General visual art thread

but one simple strand going on here is that the post-impressionists were basically vaporwave

maybe

I'm assuming those are ca. late 19th c, not recent/student works (that would be really sad)

the Olafur Eliasson One-Way Colour Tunnel in the Oculus Bridge at SFMOMA is also beautiful

someone did an installation throughout the entire length of Woolwich tunnel in the 90's. I can't vividly remember what they did. Possibly it was luminous squares in repetition or something. At the time it grew on me and was like ..wow you really get some cutting edge public art in the big smoke. Now I'd have this bitter old cynic voice in my head cursing all the posh, talentless Goldsmiths cunts who did it to hell!

I haven't seen any of Eliasson's stuff in person to the best of my recollection, even though i'm pretty sure he's had a million solo gallery shows in NYC.

Was the "One-Way" part strictly enforced? Do you have to wait in line if you want to walk through it again? Were people taking selfies in it? I'm just wondering what trying to see a piece like that involves these days.

xp

There was a show of Helio Oiticica's penetrables here a few years ago, they made you sign a wavier but once you did that, it was pretty much anything goes. I think I did running jumps onto one of the penetrables. There was another one that could be described as a "color tunnel" but obv a very different kind of thing, and you got a cup of orange juice at the end.

That is so fucking shit!

geez, so it's not ok to just "like" some paintings that do not attempt to push the boundaries of art, but simply exhibit an appreciation of past techniques by applying them to a subject the artist wanted to paint? it's not like they were raving about those paintings as pure genius.

If those paintings are "fucking shit" then what distinguishes your dismissal from the French Academy painters who dismissed the original post-impressionists?

I can't imagine how that would work now.

Also there was the James Turrell show at the Guggenheim around the same time, which was amazing obviously and it was like this deeply meditative experience of lying on the floor for ages until it broke you, like Lazer Floyd for grownups.

xp i believe those are "original" works of post-imprrssionism and that the judgement that they're shit has nothing to do with any failure to push boundaries

So you've formulated objective criteria for judging a painting as "shit" and presumably can communicate these so that anyone may see precisely where they attain shitiness as opposed to merely failing to attain the higher reaches of art? I'd be very happy to have you share this superior knowledge so that I amy no longer be taken in by liking something I ought see a pure shit. It would be a public service!

May you never be allowed to express an opinion about the quality of art created by elementary school child. It would traumatize them for life.

I used to think contemporary works referencing past forms were shit, but now don’t feel that way

I really like the landscape works of Richard Mayhew for example

many xp, there is a long line for the Olafur Eliasson tunnel. you can walk back and forth. "Viewers walking through one direction see the magical color before them and behind them feel themselves leaving only a wake of black. When they walk back the other way, the colors are darkly muted."

The James Turrel show at the Gugenheim was one of the most incredible things I have ever seen

Xp Heh, I've actually worked at a pottery studio even tho the pay sucked and the work was backbreaking for no reason other than i love the work the elementary school kids make so much. I kept hundreds of photographs of my favorite pieces and even tried to duplicate them myself on a couple of occasions! (Which of course was a miserable failure)

So you've formulated objective criteria for judging a painting as "shit" and presumably can communicate these so that anyone may see precisely where they attain shitiness as opposed to merely failing to attain the higher reaches of art? I'd be very happy to have you share this superior knowledge so that I amy no longer be taken in by liking something I ought see a pure shit. It would be a public service!

This post makes no sense to me.
I mean, I think I get the jist that you're calling me pretentious and inviting me to critique the paintings (or something). What this has to do with "failure", "knowledge", "higher reaches", "objectivity" etc, I have no idea.

I used to think contemporary works referencing past forms were shit, but now don’t feel that way

Neither do i.

i love the work the elementary school kids make

Perhaps the secret you are hinting at here is that the more practiced and proficient one becomes in controlling an artistic medium to conform to the outcome you aimed at producing, the more likely it becomes that you will produce not just mediocre, but purely shitty, art. For some reason.

Going back to your post:

i believe those are "original" works of post-imprrssionism and that the judgement that they're shit has nothing to do with any failure to push boundaries

OK. Why do you believe that?

Louis Valtat was a great painter. This website is plagued by philistines.

i keep looking at that first one, thinking about how proud i would be to make that.

but also, it's ok for people to hate that! my thinking on artistic criticism is the same as with religions - just don't hurt anyone else. do no harm. and nothing i've heard makes me feel any less about that first Valtat one that was posted, i'm glad i saw it. but it's a good reminder that it's good to have these disagreements. it would be weird and bad if everyone agreed about what was good, and also there's always that one guy who hates the beatles. what i'm saying is that louis valtat was the beatles

i was kidding about the "do no harm" stuff too. i'm kidding about all of it

"what is good?" no one has a coherent idea

:)

A good painting makes the viewer feel ashamed, either because they could never make it, or because they don’t understand it.

don't think I believe that

i'll go back to this. just to show you what a fool i am, but also how someone else looks at something

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Fm8EM4roPRs/TasFrS9yIJI/AAAAAAAAAsQ/e21r09qpN2w/s1600/Louis+Valtat+-+Femme+a+la+Guitare%252C+1906.jpg

the face isn't good. it's the first thing i go to because i'm a human and i look at faces. i see the human. cool, it's a human. guitar. ok.

look at that tree above, her though. the one to left is good too, but especially the on in the upper-right quadrant. i like the piny thorny plants behind and to the right of her head as well. the human is there, with a couple eyeballs. faces are hard. this artist didn't take much time with it, but they spent way more time on the plants. the plantlife is very good. "how" is it "good", i don't know, what is rock and roll

i just know that one thing i never want to hear, ever, is why those plants in the upper-right actually are NOT good. because before i know why i should not like those plants, i just like them. i'm an ignorant baby, typing at 90+ wpm. don't ruin this baby's night

i think someone else would look at it and concentrate entirely on why the subject is there, why they have a guitar, where this is, who painted it, what time of day, the gallery it was first shown in, and all of that. all of that is good! i devour that shit, sometimes! i am a big de kooning fan - i want to know what was going on while he was painting it, and who everyone was sleeping with. but i don't need to, with everyone, first, i just recognize that corner appeals to me.

at first I didn't even see the guitar. the composition of it and the details are beautiful

i didn't like metallica until 2 weeks ago

and also, metallica is...

__GOOD__
__BAD__
__FOOD_
__FOOD FOR SOME SOME PEOPLE__
__BAD FOR SOME PEOPLE__
__THE DEFINITION OF TOXIC MASCULINITY__
__EXCELLENT__

Perhaps the secret you are hinting at here is that the more practiced and proficient one becomes in controlling an artistic medium to conform to the outcome you aimed at producing

I don't think they're too focused on achieving a particular outcome, a lot of the time. Sometimes an intended outcome is what they're willing to abort when it starts to interfere with their enjoyment of the process. That varies from kid to kid and project to project, of course. Frustrations and struggles with the medium are apparent in some of the pieces, and that can either enhance or diminish the work for me, or neither. I'm generally more taken with the way their eye distorts things than their hands. A lot like how this Valtat guy looks at a park and sees a jungle. My favorite piece in all the time i worked there was a ridiculous hand-built urn that looked like a trophy.

OK. Why do you believe that?

I just thought it was too uncanny? Not inconceivable that they might be a contemporary works, just a lot less likely.

A good painting makes the viewer feel ashamed, either because they could never make it, or because they don’t understand it.

No.

who everyone was sleeping with.

Lol.

I can think of a few art critics who avoid making value judgements, i don't see the point of that.

...some of the kids are pretty good with clay, too.

the face isn't good. it's the first thing i go to because i'm a human and i look at faces. i see the human. cool, it's a human. guitar. ok.

look at that tree above, her though. the one to left is good too, but especially the on in the upper-right quadrant. i like the piny thorny plants behind and to the right of her head as well. the human is there, with a couple eyeballs. faces are hard. this artist didn't take much time with it, but they spent way more time on the plants. the plantlife is very good. "how" is it "good", i don't know, what is rock and roll

I enjoyed your 'review' of the painting, KM.

It surprises me that you went right to the face, with everything going on here i don't find my eye drawn to anything as a focal point.

It's a very intense setting, for a leisure scene. The plants look like they're going to eat her.

It's a very intense setting, for a leisure scene. The plants look like they're going to eat her.

keep going! this is like an erotic PR email pitch

and by that i mean - i'm drawn to those things

do i want her to not be eaten, if i have a choice? no, eat her! she's some rich aristocratic lovechild from the 1890s, fucking eat her alive!

an intense leisure scene? fuck yeah

it doesn't mean it's good for you, it just means it's good for me

Your comments reminded me of this from Barry Schwabsky's review of Clement Greenberg's collected essays

It couldn’t have been fun for artists to find themselves athwart Greenberg’s exclusivity, though not many had to face judgments he’d been storing up for years, as Georgia O’Keeffe did when he reviewed her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946: “The lapidarian patience she has expended in trimming, breathing upon, and polishing these bits of opaque cellophane betrays a concern that has less to do with art than with private worship and the embellishment of private fetishes with secret and arbitrary meanings.” And that was one of his more sympathetic comments on O’Keeffe. She sounds like Laura Wingfield polishing her glass menagerie. How things have changed in sixty years: The very qualities Greenberg invoked to bury O’Keeffe would now more likely be used to praise an artist’s work.

It's quite comic, to me. Attack Of The Killer Foliage. The poor lady, sitting in the park on a Sunday afternoon, completely oblivious to these gnarly killer trees and the plants pulsating with this menacing energy, about to devour her alive. They're going to crowd her out of her own picture at the very least.

The hilarity of it undermines its power for me

Her lifelessness animates the plants more and more. I perceive it as a symbiotic relationship. She'll be plant food soon, and so will all of us, really. It's the cycle of life, it's nature's way.

My review of this big beast Fritz Aigner book
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4184306073

Just got 2 Ernst Fuchs books in the mail

i don't really think paintings should make you feel ashamed, i was trying to create an aphorism

whether a painting is "good" or "bad" is subjective, but i think "beauty" is too narrow of a criteria. some paintings are great because they are transcendently ugly, like the work of chaim soutine and philip guston.

as with all arts, what we're looking for is something like "truth," but a very peculiar definition of it.

I love how jumblytumbly those Valtat pieces are. Chaim Soutine is another fine jumblytumbler.

you guys are weird

Ben Sledsens
https://www.instagram.com/p/CTATjb3tvM4/

Nice video about Aleksandra Waliszewska, one of my favorites. Annoying skillshare advert near the start.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgE15jkhtpo

Mark Laver is like a gooey Charles Burchfield
https://www.instagram.com/marklaver1970/

Carl Blechen
https://www.artatberlin.com/wp-content/uploads/ARTatBerlin-Waldweg-bei-Spandau-Carl-Blechen.jpg

A video about Suehiro Maruo in the same format as the Waliszewska one above
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w67WMr4krLI