Damien Hirst: signs that the recession can’t be as bad as all that
Or perhaps it’s just a sign that people have gone stark raving mad.
What am I talking about? Back in mid-September, when the economy was already rather iffy, the “artist” (I use that word advisedly) Damien Hurst had a monster of an auction, netting $200 million dollars for about two hundred lots of his work.
That’s an average of a million a lot. And a lot of those lots fetched a lot more than a million dollars a pop—some as much as eighteen million.
Who’s Damien Hirst, you might ask? And rightly so. I wrote about him here, although I didn’t name him. He’s the artist who specializes in “art” that consists of animals—or sections of animals—preserved in formaldehyde.
The following is an excerpt from my earlier post. You be the judge of how much you would pay for this sort of art:
I seem to recall an entire room consisting of cow segments. Memory could be playing tricks on me, but the image I retain is of a large creature that had been cut into four or five sections, each of which was placed in a huge vat of greenish or bluish preservative behind plexiglass: one for the head, one for the forequarters, one for the midsection, and so on, crossing the entire room.
I suppose it was some sort of political statement. It also smelled, as I recall…At some point I just wanted out, and I voted with my feet: I left.
One of the pieces that recently sold for about seventeen million dollars at the auction was a shark in formaldehyde. I wish I had known this back in college when we dissected a shark in biology lab; I would have tried to save mine and market it.
Then again, maybe not. Some things are beyond imagining. And perhaps that is Hirst’s greatest gift—because I certainly don’t see that he has any others—to have imagined that people would buy this garbage, and pay very good money for it.
Sorry to have to do this, but one photo is worth a thousand words, and all that. I call this one “Two Sharks.” It’s Hirst with his seventeen-million-dollar work “The Kingdom.” Worth every penny, don’t you think?
Once again the emperor(s) have no clothes
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. “Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.”
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
Communist Goals (1963) Congressional Record–Appendix, pp. A34-A35 January 10, 1963
Congressional Record, Vol. 109 88th Congress, 1st Session Appendix Pages A1-A2842 Jan. 9-May 7, 1963 Reel 12
the idea was to stop and kill the art and culture that was uplifting us into beig better humans who would not need others to control them,and were smart enough to evict them.
if you take some time, and you make a list of the best of art from just before the start of this theoretical work… you will see how the ideas of the frankfurt school (adorno), sought to devolve by changing the arts…
thats the replace with meaningless forms… and the US governmetn helped by cia funding of artists like jackson pollack
even worse, i see them unveil copies of socialist realist classics i nthe US and people dont know it.
take the best art from the end of the 1800s…
compare that to the art after the 30s…
and then compare that to the art after the 50s…
uplifting…
morally changing..
devoid of meaning and merit….
brahms
elvis
brittany spears
ballet
lindy hop
dance alone weirdly
james fennimore cooper leatherstocking
jack keroac: on the road
heather has two momies
averate reading level.. 12th grade
average reading level.. 8th grade
now, who is smarter than a 5th grader
elizabeth barrett browning (An Essay on Mind and Other Poems)
dr seuss (horton hears a who, etc)
H “RAP” Brown (Die Ni**er Die! – which is what rap is really from)
The 19th century gave birth to the professional scientist, the word scientist was first used in 1833 by William Whewell. Inventors began to design practical internal combustion engines. The lightbulb, telephone, typewriter, sewing machine, all came of age during the 19th century.
the 20th brought einstein, noether, mach, etc… the transistor, etc…
from socialist influences… united states tests out below most other advanced coutnries… our students cant do basic math. math can now be plural… they invented social justice, gender marxism, etc… the raping of children by kinsey, the false study funded by communists at tuskeegee, margret meades poisoning of social scinces… false gender sciences to effect legal cahnges… science as a political weapon, rather than a meritocritous tool…
the classics the canon, the lerning rhetoric, and world hsitory, etc.
women enger school, history is dropped, dumbing down starts.
now we are so dumbed down we are racing to a failed ecoomic totalitarian system, and likehappy little moonies are about to give it all away.
that the capitalists are pegged as being the msot greedy…
byut i find the communsits and socialists to be so, becaause they want it all, the whole world, all property… and power over life and the future.
which one is actually the greedy one?
forgot to add painting…
you get sargent, monet, manet, paintings like aurora, and salome, etc…
then piccasso, jackson pollack, mondrion, etc..
then now… piss christ, Damien hirst (anmals in preservative, and rotting animals), maplethorpe (gay sex including fisting as art), hanson (young prepubescent girl nudes), and lots more…. (satchi collection).
and it either makes a socailist realist message…
or it is allowed becuse it is meaningless and culturally offensice, and so dissonantly negative.
Art is a dipstick as tot he level of culture…
we are nothing like the era before the invention of socialism…
just as the japanese today are nothing like the era of kabuki and extreme complexity in simplicity.
or the han dynasty….
etc…
like stalin tearing down the most beautiful churches, detroying the arts… and replacing them with these huge buildings (some whcih could never be completed due to physics), and other large grey ugly things which were completely pragmatic and rpesuimed efficiency.
it was like a shaker from hell designed the place.
forgot to mention the peice 4’33” and 0’0″”
by the apolitical poltiical artist cage…
where In the Name of the Holocaust is just a pun on “In the Name of the Holy Ghost.”
In addition to 4’33”, 1952 also saw the creation of Water Music for a pianist using, among other objects, an assortment of whistles (including a siren and a duck call), water, and the radio. An extremely precise collage of real-world sounds, no two performances are alike because there is always something different on the radio. Water Music is an affirmation of Cage’s long-standing belief in the synonymity of art, life and theater. Along with the famous untitled event Cage staged at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the same year, Water Music became the impetus for performance art, happenings and multimedia in the ensuing decades. Cage’s incorporation of the radio into his compositions of the 1940s and 1950s was an uncanny anticipation of the ghetto blaster as an American street phenomenon decades later.
John Cage – Water Walk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSulycqZH-U
listen to him talk… you can imagine that he is as sexually oriented and bland as Warhol… hint hint
I have nothing to say
and I am saying it
and that is poetry
as I needed it
and before someone clocks me for mentioning his homosexuality, i didnt know till 10 seconds into the video..
here is an exerpt that puts him in political context to the people using him, his works, and such for political agenda… (of which he was falsely saying he was apolitical).
Music’s seemingly automatic or transparent claim to “meaning” is thus replaced by an awareness of the conditions in which or through which that particular subset of sound known as “music” comes into being.
Importantly, this embrace of silence cannot be conceived of as itself a politics, position or statement; rather it exists in perpetual alterity, always appended to its host– music–in a parasitic relationship. And, like any parasite, it will eventually weaken its host. But also like a parasite, it works invisibly, never declaring its aims, its purpose or project. Having inaugurated a problematizing of dominant expressive forms, it acts like shock wave, destabilizing the foundations of what was once understood, much more simply and solidly, as “music.” Since such silence constituted an oppositional mode that refused articulated oppositionality, it offered precisely the kind of cover required to seed destabilization in the policed consensus of the fifties, especially for closeted homosexuals.
Note that silence achieved these destructuring effects without uttering a sound. Cage’s many silences did succeed as a form of resistance. The fact that his work was not discussed at the time as specifically oppositional is in this sense evidence of its discursive success in the consensus-based culture of the fifties. Silence made a statement through the absence of statement. It constituted an appeal to the listener for a new relationship to authority and authoritative forms in music and–this is very much the point–surely in other arenas, too.
Silence, in short, is not another kind of music, but a challenge to the construction of music itself. Neither musical nor unmusical, Cage’s silence was quite precisely “other,” escaping the binaries that circumscribed the status quo as the sole arena for contestation. As result, it managed to be an anti-authoritative mode that was nonetheless not oppositional. And as an anti-authoritative mode, it revealed the power of the individual to construct meanings unauthorized by dominant culture–and all the while under its very nose. Silence was, in short, seditious.59
Cage’s silences can thus inaugurate potent “misreadings,” seductions towards such profoundly unauthorized interpretations that, for example, a silence can be read instead as a silencing. However, since dominant interests lie above all with preserving authoritative discursive control (as a means of social control), such silences are permitted to flourish precisely because they are not presented as a direct challenge or opposition to authority. Whatever “misreadings” are produced remain the responsibility of the listener, while Cage, ever the Cold War warrior, remains under cover.60
The important point here is that Cage’s silence can thus recast audience from passive to active, from consumer to producer, and from coopted to resistant. Authority shifts from outside the individual to inside, and potentially, this new relationship to authority within the concert hall begins to suggest new ways of being outside of it as well. Queer culture has long recognized that not only does this silence–as –resistance make it possible to escape proscription (since the discursive norm is upheld), moreover it paradoxically may assist, and even nurture the establishment of oppositionality, providing precisely the cover that allows it to flourish. In the long history of queer culture, the closet emblematized just such a potential. As the requisite produced effect of domination, the silence of the closet thus opens a space for oppositional existence.
No wonder McCarthyism understood every homosexual as a potential communist, the figure of seditious resistance.61 The most dangerous enemy is the one you can’t see, the most dangerous threat the one that is invisible. And silence–many different kinds of silence–was what enabled these dangers to flourish. Thus the powerful cultural anxiety over the “invisibility” of homosexuals and communists in Cold War culture, testimony to the oppositional potential of silence–real or imagined–within authoritative discourse.
Yet, there is also second, related political effect of silence: it also avoids the recolonizing force of the oppositional– that which permits dominant culture to solidify and suture its authority through reference to the excluded other. Some recent poststructuralist analysis of both textual and cultural oppositionality has stressed the utility of opposition as a means of control.62 In these accounts, opposition may simply reproduce the binary logic through which domination writes itself, and the oppositional thus becomes the “outside” that allows the “inside” to cohere in a series of exclusions. Given its instrumentality to oppression, then, opposition continually risks being coopted as but a tool of hegemony– and indeed, as we’ve seen, the outsider (such as the communist or for that matter the homosexual) has long served to support, if not actually author(ize) the production of the power which controls her/him. Once marked as oppositional, any disturbance can then be incorporated into a discourse of oppositionality which only serves to catalyze oppressive constructions, the way homosexuality has supported and stabilized heterosexuality, and communism the Cold War consensus.
John Cage had a very clear picture of how to avoid this recolonizing force of the oppositional, and that was, again, through recourse to silence. He indirectly credited his studies in Zen with this insight, “Daisetz Suzuki often pointed out that Zen’s nondualism arose in China as a result of problems encountered in translating India’s Buddhist texts…Indian words for concepts in opposition to one another did not exist in Chinese.”63 And since, as Cage once wrote, “Classification…ceases when it is no longer possible to establish oppositions.” he thus concluded, “Protest actions fan the flames of a dying fire. Protest helps to keep the government going.” 64 Cage never protested in the usual sense, yet through a performative silence that refused any direct opposition to dominant culture, his work nonetheless constituted a seduction away from authority.
http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/KatzPages/KatzWorse.html
when you read a lot of this… you find out that art stopped being for the soul, and spirit, and such…
and it became a weapon…
like everything else that politics touches if we allow it.
In case you were searching around for any meaning or value in Hirst’s work, you’ll be gratified to know the Guardian said his “work has always dealt with death and the yearning for immortality.” That same article also details Hirst’s battles with substance abuse, which he admits “affected his art.” Consider that for a moment. Alcoholism degraded the quality of his art.
“I remember once I wanted to cover a pig in vibrators like a hedgehog,” he said in 2003. “It was going to be called Pork-u-pine. Thank God, I didn’t do it. But some things like that do get made. In a way, the mistakes are the most interesting things.”
533K jobs lost in November is the largest number of monthly job losses in 34 years. The economists I’ve listened to all place the start of this recession sometime December 2007 – February 2008. Nearly all of them are saying that this one will probably end in late 2009. So, this recession will be more in the order of 1973-75 and 1980-82. I remember both VERY WELL. I graduated from high school in 1973 and went in the Army in August. So, I graduated from high school just as that one was setting in. And then I graduated from the University of New Hampshire in December 1982, which was the deepest part of that recession. Unemployment was in the double digits for that one. Classmates of mine were leaving the States to go to The Land Down Under for jobs. I kept the part-time job I had bar tending and expanded it out to full time. I kept it because I had already gone through the lengthy application process to enter the Society of Jesus for the long haul to priesthood.
Many of the people today calling this one a depression lack a historical perspective and an understanding of economic cycles. I’m not being heartless about it and I don’t mean to minimize the pain that’s going on. But this too shall pass and we will come out of it.
About 15 years ago in London an artist put up a dead sheep in a clear preservative in a glass case in the Serpentine Gallery. I don’t recall who the artist was, but perhaps it was Hirst. Shortly thereafter another person drilled a small hole in the top and flooded the case with black ink, effectively turning it into a black block and hiding the sheep. When he got caught and went to court his excuse was that he was simply making an artistic statement of his own to counter the artistic statement of whoever it was that set up the dead sheep. I think he got a slap on the wrist. I know he got cheers from many who visited that gallery.
The rich talk about how sacrifices need to be made and how disasters are good things, and those with less money become the ones that have to sacrifice personally and suffer under disasters.
That describes the Democrat party to a T, certainly.
A bit off subject, but today marks the anniversary of the end of Prohibition.
Some thoughts on repeal day here
Half in the bag thoughts, anyway!
I’ll drink to that!
Who’s the true villain here, Hirst or the fools who buy his “art” at outrageous prices? If nobody buys this garbage, Hirst doesn’t produce it, at least not as a means of livelihood. As long as it’s enormously profitable for him, why should he stop? I have no idea what his political views are, if he’s consciously doing this to further some leftist agenda, but he certainly has no incentive to stop doing what’s making him piles of money. To all those rich folks out there who have more money than taste: DON’T BUY THIS TRASH! There, I feel better now. I think I will celebrate the end of Prohibition. Thanks for the reminder, Bob.
Cage, Hirst, and their ilk (Warhol included) are con artists who laugh all the way to the bank. The mutton-faced fools who buy this garbage deserve to be parted from their money.
I didn’t realize that 1982 was a recession. I decided to get a job in New York and moved up here from Nashville. Wasn’t hard, either (the getting a job part: getting a place to stay was a Whole ‘Nother Thing).
I guess you could say that, in my newly graduated innocence, I just ignored the whole recession thing. Which is what I intend to do this time, too: apart from upping my marketing.
There have been two moments in my life that have cemented that modern “art” (the quotes aren’t because I do not think it is art – art is in the eye of the beholder – but because I use the broadest sense of the term to include poetry, music, and other than purely visual forms) has degraded from the past.
One is during college when I found out old thesis and dissertations were part of the schools library. I could take a thesis in any humanity 50 years ago and it was as much gibberish as the physics was (I’m a computer scientist – I could follow nearly all of those thesis from front to back and, at the time, dissertations were hard to follow). I could follow the introduction and, well that was about it (and that is pretty much the goal of what college is supposed to be).
Then we move into the modern age. A physics thesis – well pretty much the same thing, a modern humanities dissertation and not only could I understand it, it wasn’t too terribly off something I could write. That was a sad commentary on how far the humanities had fallen. I truly felt a sense of sadness there – the humanities should be like Mathematics, something that teaches a base ability to critically think about ideas. That is something highly useful yet we have lost that.
The other – and really the greater (in the sense of personal change, I feel the general decline is of more import for a civilization point of view) – event that colored my view of humanities was in poetry. In our composition II class we were required to keep a daily journal of our innermost thoughts or write a poem.
Since I’m someone that isn’t about to share my innermost thoughts with anyone else (not married or close to being so) that left poetry. Of the styles we could choose one of them was a form where you would have (I do not recall exactly – someone here may know exactly what I mean) line one have a noun, line two have two adverbs, line three have three adjectives, line four have two pro-nouns, and live five had a noun. It was a little more complex than that – but not by much. I think it went out to around five words in the center.
So, being that Computer Scientist that I am I decided I could do my whole semesters poems in less than a day if I wrote a program to do this – they all seemed random to me and I always failed miserably when I tried to be “smart” and write what they wanted.
While this was the early days of the internet (was my Freshman year – 1993) one could still find a nice list of words split by category. So write a program that randomly reads a word from the lists, prints it to a file in the correct format, and then print that one a printer and – whoa, done for the semester.
Not only was it one of the few A’s I achieved for any humanity but the prof pushed too have two published and me go focus my skills on writing poetry. It was *obvious* that I had some deep insight into the human mind and I needed to develop that. IIRC in 1993 most applications still used RANDU – which not only am I sure doesn’t have any real insight into the human mind but wasn’t even particularly random either.
Sadly, as a freshman I mostly wanted to go about my own business. In later years I would have jumped at the chance to do something that showed how horrid the system was (I still believed in it at that point – I felt surprise more than anything).
But then, in even later years, I also found what the prof said to be true in another sense (and also why I really wish they had been submitted for publication) that it *really* did show a keen insight into the human mind.
In a sense it is the Obama-effect (though given his recent choices I’ll hold off an calling it that – he seems to have sold himself as A and really been Z which is a whole other idea) – random leaves the reader to build their own ideas as there is no idea there. When I tried to convey a specific image those that agreed with my image liked it, those that didn’t hated it. When it was simply random (or random like) then one could read what they wanted into it.
However I also note that few – if any (I know of none, but I hate to say “none”) – of the “I am blank canvas” people or stories really make the test of time. All the greats that are still read take a stand, and a fairly strong one, and we just find the still mostly entertaining. Bland blank slate ideas work well in the short term (after all you can apply anything you want to it) but strong decisions are remembered for good or bad.
Wow Artie, the disdain you have for ordinary Americans seems boundless. Where were you educated?
One may also like to look beyond the Congressional record for cues as to trends in popular culture and fine arts.
Take Japan. The French impressionists are huge there. Massive Monet exhibitions sell out for months every year. Van Gogh is as probably more widely known than Britney Spears.
Same on the music front. The best philharmonics in the world regularly tour there to sold out audiences. Opera. Musicals. All the stuff people like Artie say represents the good old days before Lenin ruined every single thing.
How is it, then, that Japan is so very much closer to a communist state than is America, where no one cares about Monet or the Berlin Philharmonic anymore?
Socialized medicine? Japan’s got it in full force. Industrial planning? That’s the name of the game in Japan, and virtually all the biggest companies play it, or else.
The Japanese press? Every bit as obsequious as Pravda in its day — well, at least the mainstream daily newspapers are. There are the weekly magazines that take views critical of the government and/or system — but they sandwich the barbs between seething exposes on where to buy the cheapest hookers and how to cheat at pachinko.
Look around, Artie, beyond America. There’s a lot to see.
I heard Cage’s 4’33” and rather than condemn it, I hoped that all of Cage’s future compositions would be similar but longer.
Too bad this came up now; my high school biology teacher, Mr. Hawarney, had millions of dollars in art in the classroom’s closet.
By the way, Art, I’m rather sure that the communist “goals” you quote are right up there with “Lenin’s Rules for Revolution” as spurious.
Art is what the market says is art; it’s all relative to the people with money in the art world.
Speaking of which I’m buying a load of oil pastels, and gesso, glaze, and dryers and canvas and I’m going to do some painting. I have some compositions in mind and I’ve been thinking about it for a while long enough 🙂
I sort of see the point of the high market value of the strangest of post modern works, it keeps everything driven towards pushing the creative boundary, we had flowers in a pot thank you, let’s have something different, anything different, how different can we go? When allied to art then this is good, unfortunately it creeps into other realms where traditionalist has hammer out the best there is, or has it?
Japan has always been different, Bogey, as you hinted at. It’s a place and a culture unto itself, and although the democratic reforms imposed at the end of WW2 have taken hold, the Japanese have still gone their own way. They’re democratic enough in their own fashion and good allies now, but never expect them to walk lockstep with anyone, especially in sectors like social policy or especially art. From the Tokyo Shock Boys to the Osaka Symphony, Japan does its own thing its own way. Don’t expect screaming headlines against the government in Asahi Shimbun, either. The journos will get their digs in, but in a subtle, uniquely Japanese fashion. Like a katana slicing a single hair.
I’ve wondered about your handle, strcopy. (I’d have picked something like NP-complete, I think).
When I was an operator in the college computer center, some years before you in the era of 132-column line printer paper, an Art student came in asking if we could help him with a project. Could we, he asked, print out all the possible combinations of letters in strings the width of the paper?
I did some quick mental math and told him that the printout would fill a boxcar and more, that I couldn’t tell him how many railroad trains it would fill. He then asked if I could just print out the palindromes. Well, that was easier; it would probably fit in a railroad car, but we didn’t have that much paper on hand and I wasn’t going to help him carry it all to the Art building, never mind tie up our line printer for a week.
He wasn’t convinced. Somehow the idea of “too much” was too much for him, as though his Grand Concept provided him with a fact-proof immunity to any clue whatsoever.
Mr. Hirst’s “art” is making it easier for the clue-proof to go bankrupt. Whether this is a good that outweighs the poor use of their money is a question I am not equipped to answer.
How is it, then, that Japan is so very much closer to a communist state than is America, where no one cares about Monet or the Berlin Philharmonic anymore?
Japan has an extra 4-10% of their GDP that they can spend on social welfare instead of defense. America usually handles that with American blood and treasure, as usual for many prosperous places in the world.
I loved your post, Neo, about Kundera (written a while ago — you quoted the “variations on a theme” segment from one of his novels, one of my favorite Kundera passages), and I also love Magritte. But I think you totally miss the point of Damien Hirst. His work isn’t simply “animals in formaldehyde” — it’s about the line between the living and dead, between the animate and the inanimate. What makes his work disturbing is that we tend to think of the alive and the inanimate as clearly separated, yet it’s obvious there is a grey zone in between, which we look away from. We look away from it, because we don’t want to believe and/or acknowledge that we’re material beings — or that it’s not entirely clear where the dividing line is. That’s why, I believe, his work is disturbing. We are programmed to make this distinction (cognitive science experiments show that even newborns can make the distinction between animate and inanimate), and work that blurs this line is, naturally, quite discomfiting. Nevertheless there’s something very interesting, I believe, about zeroing in on this issue, both scientifically and artistically. Naturally, you’re welcome to disagree but in my view, Hirst zeroes in on something which is very much at the forefront of where we are as a culture, as we build machines that are more and more lifelike, and as we attempt to understand how mind can arise from matter, or what the relationship is, in fact, between mind and spirit.
Sorry, meant to say, between mind and body.
Thank God, not all conservatives think poorly of Andy Warhol’s Art and Legacy. Brit Hume (one of My heroes!) is one of them.
Now Damien Hirst is another story! The anti-Warhol, so to speak. One – The King of (American) Pop Art; the original – praises Life, Joy and America with all her flaws and all her goodness. The other – pure British creepiness at work – resemble more the case of an obsessed sick scientist, experimenting in his laboratory; no Art. I find his work repulsive. A direct gift from Hell. Art is a representation of Life and Universal Truths. When it becomes the projection of a pathological mind, it loses all his magic and all his Beauty. From breathing timeless material it morphs into dead objects.
Nothing spiritual to discover in this kind of art. Quite the opposite. Vulgarity never works.
This is the first time I post a comment, Neo, probably the last time also. Not good with words. I’m not American although I was always in love with America. I’m still waiting to reach your shores from Europe where I was born. I’m not European neither but French is my first language nevertheless. No I don’t live in France. I’m a painter on her way to worldwide fame. AcidPopArt, that’s how I define my work. I’m a true follower of Andy Warhol and Pop Art. Thank to my genuine love of America, I guess, it was natural and easy for me to paint like a true American Pop Artist. But since I paint Abstract, I added Acid before Pop. The surprise was to see that painting structures led to images . All out of my control, but all out of my subconscious. And the paintings are fabulous also.
One day you’ll hear from me. I’ll be in NYC that day. Hopefully soon.
Did I mention I also love Fox? I’m never offended by any of them. Yea, maybe Alan Colmes. But he serves a purpose. So does O’Reilly. One thing sure about Fox is that it’s not run by pompous asses. And that’s good enough for me. They love America too and that’s all I need to know to feel at home… And the truth always comes out when you watch Fox. No subject is taboo.
First time I saw Fox on TV, 10 days before the Iraq war, it was a revelation for me. Never saw that on TV. But Fox has a very bad reputation around the globe, courtesy of the envious clueless Left. So one idea for me was to sign my painting FoxNews, since we have the same initials…
… A Short cut to clarity.
See you!! and Thanx for your great site. I hope you wont quit.
Love!
By all means, AcidPop, keep posting. Your English is fine.
In my case, I speak good English, fair Hebrew…and Great Britain.
A fool and his money are soon parted.
I think that a big problem with the prestige art of the contemporary world is that it lacks love and awe. Great art expresses love and/or awe for God, for the natural world, for people, or for beuaty itself. Today there seems no love or awe on the part of the artist of anything outside the artist himself, certainly not for beauty. Furthermore, Robert Conquest noted, in his book “Reflections on a Ravaged Century”, that contemporary artists frequently leave their raw material in the raw. They do not exhibit the skill with their materials that artists did in the past. Conquest is no philistine (he is a published poet as well as historian) as some might consider me, but was raised in an artistic household in the Paris of the 20s and 30s frequented by avant-garde artists and musicians. I think his comment is significant.
Back in 2001, Roger Kimball relayed another wonderful anecdote. A janitor thought one of Hirst’s pieces was actually a pile of rubbish, so he it cleared away without a second thought. Reacting with horror, the gallery owners then set about painstakingly recreating the pile of trash based on “records of how it had looked.”
Thank you Alex for your kind words and the invitation!! But I must try to control myself. Otherwise I would talk forever. I have too much to talk about. When I’ll go public, I’ll share everything. And Anyone who will share my views, will know how to find me. Then, the real Party can start.
Thanx again!!
My dear mentor, Nikolay Vladimirovich Timofeev-Resovsky once said: “We get our salaries for making nature look simpler, not more complex”. The aim of an art is just the opposite: to reveal complexity and enigma where ordinary view sees only simplicity. So, kitch is the opposite of art.
As for Mapplethorpe: It was okay for the Greeks to represent male nudity, call them gods; for their athletes to practice sport naked (or was it only on potteries); then for the Modern Western world to claim Ancient Greece as her heritage; but finally, when a contemporary artist in 20th century America represent the same concept in photographs, doing that artfully and beautifully, it’s seen by some as unethical, perversion and shocking. Why is it that one is considered a model, but the other a perversion?
One sure thing the Greeks got right, and everyone agrees, was their own ‘Mythology’, not as substitute to religion or the divine (too much ego involved) but as hint into man’s psychology (… No, I wasn’t attracted to My dad) and as a good source or material into the discovery of man’s origins and archetypes. I believe Homosexuality (“no I’m not gay”), opposite to what people consider corruption of the senses, is one form of the concept of humans as fallen angels. In that case, fallen (greek) gods who happen to fall in love with their own “mirror” in a very sacred way, by transcending societies’ rules, laws and restrictions, able to commune with a soul mate, made out of the same mold. Experiencing the nightmare of ‘gods’ when ruled by lesser ones. Where they are the ones who understood sacredness, while their current masters accuse them of profanity. Not unlike the rest of us, free people.
Now those fallen gods are not immune to misery and all the other afflictions that all men experience in the absence of their true love. Their Romeos and their Juliets. So that’s another part of the tragedy. Just to bring more confusion into the general picture. And to make their fall even greater. And ultimately their heart bigger. If their mind is in the right place.
One other big lie comes from sick oppressed clerics, and fascists of all stripes, i.e. secular or religious – i.e. the demagogues, not even demigods – equating pedophilia (their own tendency) with homosexuality (their own too), spreading the notion than both actions are criminal. (Not mentioning rape and sex slavery). Even insidiously finding a way into a whole chapter of an otherwise very holy book (the old testament) and curse forever a whole race, the Jewish People – not unlike humanity’s fate. But everyone’s scapegoat for sure. And curse homosexuality forever. Worse, pervert the concept. What a waste. Maybe we human didn’t deserve better at the time.
As a side note, if Homosexuals thought of themselves as gods and goddesses (meaning certainly not lesser humans than heteros), they would know better and stop asking to live the ‘petit-bourgeois dream’ of getting married and start a family – or become Illiberal liberal priests! That I think nature didn’t offer them. Civil union for practical reasons is okay, even necessary, but Marriage doesn’t ring true to my ears (“so gay!”). My two cents. Following my own logic anyway. But that’s jut me. Gays have their own bullies, or ‘activists’ and their own internal wars to address.
For women it’s different. They are mothers, I can see how they may end up with their own child and raise them. There could be lots of exceptions to that, as always and both ways. That’s a rule too.
Now myself I’m more on the side of discretion (discreet). Especially when it comes to nudity. More mine. But real democracies are exactly that: the liberty to be who you are: not to be pushed by bullies to behave wilder than you are. And not to be forced by other bullies to go into hiding by fear of lynching because the truth happens to favor freedom and freedom happens to outcast/unmask THEM (Fascist governments and thoughts). Followers were not suppose to become our leaders.
Food for thoughts. I don’t mean to start an argument. Especially on line where people tend too often to act angry or outraged. This site, thanks to neo, is too decent & precious to be spoiled. (The sanity squad is very special too. You are already a brand, no doubt, the four of you, together and separately. You can’t let that disappear. I’ll print the t-shirt one day and you’ll get (the cash and) and the publicity – for the fun of it and the greater good.)
… I believe Jesus had it all right. Even after him, the truth could not be said. But he paid a high price for talking it. It’s up to us to look for all the unsaid words, I believe.
One would hope that, today, in America at least, the truth can be told. First it must be reached of course. One sure rule: the fairest and highest news will hit the jackpot. The just news! No room for hypocrites & demagogues, nor space for syrupy. Much less hate and tyranny. Soft or not. Actually an antidote to it.
We can’t compete with god’s mind, nor imagination but we can get close to it. At least not missing it when we see/hear it. That’s one purpose of ART. Art and God are one with the Truth. What’s real and what’s not? That’s an art also: to be a true art critic! How many can paint? (we know, not many) but how many can judge a painting? The question becomes could they learn to see?
I learned a lot about God by watching my own paintings. I’ll share that knowledge one day. The good news is that while I can write hours about it, one could just simply sit and trip endlessly in front of them. Especially if I had struggled a lot to achieve them. They speak for themselves. It didn’t come easy: I started as architect, changed planet few times, was cursed with bad luck, but finally I became the luckiest person on the planet (being who I am, i.e. abstract and wild, humble, idealist & very patient). I’m still waiting for the door to paradise (Manhattan) to open for me but it’s getting closer and closer, I know. Thank God, the Iraq war has seen a positive turn. It surely helps my cause. No I’m not Iraqi. But I was pro-liberating Iraq from thugs and terror. So I had to share the sacrifice real soldiers and good Iraqis were making. I could never live their ordeal. My bad luck doesn’t bring me that far, thank God; Mine is mainly spiritual. The only pain I can handle.
I should go now, my mother and my aunt are flying to town today from Tehran. Right, Persian neocon.
My hope is to one day create my own café-Museum, big, bright and beautiful, with the best people around, music, laughters and friends, only. With one goal: to celebrate all that’s good about America: her beauty, her liberty, her freedom and her flag (my main theme). And then take it from there.
… I got distracted by my visitors.
So, I’m sending this post for posterity – i.e. four months after it was written. Time flies. I have personally abolished Time in my life. Doesn’t mean I don’t know boredom. But that’s because I’m not free yet.