RapierFugue
Posts: 4740
Joined: 3/16/2006
From: London, England
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quote:
ORIGINAL: GreedyTop
~FR~
ok, after looking at it several times, I'm still on the fence as to whether I like it or not.
Good! In that case it's making you think, and that's a good thing.
Art should challenge people. I was staunchly anti-modern art for years, and highly dismissive of it, until I went to a certain exhibition and suddenly realised that I quite liked some of the pieces, but in order to reach that conclusion I had stared at and studied one piece for about half an hour – I didn't know what to make of it.
And of course if, having considered it, you decide you hate it, that's fine too, because you've gone through the process of applying your intellect to it, rather than just saying “crap, hate it, next”.
What I like most about some modern art is that I can like a piece, but not know why. I find that fascinating, because for almost anything else positive in my life I can tell you precisely why I like it, or what I find positive about it. But not with some forms of art. I have a friend who is a very successful modern art restorer and archivist/curator (I can’t give any details because it would be very easy if I told you which collections he works for to work out who he is, coz he’s pretty well known) and so I've been lucky enough to see, privately, some of the most interesting pieces of our time. Some of them I can’t stand, some I quite like, and some I think are just wonderful. He was also brilliant, in my early days of learning about art, to be able to say “well if you like X, you should look at Y”, and so on.
One of my faves is Yves Klein; “barking mad” doesn't do him justice. I think there's something wonderful about composing a 25 minute musical piece, for an entire orchestra, comprising only one note, having it played in an auditorium (by a full, presumably somewhat perplexed, orchestra, in person), while you paint your gorgeous wife blue (a shade of blue he came up with, BTW – International Klein Blue), and then use her as a sort of brush by dragging her around a vast canvas for the length of the orchestra’s playing.
Or painting several different canvasses composed wholly and only of that one shade of ultramarine that was his (literally) trademark colour. I've seen several of them, and yes they are different. The brush strokes, the layering ... I lack the understanding to explain why they are, but they are.
Or how about this, another of his crazy schemes: “Particularly notorious was The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void, a show hosted by the Iris Clert gallery in 1958.
On its opening night, guests received invitations written in ultramarine ink with a specially–made IKB stamp, and were served blue cocktails upon entering the gallery via a hallway also covered in IKB. Two uniformed Republican guards stood outside, cranking up the sense of occasion, while the street heaved with crowds jostling to take a look.
Once inside, however, the visitors were confronted by a bare, white space, utterly devoid of furniture save a glass display cabinet. The exhibition was about nothing. Rumours abound of fights breaking out and outraged guests storming out, allegedly unaware that the cocktails they had just drunk would turn their urine blue the next day—to the artist’s delight.”
I see that as majestic and life-affirming; others would say it’s pretentious crap.
I don't care :)
< Message edited by RapierFugue -- 1/22/2011 7:20:09 AM >
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RE: La Grande Petite Morte: an orgasm captured - 
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Well said! 
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