"ingo" <ing### [at] ingodemonnl> wrote:
>
> I discuss these things somtimes with my collegues at work. First thing they say:
> Uhh modern art, my three year old grand daughter can paint better. What almost
> always strikes me is that most people don't want to invest times or efford in
> something like this (not only art, but just learning/thinking things).

Hear, hear!  Such complainers can easily be dismissed out of hand.

Once upon a time, when art was almost uniformly representational in
nature, talent (or at the very least, technical skill) was required in
order to create it.  One had to invest years of one's life in order to
learn how to create art of this nature, but the consumers of art (mostly
wealthy patrons) needed no such investment in order to look at what they
had commissioned and find it aesthetically pleasing.

Now, however, the artist has been freed of the unfair burden of learning
how to create art through tiresome procedures.  It is up to the CONSUMER
of art to learn how to find profundity in it; one who has not invested
the time to derive meaning from seemingly random splashes of paint will
almost certainly complain that a trained monkey (or, indeed, a
three-year-old) could have produced this or that painting.

The difference, of course, is that a monkey or a three-year-old rarely
understands that paint splatters are at least as valid as a Rembrandt
painting, and therefore will probably not command thousands of dollars
for their works from art patrons who have invested the time to learn the
value of what the uneducated call "crap".

Foolish is the modern artist who invests years in learning the
techniques of the Old Masters, for Art which requires talent and effort
to produce is outmoded and unfashionable.  Like the composer who
stubbornly clings to classical harmonic structures, it is the earmark of
a rigid, uncreative dullard who refuses to accept that it is the
interpretation of the beholder -- not the ability or laborious toil of
the artist -- that makes a piece of art great.

These buffoons will labour for weeks or months painting a single work
with brushes and much mixing of paint, when they could produce dozens of
works in a single day by simply splashing it on the canvas or laying on
bold swaths of colour with a palette knife.  Or they will spend similar
amounts of time chipping away tiny bits of stone to create an obsolete
statue when they could simply weld random bits of metal together in one
or two days, and get tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for little
or no effort.

And these outdated creations cheapen the artistic world, for a work
which requires no effort to appreciate leads to mindless patrons who,
like couch potatoes watching sitcom after formulaic sitcom, turn away
from anything requiring intellectual activity, leaving the great artists
of today unappreciated and penniless!

But if you will excuse me, I must now go to the hospital to have my
tongue surgically removed from my cheek.


-- 
Jeff Lee         shi### [at] gatenet         http://www.gate.net/~shipbrk/

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Jeff Lee heeft geschreven in bericht <376e8251@news.povray.org>...
> ..........................
>Now, however, the artist has been freed of the unfair burden of learning
>how to create art through tiresome procedures.  It is up to the CONSUMER
>of art to learn how to find profundity in it; .....................

Our ancester art consumers had to learn too. There is quite some sybolism in a
lot of paintings a non educated person would have missed. Take a simple still
life. What dead animal is in it, a fish, a grouse, a pheasant? What's the
orientation of the knife and fork. What material is the plate made off, gold,
silver? And the prominent lemon, peeld off course.


>But if you will excuse me, I must now go to the hospital to have my
>tongue surgically removed from my cheek.
>

Leave it in.

ingo
--
Met dank aan de muze met het glazen oog.

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