What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

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What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by Heracleum Persicum »

.


Tracey Emin’s unmade bed sells for record $4.3-million at auction


Art of each time frame mirrors culture, civilization, feelings of society at that time

and

It ain't sayin anything good


.
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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by noddy »

modern art tells us that once you have long lasting materials and recordings it becomes pointless to replicate or imitate the masters of previous disciplines, they did it before and they did it better.


all you have left is being midly amusing and hopefully a bit different.
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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by NapLajoieonSteroids »

Wouldn't this be considered Post-Modern Art?

I think noddy makes an interesting point. I want to add that the art market itself is out of whack. Something like this sells for so much because of the way governments have subsidized the art world since the end of World War II. The prices have been inflated and it has allowed for more...silliness...since there is so much money floating around.

Not only does it price "regular people" (defined in a few different ways) out of the market but it actually shrinks the number of enthusiasts out there. I am no populist but you are not going to pump out quality enjoyable for everyone when your art "installation" requires the viewer to read your 70 page manifesto beforehand just to understand your piece. It's elitism without any nobelesse oblige.

That being said, there is some very excellent Post-Modern pieces and some very interesting avenues. This work, or most featured in these types of stories, doesn't speak for modern art and may not even be representative of it in the future.
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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by Nonc Hilaire »

The art business has always been largely about laundering money and getting laid. Some good stuff lasts, but most is ephemeral.
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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by Heracleum Persicum »

Nonc Hilaire wrote:The art business has always been largely about laundering money and getting laid. Some good stuff lasts, but most is ephemeral.

NH , this not about (Art) BUSINESS .. true, money laundering and gettin laid (and coning others) major part of that "business"

but

This a philosophical debate about the "Nature" of art

question was, what does "unmade bed sells for record $4.3-million at auction" say about stand of western culture and civilization at this epoch ? ?


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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by noddy »

it says something about azari, it doesnt say much about modern art.

millions of bits of modern art in the west, every possible variation of every possible artform and you concentrate on A SINGLE STUPID ITEM and try and draw a big collusion about the entire west.

welll...... its not gonno worko.

nonononoononoonn.
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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by Heracleum Persicum »

noddy wrote:it says something about azari, it doesnt say much about modern art.

millions of bits of modern art in the west, every possible variation of every possible artform and you concentrate on A SINGLE STUPID ITEM and try and draw a big collusion about the entire west.

welll...... its not gonno worko.

nonononoononoonn.

agree, millions of bits of modern (rubbish) art in the west, free country .. true

but

they ain't sellin for $ 4.3 Million in auction

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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by Nonc Hilaire »

It's telling you to just go back to bed.
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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by noddy »

a rich person spent too much money on some crap because they thought it might make them cooler or seem more sophisticated.

still not telling me much about the modern west.

modern west has got these grumpy iranians in it who dont like anything about the modern west, is the art they produce rubbish ? enquiring minds want to know ?
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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by Typhoon »

Although HP's argument is the standard logical fallacy of generalizing from a specific event to condemning an entire society,

how we got to where mod art is today is an interesting question.

Once photography and film were . . . developed, the long tradition of art as representation became superfluous.

Photography and film meanwhile also became part of art.

I think that the response of the Impressionists was brilliant, but what should the next and succeeding generations do?

In my view, each generation stretched the boundaries until [in the anything goes 1960's?] they finally snapped.

I think that constraints paradoxically inspire creativity.

With no constraints, we have people paying millions for pickled sharks and unmade beds.

The reams of text accompanying such works is often obscure post-modernist jargon that is more difficult to understand than the work itself.

Also creativity goes where it gets paid, so instead of religious themes about the nature of man and his god[s], we have fortunes spent on promoting consumer goods and services.
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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by noddy »

yeh thats kind of what i was getting at with my earlier comment on long last recordings.

however... this is just grumpy old man nonsense and as a single example off the top of my head the "fresh" art going on in the computer graphics world and 3D technology is sometimes amazing and only getting better.

i doubt if certain people would take that seriously or understand the levels of technical excellence combined with creativity required to produce a modern computer game or movie - its well up with the old masters, perhaps better because its entire teams of michelangos and costs hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars.

it hasnt peaked yet either, the true masterpieces that define the genre are still along way off and that is of course the other aspect to this which leaves the entire argument nonsense - many hundreds of years is condensed down into a handful of famous masters and its absurd to compare the here-and-now in such a manner.

at any point in time in any history on the planet the artistic scene is 99% copycapts and wannabees and egotistical floggers throwing money at crap - if this wasnt the case then we wouldnt celebrate the handful of geniuses the way that we do.
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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by Heracleum Persicum »

.

Central question in this thread is WHAT IS ART ? ?

That IS the question

Some "creations" .. a painting, a music, a statue, a movie, a literature, a poetry and and and .. become immortal for 100s or 1000s of yrs, during so many changes in culture and civilization

That's how "Creations" become ART .. must endure, keep attraction, with change of time (progress, evolution of culture and civilization)

Otherwise, best case scenario, it is a "Kitsch" , or nothing

Question now arises, how and why a "creation" would keep it's attractiveness to many generations and cultures and civilizations during so many yrs, 1000s of yrs ? ?

Simple answer to that question is, the "creation" must genuinely and masterly REFLECT the culture and civilization of the time it coming from within

That test, thinking, applied to all those classical ART we all now consider as being ART, music, painting, architecture, theater, movie and and would validate the above

In that sense, either that "unmade Bed" sold for $ 4.5 m is not an ART (rather it's a rubbish) .. or .. it is an ART that reflects present western culture and civilization

well,

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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by NapLajoieonSteroids »

Nonc Hilaire wrote:It's telling you to just go back to bed.
:D
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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by noddy »

ive left my bed unmade this morning , fingers crossed.
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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by NapLajoieonSteroids »

There's a lot of excellent answers in this thread.

Azari, if you want to know what the whole field of modern art is telling us, you gotta break it down into different groups and interests and find common themes and techniques and so on.

You also got to point out what is GOOD about modern art.

You present a test that cannot be reasonably applied to any creation for (as you suggest) it take generations for a creation to be recognized as art. How are we to judge what the people of the people of the future will value?
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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by Heracleum Persicum »

NapLajoieonSteroids wrote:.

You present a test that cannot be reasonably applied to any creation for (as you suggest) it take generations for a creation to be recognized as art. How are we to judge what the people of the people of the future will value ?

As said, only time will define whether a creation is ART or Kitsch .. that is THE acid test

There is a reason for that

A creation must have "something special" to attract same admiration in "different" changing times and cultures and civilization, sometimes for 100s (or 1000s) of yrs.

A lot of "things" come with a big hoopla but later end up in cemetery of history never 2B heard again .. those staying alive for centuries with changing time must have something special, ART

That is why it is so difficult to judge at the time of creation whether a creation an ART or Kitsch .. only special eye would have a chance to see through

Question now is, why a creation "becomes" ART and the others not

Answer, as said B4, is, the creation must genuinely come from within and reflect the soul of the time, must be a child of the time

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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by Typhoon »

noddy wrote:yeh thats kind of what i was getting at with my earlier comment on long last recordings.

however... this is just grumpy old man nonsense and as a single example off the top of my head the "fresh" art going on in the computer graphics world and 3D technology is sometimes amazing and only getting better.

i doubt if certain people would take that seriously or understand the levels of technical excellence combined with creativity required to produce a modern computer game or movie - its well up with the old masters, perhaps better because its entire teams of michelangos and costs hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars.

it hasnt peaked yet either, the true masterpieces that define the genre are still along way off and that is of course the other aspect to this which leaves the entire argument nonsense - many hundreds of years is condensed down into a handful of famous masters and its absurd to compare the here-and-now in such a manner.

at any point in time in any history on the planet the artistic scene is 99% copycapts and wannabees and egotistical floggers throwing money at crap - if this wasnt the case then we wouldnt celebrate the handful of geniuses the way that we do.
CGI certainly pushes the bounds of algorithmic creativity.

A corollary to your point is that the creative types are no longer involved in what is traditionally considered to be art, but in other fields, such as science, engineering, technology, commercial advertising, computer games, etc.

FT | Contemporary art is judged by its price tag not by aesthetics
Among the many records set at Christie’s astonishing $852.9m contemporary art sale in New York last week, one has gone strangely unreported: the highest price ever paid for a urinal.

Robert Gober’s 1988 installation Three Urinals sold for $3.52m, which works out at just over $1m per urinal. They do not actually work – that is, they only take the proverbial in a figurative sense. But this is a good thing, for according to Christie’s their “smooth contours invite the viewer’s touch”, and hand sanitiser was not included in the price.

That a urinal by an artist you have probably never heard of is worth more than a masterpiece by one you have (a Gober urinal will buy you a fine Rubens) is down to the unique way in which the contemporary art world functions. There, the merit of works such as Gober’s is not judged in any traditional and objective artistic sense, but by value.

Expensive, say the experts, equals good. After all, Three Urinals is indistinguishable from three actual urinals except by virtue of its price, and several paragraphs of impenetrable art-speak in a catalogue. And if Gober’s urinals are worth $3.5m, then one of his sinks (he does a whole range of toilet ware) must also be worth millions.

In other words, we have collectively lost the ability to assess art for ourselves and on its own merits. Instead, we follow such indicators as fashion, price, and, in this case, hype. You may say it was ever thus. But the result today, when allied with an ever wealthier elite for whom buying contemporary art has become a form of conspicuous consumption, is an unprecedented art boom. Can it last?

Normally, speculative bubbles end when an underlying financial reality hits home. The subprime boom ended when homeowners stopped making repayments. But in the art world there are few such constraints. The only requirement is that works keep edging up in value.

And if they do not? Well do not worry, for the market has developed ways to help make sure the numbers go up – or at least appear to.
Two examples. First, if you are a dealer representing one of the relatively small number of artists who matter, you can bid (anonymously) on their works yourself, to register new “values”. You may have to buy some works back, but in a world where the only thing that matters is the most recent price, paying an auctioneer’s commission is merely marketing.

The second is the guarantor purchase. A guarantor is someone who agrees a certain (undisclosed) price for a work before a sale, and makes a profit if it sells for more. To liven things up, they are allowed to bid the work up during the sale too. But if they happen to buy it, their presale negotiation (again, undisclosed) means they will not pay anything like the “price” reported by the auction house, and nor will the new “value” of the work be representative. Almost half of the lots in Christie’s sale last week were guaranteed.

Try this in another kind of market, and there would likely be calls for a regulator to intervene. But in the art market anything goes, which is one reason we are unlikely to see anything that resembles a bubble bursting in the near future. It is possible to massage the numbers just enough to persuade the next mug that another Gober is “worth” $Xm; “look what the last one made”.

As fashion changes and hype fades, however, works such as Three Urinals will begin to be assessed more objectively. In 100 years’ time people will not care that they made $3.5m in 2014, only that they were a rip-off of Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain. In fact, history suggests that the artist who will one day be celebrated as the greatest of this era will be someone we have not yet heard of. Never forget that Van Gogh sold just one painting in his entire life.
My guess is that many art galleries will be holding "modern art" liquidation sales in the future.
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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by Nonc Hilaire »

Not too many bona fide sales for this. Much of the market is swaps to run up the price, then donate to a museum for a tax write-off.
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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by noddy »

Typhoon wrote:
noddy wrote:yeh thats kind of what i was getting at with my earlier comment on long last recordings.

however... this is just grumpy old man nonsense and as a single example off the top of my head the "fresh" art going on in the computer graphics world and 3D technology is sometimes amazing and only getting better.

i doubt if certain people would take that seriously or understand the levels of technical excellence combined with creativity required to produce a modern computer game or movie - its well up with the old masters, perhaps better because its entire teams of michelangos and costs hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars.

it hasnt peaked yet either, the true masterpieces that define the genre are still along way off and that is of course the other aspect to this which leaves the entire argument nonsense - many hundreds of years is condensed down into a handful of famous masters and its absurd to compare the here-and-now in such a manner.

at any point in time in any history on the planet the artistic scene is 99% copycapts and wannabees and egotistical floggers throwing money at crap - if this wasnt the case then we wouldnt celebrate the handful of geniuses the way that we do.
CGI certainly pushes the bounds of algorithmic creativity.

A corollary to your point is that the creative types are no longer involved in what is traditionally considered to be art, but in other fields, such as science, engineering, technology, commercial advertising, computer games, etc.

FT | Contemporary art is judged by its price tag not by aesthetics
Among the many records set at Christie’s astonishing $852.9m contemporary art sale in New York last week, one has gone strangely unreported: the highest price ever paid for a urinal.

Robert Gober’s 1988 installation Three Urinals sold for $3.52m, which works out at just over $1m per urinal. They do not actually work – that is, they only take the proverbial in a figurative sense. But this is a good thing, for according to Christie’s their “smooth contours invite the viewer’s touch”, and hand sanitiser was not included in the price.

That a urinal by an artist you have probably never heard of is worth more than a masterpiece by one you have (a Gober urinal will buy you a fine Rubens) is down to the unique way in which the contemporary art world functions. There, the merit of works such as Gober’s is not judged in any traditional and objective artistic sense, but by value.

Expensive, say the experts, equals good. After all, Three Urinals is indistinguishable from three actual urinals except by virtue of its price, and several paragraphs of impenetrable art-speak in a catalogue. And if Gober’s urinals are worth $3.5m, then one of his sinks (he does a whole range of toilet ware) must also be worth millions.

In other words, we have collectively lost the ability to assess art for ourselves and on its own merits. Instead, we follow such indicators as fashion, price, and, in this case, hype. You may say it was ever thus. But the result today, when allied with an ever wealthier elite for whom buying contemporary art has become a form of conspicuous consumption, is an unprecedented art boom. Can it last?

Normally, speculative bubbles end when an underlying financial reality hits home. The subprime boom ended when homeowners stopped making repayments. But in the art world there are few such constraints. The only requirement is that works keep edging up in value.

And if they do not? Well do not worry, for the market has developed ways to help make sure the numbers go up – or at least appear to.
Two examples. First, if you are a dealer representing one of the relatively small number of artists who matter, you can bid (anonymously) on their works yourself, to register new “values”. You may have to buy some works back, but in a world where the only thing that matters is the most recent price, paying an auctioneer’s commission is merely marketing.

The second is the guarantor purchase. A guarantor is someone who agrees a certain (undisclosed) price for a work before a sale, and makes a profit if it sells for more. To liven things up, they are allowed to bid the work up during the sale too. But if they happen to buy it, their presale negotiation (again, undisclosed) means they will not pay anything like the “price” reported by the auction house, and nor will the new “value” of the work be representative. Almost half of the lots in Christie’s sale last week were guaranteed.

Try this in another kind of market, and there would likely be calls for a regulator to intervene. But in the art market anything goes, which is one reason we are unlikely to see anything that resembles a bubble bursting in the near future. It is possible to massage the numbers just enough to persuade the next mug that another Gober is “worth” $Xm; “look what the last one made”.

As fashion changes and hype fades, however, works such as Three Urinals will begin to be assessed more objectively. In 100 years’ time people will not care that they made $3.5m in 2014, only that they were a rip-off of Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain. In fact, history suggests that the artist who will one day be celebrated as the greatest of this era will be someone we have not yet heard of. Never forget that Van Gogh sold just one painting in his entire life.
My guess is that many art galleries will be holding "modern art" liquidation sales in the future.
i guess im not that hung up on art being just sculpture and painting and even if one does consider those fields then its thousands and thousands of years of crap and a handful of masters during the renaissance and 19th century (heh).

things evolve and i think it its significant that the creative types are focused on the electronic new fields like robotics and cgi and the old fields are uninspired, we certainly have lost alot of skill in working with rocks, do we miss it ?
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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by Typhoon »

noddy wrote: . . .
we certainly have lost a lot of skill in working with rocks, do we miss it ?
I do, to some degree . . .

Image
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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by noddy »

we arent missing it tho, the masterpieces from those eras are still around, still looking gorgeous, what is the need to replicate them ?
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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

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noddy wrote:we arent missing it tho, the masterpieces from those eras are still around, still looking gorgeous, what is the need to replicate them ?
Not to replicate, but to surpass . . .
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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by noddy »

surpass is a big word and im not a particular fan of sculpture but even i can think of a modern artist doing striking work that makes you stop and think, if nothing else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Mueck

even if you dont like this kind of sculpture, its highly skilled anda long way from unmade beds and the art fashions in the rich and tasteless brigade.
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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by NapLajoieonSteroids »

noddy wrote:we certainly have lost alot of skill in working with rocks, do we miss it ?
Poppycock. Rick James did his best work with rock.

n0w099fw4lw

And what about Richard Pryor?

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Re: What is (supposedly) "Modern Art" telling us

Post by noddy »

aaah, but did they carve it into pretty shapes.. bitch!
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