On the Nature of Things | Forum

This thread was inspired by a posting on another forum.


Where I live, ugly art is about all we ever see. There's even an Ugly Sweatshirt shop in the city which I most often visit. Just in case you don't get it from its lumpen, discoloured, and blotched apearance, there is an 'Ugly Sweatshirt' logo emblazened in large lettering on the front, so that people will be sure to know just how avant-garde you are.



The Vancouver Art Gallery is currently hosting an exhibit of the most famous producer of ugly art in history:


https://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/the_exh ... tions.html



... whose work, it must be said, shows considerably more talent than the typical installation of broken pieces of rock and brick or canvas splattered with cans of paint thrown in its general direction which art critics became so fond of as time went on and ugly art went from merely ugly to something you'd expect to see in a garbage dump or toilet bowl. Picasso did know how to draw and paint. He just wanted to show that he could do something different and played the market. "Serious" art is now all political (the whole point is for someone to be able to write a disertation to explain what it means) and ugly, possibly tp prove, as 'Spengler' once reminded us, that the beautiful is not the good.




The proposed new art gallery distinguishes itself by being as ugly as the art usually exhibited in it:

https://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/future.html





And now another gallery has opened, one that appears to want to show that it can out-ugly anyone in town, or at least match the Tate Gallery in London, where the photograph, called ''Upside-down Water Torture Chamber, Harry Houdini, 1913', which adorns the cover of the latest issue of BC BookWorld was borrowed from:


http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lee ... 913-l02686




In a hasty retreat, and before it was supplied to its largest distributors, this publication re-printed this issue with a different cover entirely. I suspect they had protests from the B.C.'s large Asian community, or perhaps people like me who agree that, like most "modern" art, it is as tasteless as it is devoid of displaying any talent. Notice that the book this fellow is holding really is upside down. BC BookWorld doesn't just promote art; it is also western Canada's foremost literary journal and aims to promotes reading.

The truth about popular culture
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In the eye of the beholder and all that........

Apollonius wrote:
The truth about popular culture
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The author of the video seems to think that there is plan behind this by the postmodernists.

I'm skeptical

H. L. Mencken was going on about the same, in a far more concise and articulate manner, back in 1926 at the height of the Jazz Age.

No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

Going back even further, one can find ancient Roman authors expressing the same opinion.

tl:dr; crap sells

As for much of the modern art, as opposed to pop [tart] art, that one currently encounters in galleries,



contrary to the video authors claims about lowering art to the lowest common denominator,
and despite much of the modern art being low grade agitprop espousing all the currently fashionable progressive dogmas,
my view is that its purpose it as a method of establishing and maintaining
social/cultural class distinctions.

modern art has you lot covered.

noddy wrote:modern art has you lot covered.

Titled: "The Selfless Soul's Search for Self-Validation thru the Blogosphere!" I assume....

or "F**k You! I have an Opinion You are Entitled to!"... maybe?

Typhoon wrote: my view is that its purpose it as a method of establishing and maintaining
social/cultural class distinctions.

Yep! Art snobs, wine snobs, beer snobs, enlightened political opinion snobs, NASCAR snobs...... are all the same animal.

im proudly a beer snob - its the only reason hipsters are forgiven for existing in my world. blessed tasty ales.

noddy wrote:im proudly a beer snob - its the only reason hipsters are forgiven for existing in my world. blessed tasty ales.

I'm there with you but only part time, last night I had a Banana Bread ale from England with the Queen of SimpleMindedStan to celebrate V-Day early so we would not have to mingle with the unwashed masses of humanity who feel the need for common holidays of hobknobbing.

The hipster contribution I enjoy the most is the self-styled intellectualization that enables them to infinitely parse every word ever known to mankind so they can convince themselves they are winning every form of attempted communication. If only their mothers had given them less praise and hugs, and more dope-slaps.....

We used to say something that was obvious was "black & white." Now no one knows what either word means. Even males and females are confused now..... no wonder population is declining..... in enlightened societies.......

noddy wrote:modern art has you lot covered.

Indeed.

A bit more clever than most.

Miss_Faucie_Fishtits wrote:

. . .

In the eye of the beholder and all that........

The contemporary expression of what historically was labelled as "folk art".

Yeah..... it's quite art and skillful, but the common mind associates it with vandalism and the undermining of social order and of course, most boxcar art features a street script that normies can't read - and this alarms them. Anything you can't read is associated with the enemy....'>...:

that video is philistinism at its finest

Much as I get a laugh out of some of Paul Joseph Watson's videos, he's maybe not the perfect art critic. Even his best points, while true enough, are a little too unsubtly expressed for my taste.


I mainly posted it because it includes some comments about the Tate Gallery, which conform to what I said at the beginning of this thread, which is that it's full of dog poop.

Apollonius wrote:Much as I get a laugh out of some of Paul Joseph Watson's videos, he's maybe not the perfect art critic. Even his best points, while true enough, are a little too unsubtly expressed for my taste.


I mainly posted it because it includes some comments about the Tate Gallery, which conform to what I said at the beginning of this thread, which is that it's full of dog poop.

Understood. I largely agree with the general point.

However I think the problem has more to do with a loss of nerve; an unclear voicel and a class of people who are rather timid about their craft, persons and interacting with the outside world when all is said and done.

Many have nothing to say or nothing to say outside their social circles. Instead, it's a lot of weenies who jealousy gate-keep their status as revenge for getting shoved into lockers in high school, perhaps.

Maybe that's almost an unfair assessment but I think it is more accurate than trying to frame it on ideological-aesthetic grounds. The 20th century red terror/white terror art movements have burnt out of fuel and no one knows what to do (or what do with any confidence).

In that regard, outsider artists, ugly artists, the naive have a leg up. Because no matter how bad, bizarre, ugly and pathetic it may get, it is being made by people willing to stick their necks out and interact with the world for better and for worse. And in the end, having bad taste is still better than having no taste at all.

recording and distribution have affected art in massive ways over the last century, leaving pretenses and ignorances that normally would flourish happily in isolation, brutally exposed.

in any given existing genre or form their is absolute brilliance available widely to all, leaving the modern artist in million monkeys bashing a type write mode.

--

also, the art of the modern era is collaberative - movies and to a certain extent games.

noddy wrote:recording and distribution have affected art in massive ways over the last century, leaving pretenses and ignorances that normally would flourish happily in isolation, brutally exposed.

in any given existing genre or form their is absolute brilliance available widely to all, leaving the modern artist in million monkeys bashing a type write mode.

--

also, the art of the modern era is collaberative - movies and to a certain extent games.

When I attended RIT, you could ID the art majors and photog majors by how they attempted to out weird or out shock each other. Girls wearing short skirts over men's long underwear, one army boot and one dress shoe, stylishly ripped tee-shirt, with a man's belt for a necklace, etc.. Pecker measuring in terms of creativity I assume.

I recall a biologist who observed that even in the animal kingdom, individuals would form groups or herds first, then try to establish unique identity later. Only after there is enough of you, to maintain safety, can you then truly be you.

Simple Minded wrote:

noddy wrote:recording and distribution have affected art in massive ways over the last century, leaving pretenses and ignorances that normally would flourish happily in isolation, brutally exposed.

in any given existing genre or form their is absolute brilliance available widely to all, leaving the modern artist in million monkeys bashing a type write mode.

--

also, the art of the modern era is collaberative - movies and to a certain extent games.

When I attended RIT, you could ID the art majors and photog majors by how they attempted to out weird or out shock each other. Girls wearing short skirts over men's long underwear, one army boot and one dress shoe, stylishly ripped tee-shirt, with a man's belt for a necklace, etc.. Pecker measuring in terms of creativity I assume.

I recall a biologist who observed that even in the animal kingdom, individuals would form groups or herds first, then try to establish unique identity later. Only after there is enough of you, to maintain safety, can you then truly be you.

Random juxtaposition and variations are essential art student exercises.

Ugly art? Brutalism qualifies. Elevating student exercises, striking illustration or mere novelty to mature art status prematurely is common but it is not ugly art.

Why art became ugly - Stephen Hicks, The Atlas Society, 1 September 2004
https://atlassociety.org/objectivism/st ... ecame-ugly

We would not know from the world of modern art that average life expectancy has doubled since Edvard Munch screamed. We would not know that diseases that routinely killed hundreds of thousands of newborns each year have been eliminated. Nor would we know anything about the rising standards of living, the spread of democratic liberalism, and emerging markets.

We are brutally aware of the horrible disasters of National Socialism and international Communism, and art has a role in keeping us aware of them. But we would never know from the world of art the equally important fact that those battles were won and brutality was defeated.

[...]

The point is not that there are no negatives out there in the world for art to confront, or that art cannot be a means of criticism. There are negatives and art should never shrink from them. My argument is with the uniform negativity and destructiveness of the art world. When has art in the twentieth century said anything encouraging about human relations, about mankind's potential for dignity, and courage, about the sheer positive passion of being in the world?

Having our retinas scoured with Brillo - Kenneth Francis, New English Review, August 2018
https://www.newenglishreview.org/custpa ... _id=189349

As always, follow the money.

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Artist says anime should be more like Marvel/Disney, can’t because of sexualized, moe content

A lot of the discourse seems to stem from Moritsugu’s apparent framing of high quality and sexual content as an either/or proposition, with multiple commenters pointing out that since Marvel and Disney are aiming their products at a worldwide audience, those broader demographics are naturally going to shift the content of their films away from the sexual fetishes that so often crop up in otaku and fujoshi-oriented anime. The target market for a new Disney movie is essentially “anyone in the world who’s a kid or kid at heart,” and for Marvel movies it’s “anyone in the world who likes action movies.” Anime, though, especially the risque or moe projects that Moritsugu is taking aim at, are much more of niche product, with their creators knowing full well that they won’t appeal to everybody, and the goal instead being to appeal very strongly to a certain subset of somebodies.

https://soranews24.com/2019/05/01/artis ... e-content/

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