler or her wider influence, and the wider art world has always, shall we say, baffled me. For example, for all his apparent (to everyone but me, it seems) genius, the appeal of Picasso has always eluded me. It strikes me as rather silly that art seems to be valued not by what it looks like, but rather by who did it. Arguments about whether a newly discovered work is an "original" by this or that legend, or is instead a fraud...and the implications of that on the value of the work... have always indicated to me an lack of substance in the evaluation of art. If it's a work of genius when thought to be painted by Picasso, I don't see why it suddenly becomes worthless when it discovered to be by Joe the gardener. Or, more often, vice-versa when an otherwise unheralded piece of art suddenly skyrockets in value when discovered to be an "early" or "late" or "previously unknown" work by a legend.
But I fully recognize that the problem, of course, might be my own blind spot, a possibility to which I tried to allude in the post-header and my reference to being a philistine.
SC
PS - thanks for the kind words about the blog.
Modern art is art for other artists. Only those who are in the know as to what classic rules of composition are being broken, twisted, or reversed can get the joke.
Of course, no one wants to admit they don't get a joke....so no one will admitthat the emperor has no clothes.
So, art has now become a talking game.... it has no value in representation of reality or in demonstrations of beauty. It's a starting point for babblers to spout arcane knowledge.
Marcel Dschamps predicted the fate of modern art back in 1917 when he used a urinal as art.....
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