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The vast majority of movies are not art. They are a commodity. “Troy” is a commodity.
We agree on that. See, WV? More common ground!!
All art is a commodity. It has value, and is traded for things or money or status or prestige or all of the above.
But taste? That can differ. Within a given range, people have different experiences and like different things.
I’m talking about commodity in the capitalist sense. In the Marxist sense of the capitalist sense. No, not all “art” is a commodity. That implies endless exchange, for the sake of exchange, where the exchange itself, where the result of the exchange (money) is the alpha and omega — and not the art. The sole purpose is to make money, etc. etc.
To commodify something is to alter its purpose to fit inside that box. To be the thing that makes money, and nothing more. If it has “use value” beyond the exchange, that’s just a lucky side effect. The raison d’etre for a commodity under capitalism is to make money for the capitalist.
“Art,” at least from my point of view, is something that radically transcends all of that. That exists prior to those particular economic relations, scoffs at them, radically overcomes them, perhaps even embarrasses and shames them, etc.
Real “art,” in fact, in a kind of meta-narrative, demonstrates the shallowness, the emptiness of culture as commodity*. This has always been an essential part of its tradition(s).
*Milan Kundera’s use of the word “kitsch” fits well here.
Abstract art is ridiculous. The lack of true artistic talent collides with separating the wealthy want to be abstract art patron from ridiculous sums of money. A no talent talent so to speak. Geometric designs of whimsy is art. Monkeys flinging their poo on a large canvas is Pollock.
Real art is appreciated. Abstract art is interpreted. Take for instance the very recent,
“High school art project from 1970s mistakenly valued up to $50,000 on Antiques Roadshow”
High school art project from 1970s mistakenly valued up to $50,000 on Antiques Roadshowand then theres the myriad of Pollock fakes since anyone can drip and sling paint. A cottage industry of faking Pollock has now created a CSI like approach to disproving claims of a Pollock. From computer programs designed to follow known Pollock geometric progressions of painting to catalogued ID of all paints found on his studio floor and walls in the order of his using them. I find it amazing. Pollock must still be laughing in his grave.
The upside to being a Rams fan is heartbreak.
Sprinkles are for winners.
Abstract art is ridiculous. … I find it amazing. Pollock must still be laughing in his grave.
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Well, I used to think that way myself, and I still do sometimes, when i walk through
a gallery and see stuff like a coat-hanger sticking out of a watermelon, etc.But then I stopped trying to ‘define’ what Art “is” a few years ago. (if you gather quotes by famous artists, btw, you will always find a sentence that starts ‘Art is….’ and for each artist their definition will be different. I happen to collect ‘Art is…‘ quotes, btw
One thing that has helped me think and wonder and enjoy and hate ART,
is to separate the ‘business/corporate/patron’ aspect of it, from
the artist/doing-art part of it. There’s always been and always going to be
rich folks who over-pay for ‘art’ or who view art as an ‘investment’ and who influence or control the art ‘market’. And that whole money-dynamic is a different thing
than ‘art’. Whatever art is. Or isn’t.Another interesting thing to me is, some of those ‘abstract’ artists could also paint
‘realistic’ pictures very well. They could do the realism thing just fine, and often did early in their careers. So, its not always a case of them not being ‘able’ to do landscapes and fruit baskets and greayhounds chasing foxes and stuff. Sometimes they just got-to rethinking what art is, and what life is, and started exploring weird stuff. Doesn’t make their art ‘good’ btw. Or bad. Ya know. Folks will have different experiences lookin at it.I’ve said this before — I used to think Rothko’s ‘one rectangle on top of another’ was bullshit. A child could paint that. Etc. Then one day, i was lookin at one of his paintings and i started tearing up. I got emotional. (apparently this is rather common with Rothko’s paintings) Well, that made me rethink Rothko’s work and i started reading about him, etc. Blah blah blah.
I dunno what Art is. Its fun to wonder about it, though.
w
v
“Art is either plagiarism, or revolution.”
–Paul Gauguin.“Art is not a mirror held up to reality
but a hammer with which to shape it.”
― Bertolt Brecht“Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook“Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear”
― Samuel Beckett“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”
― Pablo Picasso“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.”
― Federico FelliniNature is the art of God.
~ Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1635 ~Excellent post. I agree with everything you wrote except the tearing up part. (Might want to get your T level checked.) The Gauguin quote is perfection.
The upside to being a Rams fan is heartbreak.
Sprinkles are for winners.
WV makes an excellent point above, one that hit me right after I read your post, bnw.
It’s a major misconception about abstract artists that they do X because they don’t have the “talent” to do Y. Y being, usually, copying nature like a Xerox machine, give or take.
Pretty much every single great painter or sculptor generally called “abstract” worked for years and years to get to that place. They started their training doing “representational” art, copied the masters, copied, perhaps, their teachers, drew, painted, sculpted from “life,” and then decided to go in a different direction. They didn’t do it because they had no other choice. They did it because the artist in them pretty much forced them to. They were driven to express themselves in a different manner, one outside the contemporary box. They did what all great artists do, in all the arts: Add another step on the ladder of human/expressive possibilities. Build upon the past and carve out their own place in the progression. Add their name to the legacy of the new, built upon the old.
Also: in reality, all art is “abstract.” All of it is an abstraction from internal/external “nature.” A vision informed by both, simultaneously. Emphases are generally quite different. But all artists attempt to render their personal vision which comes from within.
IOW, “abstract” artists render their own internal vision, informed by the external and internal. It takes just as much “talent” to do what, say, Kandinsky or Picasso did, as opposed to, say, Raphael. The felicity of their expression, their vision, should tell the tale. Not whether or not someone can “copy” things from the external world like a photo — that guy on NPR can do that, and, to me, his stuff isn’t “art.”
To me, in the post-photographic world, the “abstract” is more and more important. If someone wants photographic “realism,” for example, why not just look at photos? Painting and sculpture can give us something photos — with exceptions — can’t generally do: Bring us a direct vision of internal life, connect us with that vision, directly.
On Rothko: I wrote this for my own website back in 2008:
All art is paradox. But Rothko, perhaps more than any other modern painter, embraced the paradox and threw it profoundly in our faces.
The canvas is flat. You can’t enter it. You can’t go through it, if it’s hanging on the wall. At least without injury and perhaps a heavy bill from the gallery. But Rothko continuously tells the audience to do just that. Embrace the painting, enter it, walk into it, let it engulf you and torture you and shake you. Shake the core of you. He wants the painting to be a plane and an entrance way in the same bright moment. Flat and omnipresent. Pressed against the wall as it surrounds you. And he wants you to accept the paradox and reject it long enough to succumb.
“We favor the simple expression of complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.”
Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Russia (now Latvia) in 1903. Rather, Marcus Rothkowitz was born in that place and time. He became Mark Rothko later in life. At the age of 10, he left Russia with part of his family to join the other part in America, arriving at Ellis Island and eventually Portland, Oregon. The culture shock must have been tremendous. From a life filled with the constant threat from Cossacks and the Czar, to one with much more mundane worries. He did, however, have to grow up in a hurry, as his father, Jacob, died not long after their arrival in America. His life from that point on became more and more complex . . .
. . . If one looks only at his most famous paintings, the floating blocks of luminous color, the large canvasses he wants us to enter and celebrate, that person might mistake the surface for stasis, for the lack of evolution and emotion, for a ground that never changed for Rothko. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only did his intellectual rationale for his art evolve greatly over time, taking him from an intense study of myths, archetypes, Jung and Freud to Nietzsche and beyond . . . his artistic methods and subject matter evolved as well. Few artists, in fact, changed as dramatically as Rothko, if we look at his career from the 30s until his suicide in 1970. Another paradox. The flat, solid blocks of color, forever floating, and a whirlwind of change before and after.
“I am not an abstractionist. … I am not interested in the relationship of colour or form or anything else. … I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on — and the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures show that I communicate those basic human emotions. … The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!”
I have sat for many an endless moment in front of his paintings, most recently in Washington D.C. Rather than make me weep, they generally bring me tremendous waves of calm and peace. Even though I’m guessing he wasn’t shooting for that reaction, he never did want to limit them or define them or jail them. Enter the painting was all. Only connect was all.
“Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.”
Of course, it’s impossible to sum up a great artist. And rather ridiculous to try. But I think, in a nutshell, Rothko sought something similar to other great modernists like Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Pound, Eliot and Joyce. To reinvent myths, reinvigorate them, and introduce them back into the cultural stream. Most of the great modernists seemed to want this, saw this as vital, essential for our health and survival. Some thought this could be done only through collecting ruins, fragments, the remnant of civilization. They sensed a scattering and a loss of cultural potency that could never be reversed. Others thought the disorder and fragmentation could be overcome. I think Rothko falls into the latter category, and his floating blocks of luminous color contain the detritus of civilizations long gone. Paradoxically, they surround us with the future.
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