Art that people rave about that's actually shit.
- Thread starter bubblesmcgrath
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wayward bob
i ate all your bees
this is how we're marked - equal weighting to ideas/skills/context. i think some of her fears about art school are misplaced - above everything they want to facilitate our practice, get our work out there, have confidence and marketable practical skills, they don't want to stifle any creativity they genuinely want to foster our abilities.
(tbf my perspective on this has changed on my current course compared to the one i did in first year - find the *right* course and she could really blossom if she decided she wanted to
)
Cid
Proper break this time
I studied (and dropped out of) architecture at a highly conceptual school (UCL/Bartlett). It was an absolute nightmare trying to work out which justifications were 'right', what the tutors would accept etc. I did get used to it, but even there you had at least some framework you could work from. Find site, immerse yourself in history of it, look at sight lines, how people walk around it etc. The more conceptual projects (not buildings) I had more difficulty with because there really didn't seem to be much point behind them.
Sister art school (er, not 'my sister's school' before it gets confusing) was the Slade. My god. I hung out there occasionally with a friend who had a heavy art background (mine is more design). Walls of unintelligible crap (and I do mean crap quite a lot of the time). Just seemed a huge pile of post-rationalisation and justification... I have a few friends who are fine artists; one works at Goldsmith's as a technician now. I really like his work - he's a sort of concrete specialist - simple forms but very well executed. Lovely texture etc. My other friend is high concept. I don't really get her art. She's great and extremely intelligent, but it doesn't appeal to me and the intellectual justifications just seem too obtuse.
Graphic design I think my sister had a few frustrations with some of the conceptual side, but when you have a degree of structure around it and are able to develop your own style in relation to that I think it can make it easier. I think she might have preferred illustration (which is why I suggested it to sam) as there's a bit more hand work and less need to have a fairly diverse knowledge of inputs (GD you obviously learn about typography, video etc as well) but she got a good grade (2/1 I think - difficult to get at Brighton) and has a fucking brilliant lifestyle out of it (doesn't make a lot of money, but works from her laptop so can just travel a lot).
fractionMan
Custom Title
Yours sounds a very similar experience to mine. I dropped out of a ceramic design degree for much the same reasons. Being asked things like "why is it red?" or "what influenced your vessels shape?" all the time drove me mad.
The fine art lot I hung around with (and still do!) produced ten tons of verbal garbage in an attempt to justify whatever they were doing. Most of it crap. One of my friends got a first, not because she was good, but because she worked out the game. Those are her words as well.
wayward bob
i ate all your bees
sorry just picking up points on rereading
our assessments aren't usually done in our absence. we generally have a chance to *present* and discuss the work with the tutors/our peers. but even when they're judging the final work they read our blogs alongside - so the technical nitty-gritty, project development, references etc. goes in there - anything we'd otherwise talk about in a face-to-face assessment.
wayward bob
i ate all your bees
missed this
yeah, call me a weirdo but i'd really like to earn some kind of living out of it 
wayward bob
i ate all your bees
fractionMan
Custom Title
I got a first at software engineering for the same reason
bubblesmcgrath
Well-Known Member
I did...and then backed it up with a quote.
bubblesmcgrath
Well-Known Member
What have you contributed to the thread bar picking at posts? And being a nasty little prick?
Nothing.
Sasaferrato
Super Refuser!
Aye, I did say at the time, that a wee bit less red would have been better.
Wonderful paintings though.
bubblesmcgrath
Well-Known Member
Sasaferrato
Super Refuser!
No. Nor do you have to understand the artists 'motivation' in order to appreciate the art. There is an awful lot of pretentious bollocks talked about art. If it has to be 'explained', then it is likely to be pretentious bollocks on the part of the artist, Hirst's sheep, Emin's bed, and Pollock's dribbles from the top of a stepladder, fall into that category.
I've spent a lot of time over the years looking at art, my all time favourite picture is this:
I love its serenity. I love it's composition and use of perspective and chiaroscuro. It hangs in the National Gallery, and is absolutely stunning. Just recently I heard on the radio why the Virgin is so often depicted in a blue robe, the pigment is lapis lazuli, very expensive, and therefore the highest honour the artist could bestow.
Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers' (of which I've seen four), sell for millions, yet they were something that he dashed off, to brighten up the house because a friend was due to visit. No more, no less.
Sasaferrato
Super Refuser!
bubblesmcgrath
Well-Known Member
I know of a "modern abstractionist" painter / artist who is selling very well after ditching traditional landscape art in favour of painting "batshit art" (their own words). This artist got a young art student to write apraisals for the artworks and these were handed on to galleries etc. The artwork is selling very well.... I thought it dishonest and asked why they felt the need to do it? Money and making a living were the answers.
bubblesmcgrath
Well-Known Member
People have very different opinions.
Sasaferrato
Super Refuser!
I disagree. (There's a surprise
). There are paintings whose magnificence just stops you in you tracks. Like this one:
It is a huge painting, and it's only when you see the painting in the flesh, you see that the wee blob in front of the train is a hare. I love Turner, the collection in the Tate Gallery is well worth a visit. The 'golden flare' of his later work, is reckoned to be because his colour perception had been altered by advanced cataracts.
wayward bob
i ate all your bees
Me too - i did a project on him when i was 14, and he inspired me to do 'Flowers' as my project for Junior Cert (Ireland's GCSEs). I recall my art teacher suggested doing lots of pink and yellow on a RED background - odd (and I avoided the pink) but did lots of red on red, and greys and army green ferns. My main focus thorny flowers in the Rocky Mountains, the more gruesome, the better. I worked really hard and got an A - very proud of that!!
Cant stand the Ellsworth Kelly either - i mean, up close you wonder whether there really is detail and layering involved, cant see it online.
Can say this: with painting green, grey is a great backwash colour, so maybe achieving that shade of green is some sort of breakthrough?? I dont know..
His stated aim was to produce art that was figurative and non compositional...he achieved this.
Here's another. .
And here's what has been written recently about it...
"Kelly's Painting for a White Wall (1952) © Ellsworth Kelly
This severing of the physical link between referent and indexical sign—which amounts to the splitting of the indexical sign from its usual function of communication—is what happens almost by itself in the particular mode of transfer that is cropping, as in Maillot Jaune andTricot. Kelly’s use of cropping has nothing to do with this paean to the subjective and transitory nature of experience—especially since, as one must always remember, what he crops is always flat (if it involves the visual field, and not, as is most often the case, a particular surface in it, it is the visual field as perceived with only one eye). More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that the cropping is itself an involuntary accident, almost like a hiccup or a Freudian slip of the tongue—the sudden “apparition” of a shape as it strikes a chord for being unrecognizable, for being recognized as something the artist consciously knows it is not. Either this shape echoes something already caught in the web of the matrix, or it appeals to Kelly for its potentiality as a score for a new piece, but a score whose material performance in the real world, an “already-made” unperceived by anyone but him, is only the material proof that it can, indeed, exist on its own. The process by which the “already-made” shape is suddenly available to Kelly—while it escapes most of us—is one of defamiliarization, of what the Russian formalists called
ostranenie...
By Yve Alain Bois writing for IAS (Institute for Advanced Study) fall edition 2013.
The thing is that Kelly was very up front about his art and it was John Coplans who decided to neglect the figurative inspiration and sources of Kellys art to the extent that in his first writings on Kellys work, he deliberately did not mention them. Preferring to let the abstract nature have foremost mention. It was a few yeats later that Coplans edited his writing and included the figurative origin and inspiration for Kellys art works.
Kelly was clear that his work was figurative yet the world of militant abstractionism was not keen to hear that and for a while neglected to mention it...
i think perception of art is about feeling. You ask, does it respond to me or not? I try to avoid (but to my chagrin, enjoy) reading 'art analysis' as its like telling you how to feel - which cant be taught.
that may have made it valuable, but doesnt mean its good. Remember Tracy Emin??? I think she is great but some think she is shit....
There's nothing 'wrong' with the images you are posting - art is so subjective, no right or wrong.
shut up! Art speaks for itself. Bubbles can post what she wants and doesnt have to explain herself, or provide these 'critiques' you seek...
Amen.
No. Nor do you have to understand the artists 'motivation' in order to appreciate the art. There is an awful lot of pretentious bollocks talked about art. If it has to be 'explained', then it is likely to be pretentious bollocks on the part of the artist, Hirst's sheep, Emin's bed, and Pollock's dribbles from the top of a stepladder, fall into that category.
I've spent a lot of time over the years looking at art, my all time favourite picture is this:
I love its serenity. I love it's composition and use of perspective and chiaroscuro. It hangs in the National Gallery, and is absolutely stunning. Just recently I heard on the radio why the Virgin is so often depicted in a blue robe, the pigment is lapis lazuli, very expensive, and therefore the highest honour the artist could bestow..
I love this. Have visited 'Lourdes', Medugorje, and other religious places where the Virgin Mary is celebrated somewhat. With all due respect, the art and statues are so gaudy - very bad. But above all, my favourites of the Madonna are the serene, solemn ones. I love 'La Pieta,' There is a religion shop in Dublin called Veritas, and I swear, its hard to find a really good wooden statue of the Madonna that is kind of....dignified. Maybe I should go back to Italy for that....
you made a perfectly reasonable point, i think art just riles people somewhat, as we all interpret it differently.
I know a really good contemporary artist in Brixton who sometimes has to produce 'commercial' art to make ends meet (the kind of awful stuff you see inside a bank, for example.) its still good but he just freelances that stuff to make a living, which is okay i think. I am not sure i would do it myself if i had the talent (which i dont!)
chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
Once, many years ago, as a very bolshy art student, I'd gotten so sick of the art world and it's demands that I produced a piece of work that I refused to exhibit, I refused to document and my "justification" was written in Welsh (a language I knew my tutor didn't speak) and placed inside a sealed envelope that my tutor wasn't "allowed" to open.
Sadly, this gesture became the work.
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