Finally, somebody with common sense :)

Posted on By admin 11 Comments on Finally, somebody with common sense :)

Observers, Artists, Critics Rank Children's Paintings With the Masters

Mar. 11, 2005 – People got very excited about Christo's latest public art work, “The Gates,” in New York's Central Park. For two week's 7,500 metal gates draped with orange fabric were staked along 23 miles of the park's footpaths. Some people called “The Gates” a masterpiece. Others called it an ugly nuisance.

New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser said all the orange fabric on “The Gates” made it look like an ad for Home Depot.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R) was annoyed by the criticism. “Nobody's criticizing this. Everybody likes it. And this is certainly art,” he said.

It is? Well, I kinda like it, but how does the mayor know that “The Gates” is really art, and not just shower curtains on poles? Do people really know what's art and what's just stuff?

We ran a test.

On ABCNews.com, we showed four reproductions of art works that are considered masterpieces of modern art along with six pieces that will never make it into any museum. We asked viewers to decide which work was art and which was not.

I assumed the famous art would get the most votes if only because art lovers would recognize them, but they didn't. Most got far fewer votes than the winner.

The one that received the most votes as a “real” artwork was a piece of framed fabric “20/20” bought at a thrift store for $5.

We also conducted the test with New Yorkers at Manhattan Mall. We asked people to tell us which art works they'd expect to see in a museum. We included copies of the famous paintings, plus some other items.

How do critics and curators decide which is art?

How do they determine that Damien Hirst's embalmed shark and sliced cow carcasses are art?

Why is Willem de Kooning's “A Tree in Naples,” which we included a reproduction of in our quiz, worth millions, when a more realistic looking landscape, done by elephants with paintbrushes in Thailand, is worth much less?

I asked an art historian: Why is De Kooning's “A Tree in Naples” art? The work doesn't look like a tree, let alone Naples.

“But if you look closely, you might say this brown part is the bark of the tree. You might say the blue is the sky. Maybe that's, maybe that's the case and maybe it's not. But you bring to it whatever feelings that this evokes,” said Samantha Hoover, an art historian at New York's School of Visual Arts.

What about Kasimir Malevich's Black Circle, which we also included in the online quiz? “He was saying I want to free art from telling a story,” said Hoover.

So it's just all in the eye of the beholder?

“I wouldn't say it's all in the eye of the beholder,” Hoover said. “I think you need to know the story behind the work to understand its full impact and meaning.”

OK, I can get that concept. Watching Ed Harris' performance in the film about famous artist Jackson Pollock, I learned that Pollock's creative genius came from his tortured soul. That led to a big breakthrough in modern art. But do the people who pay millions for Pollock's work really see the difference between his dripping colors and a child's painting?

Four of the art works in our test were done by 4-year-olds, and when we showed their artwork on the Web, and showed it to people at the mall, the kids' work ranked ahead of most of the masters.

I assumed real artists wouldn't fall for the trick, so we invited some to take our test. Most of them also put at least some of the kids' work up there with the masters.

One artist, Victor Acevedo, described one of the children's pieces as “a competent execution of abstract expressionism which was first made famous by de Kooning and Jackson Pollock and others. So it's emulating that style and it's a school of art.”

When I told him the work was done by a 4-year-old he said, “That's amazing. Give that kid a show.”

Actually, it was a collaboration. Maybe they should give Hannah and Haley, the two 4-year-old girls who painted it, a show of their own. More than 1,800 people said their work was great art.

And even Hoover, the art historian, ranked one of the children's paintings among the real artworks. When I told her who did the work she said, “It has good composition. I think it has good depth and space.”

So can anybody explain to me why people want to spend millions of dollars on abstract art if any 4-year-old could create something great?

“There's some art that's validated by the establishment or by the media and then there's the rest,” said artist Deborah Gilbert.

But maybe the establishment is out to lunch.

An artist who calls himself Flash Light told me, “The function of art is to make rich people feel more important.”

Well, if rich people want to spend their own money this way, fine.

But you should know that you're contributing your money too. The politicians may say they're starved for funds, but they're still giving your hard-earned tax dollars to museums that exhibit these kinds of things.

Which makes me and some of our testers say: Give Me a Break!

Original link: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/print?id=563146

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Comments (11) on “Finally, somebody with common sense :)”

  1. To me, the most important thing is to look into the artist's motivations and try to understand where the piece is coming from and what it's trying to say. Art is more often than not a reaction to something, be it world news or a preceding school of art. Art is not necessarily about creating beautiful things, it's also about saying something. That is obviously my humble opinion and I can totally understand why a circle of rocks in a field might not seem to be art.

    Btw, I only got one wrong on the test. After reading the article, mind you but still… ;D

    (http://livejournal.com/users/ashre79)

  2. Yeah, I guess this is exactly what I'm ranting on (and on, and on, and then on some more) about in my journal. I hate the academic grounding of contemporary art because I genuinely believe that abstract expressionism and 1970's-style splotching don't have much to say anymore. Performance art infuriates me to a degree that I can barely articulate.

    I think that the postmodern poststructuralist discourses had a lot to say, once upon a time, but the time is over and it's now far more pressing to teach young art students to be spectacular draftspeople again. Rewarding people purely for their ability to research various traditions is nonsense and should not be tolerated by any genuine art school. The traditions may be important, but to forever look to the past for inspiration is to quite literally retard artistic development. We're at the point where children can be more developed artists than adults almost purely because of this idiot insistence on Grounding Your Work, rather than Doing Your Work Better; children have no grounding or research, so of course their stuff will be fresher than the freshest grounded stuff. They can't possibly be quoting anything. They're just doing it the way they want to.

    I believe surely that art should say something, but I think that it may need a little help with its language these days.

    (http://livejournal.com/users/pretentiousgit)

  3. Postmodern poststructuralist discourses, eh? Must be the French in me. ;P

    I unfortunately don't know enough to elaborate on this subject. However, I remain convinced that influence (be it conscious or not) is what makes art. Rejection, emulation, elaboration seem to be the forces pushing creation forward. To me, art is rooted in history.

    Like I said, only my two cents. I am far from being a specialist and this was mostly me talking out of my ass.

    (http://livejournal.com/users/ashre79)

  4. *laughs* From this 'cross-the-pond perspective, being French is almost enough to make you an expert. I've been hearing nothing but yBas and The Salon for about eight months, and really, Canadian art is pretty dry. It's the winters.

    I think art is about life, really. The surface is just the clothing on the idea, and it doesn't really matter particularly what the surface is. I prefer technically apt surfacing, because inept stuff gets in the way of the expression, but otherwise it's just… bleh.

    (http://livejournal.com/users/pretentiousgit)

  5. I feel it all comes down to one thing: content. It can be purely sensorial, when something just looks good (composition, color, just plain craftsmanship). It can also be intellectual meaning, when something makes you think, about art itself or about life. Those two are my gauges. They are how I judge a work of art and by that I obviously mean the field of visual arts. I admit that having both at the same time is a very welcome bonus, but as far as I'm concerned, they are independent and they are both worthy.

    (http://livejournal.com/users/ashre79)

  8. Hmm? Oh, no! I'm sort of unconscious because I haven't been sleeping a lot or eating properly for about two weeks. Midterms, exams, girlfriend, business, etc. have sort of left me pulped, and I actually am taking your meaning pretty well: I want to agree in more depth and specificity, I guess, but can't explain what makes me so mad without sounding like a total reject from the very club I loathe so much.

    I concur that content is pretty much the most important thing in art. It's the stuff that has none and yet is enormously celebrated that bothers me so much. Defining that category gets tricky, but damn I know it when I see it. And I see it a lot in art school.

    (http://livejournal.com/users/pretentiousgit)

  10. Hoooy, yes! Hah, I thought you totally knew that already. And then I remembered that I just read [info]eniran's journal and never have much to say. Yeah, I'm in art school. It's absolutely astonishing, the level of BS that comes into my world to make me angry every day.

    Art school, with a combined honours in cultural studies/critical theory. Which is like distilled, Calculus-class English, really. Very meta. Very dry.

    (http://livejournal.com/users/pretentiousgit)

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