Okay, so this is my Pollock-esque painting. I did it more for kicks than anything else. It's fun to experiment and see what you can do, right? So what do you think? Is it art or does it just look like a piece of a house painter's coveralls? I think I would like it better if I did a set of them each with different colors to be displayed as a triptych.
10 comments:
Soph, We love it. You need to help us get some color in our drab ol' joint!
Keep it up!
-Peter and Annisa
Thanks guys! I have an idea for your guest bedroom that would tie in the colors that are already in that room if you're interested.
I really like the colors, much closer to art than anything Pollock did, why is that guy famous? His stuff looks like a sneeze guard at the dollar buffet after the insane clown posse got into the pepper spray.
Wow!! You paint quite the picture there yourself, KP!!!
I am just trying to keep up. So what is your opinion of Pollock? Is he a (con)artist?
I think he was trying to do something new and different and the art for him was more in the action of creating it rather than in the end product. I was reading what he said about it himself this morning and he said he liked to feel like "a part of the painting." His paintings are really large so he would lay out the canvas on the floor and walk around on it as he splattered it. Sounds like fun to me. As far as whether it is art or not I think it is, but in a less traditional way, almost like I consider dance to be art. It is movement and it is visual, and if done right, it's nice to look at. It's like I have to imagine what the creation of it looked like, the movements Pollock made, to make the painting come out the way it did. Sure, anybody can do it if they just pick out the right colors, but the swirls and lines created reveal a lot about the artist just like our handwriting can be analyzed to reveal our personalities.
Okay, very good points and great examples but I am still not convinced. Everyone's handwriting is different and does reveal things about the author but that doesn't necessarily make it art. I can appreciate the element of motion and the analogy to dance. As a counter point I would suggest both Matisse and Van Gogh have works that are exercises in movement that are less...random? One of the most consistent criticisms of Pollock (or any abstract artist) is the "my kid could do it" argument, indicating a lack of intelligence behind the work. Pollock seems to have less organization, structure, and purpose to the works. If his patterns (intelligence) are too subtle to be recognized or to produce an aesthetic response then I would argue that he has failed as an artist. (He is obviously an artist as he is in the books but I have observed that the most common response to his work is confusion and by definition the artist's relationship is with society, he is missing his audience) The difficult thing about art is the fact that it is so arbitrary. "Who is to say what is and isn't art?" There is a canon but it can only look to the past, an open canon is the same as no canon at all, a flexible standard is not a standard. I appreciate that innovation is, to a degree, breaking the rules but there are still basic principles. At some point all the rhetoric in world can't make something art. In the end the lines defining art must be drawn by the individual, for me that means Pollock's Autumn Rhythm is not art (flawed reasoning and post-project justification) while Rothko's "Yellow and Gold" is a work of genius (meditated intelligent purpose).
Okay, you got me thinking about something that I wanted to bring up as a comment later, but here we go. I think that people tend to blindly trust the "experts" when it comes to anything in life, and that's fine, but with art I think it should be different. The experience of art should be a personal one, a feeling that you and the artist are somehow communicating through the work. There should be a mutual understanding, even at the most basic limbic level- a shared emotion based on a color or expression. You said that a Pollock is art because the books say it is. If that is the only way you can see it as art, then it really has failed to be ART. Who are the art experts to decide what is good or not if they don't have really good reasoning? Most of the time I don't disagree with the books or once I hear a good argument, but sometimes I just get tired of the pretentiousness of artists and art critics. If art is really an individual experience, then it may be art to them and kitsch crap to you and vice versa, and that's okay. Thanks for not just blindly agreeing with said "experts."
Good point. But how do you stay true to that when the only way for an artist to be successful is to go through the "experts?" That is the necessary endorsement to ensure recognition on a large scale. The experts are merely a clique endorsing whomever they are occupied with in that moment. Since I don't have an example in art I will use music. Look at how our generation has hailed Nirvana, they have been called "the beatles" of our time. What did they really do? They made playing instruments poorly popular. They really aren't that great as musicians, they just had an abnormal sound and were made famous. More than their own abilities was the need for our culture to be part of some significant act or event to stand out in history, we elevated them above their own talents and abilities, even more so with the passing of Cobain, making him some sort of martyr. Look at Warhol, his work was as mass produced as an album, he referred to his studio as "the factory." Art for art's sake is dead with the first sale. Just as when a book is completed and printed it is known as the "death of the author," the moment there is a monetary exchange art is dead, once it caters to society rather than criticizing it loses its insight, no longer art it is entertainment to be peddled on every street corner as a $15 simulacrum. How does art reach the masses and still maintain its integrity as art?
Frankly I don't know. Maybe the artist just has to keep doing what he/she was doing before the art became popular and act as though their art never received acclaim. If their work and style were to stop changing and being something the artist is continually experimenting with, then it is obvious that they are done doing art for art's sake and just trying to make money. At that point I think it's just a vocation and no longer a passion.
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