Disappointed. Trash. I thought it might be some amateur's artistic appreciation of your human form. That would have been interesting. Why don't you ask some budding artist to paint you? Just a thought. I wonder if the internet will eventually herald the end of pornography. If you can look at anything, what is taboo? What is secret?
That isn't so. He was revered by many, especially in the music world - the professional instrumentalists and composers and the hundreds of his contemporaries who really were just playing the organ to feed their families, they knew very well that his stuff was far above the ordinary. In his old age his home in Leipzig was well known as a destination for any composer or musician of consequence throughout Europe, his music was spread throughout Europe and into England by these many professional musician visitors, and his several musician sons were identified and employed at least partly as related to him. His system of tuning keyboard instruments had been adopted throughout Europe, by the influence of his compositions and reputation - it's essentially the "piano tuning" standard throughout the Western world today. He was even paid the supreme compliment of seeing his entire approach to composition set aside in his lifetime, abandoned, by the next generation (his sons and students): they had nowhere to go with it; he'd killed the entire genre, and they knew it. He was not just a guy who played the organ. And this is true of most great artists, in any field. Their fellow pros, at least, were not blind to them - and usually they enjoyed respect and esteem from the general community, as well. It's far more common to see the opposite - the widely acclaimed artist whose reputation we find mysterious now, whose contemporary fame seems inexplicable, whose work and name were soon forgotten and whose influence is an item of historical trivia.
Gee, I guess we must have read different authors and/or taken different classes on this topic to have such widely divergent perspective on it. I do admire the optimism though. Your last sentence underscores my point, however - it is indeed in the (fickle) 'eye of the beholder'. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
1. 75 % -- the only one I really recognised was the one by kandinsky and mondrian, the rest was just wild guessing. 2. 50 % -- damn the one by Hitler is actually quite pretty, just shows that he would have been so much better off as an artist than a psychokiller. -- I only recognised renoir, matisse, monet -- rest was guessing 3. 100% -- must say though that I wasn't sure about the first one since it looked quite interesting, also the colour composition.
The best art will anticipate the future of culture and will hit a chord that goes beyond the contemporary; still appropriate for the future. The impressionist art altered the clarity of the previous generation of art (almost a photo copy) into art that was more fuzzy via subjective impression. This was an anticipation and reflection of the industrial revolution, where humans left the clarity of the farm for all the fuzziness of the never been for done life in the factories. The abstractionists that came next, anticipated the clarity of science cause and effect of being replaced by uncertainty and probability, with almost anything having some range of probability. The art of Escher, was all about the pitfalls of relative reference. As shown below, if you look at any given reference, it can appear valid. But in the context of the whole, one becomes very aware they can't all be true at the same time, since many are mutually exclusive. There are often many theories for the same thing, because of math, with many mutually exclusive yet all are allowed to exist since reference is relative and each can appear right in its own way. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
The first quiz, I got is 67%, It's not a good grade for me. The second quiz, I got is 25%, I need more review about those arts. The third quiz, I got is 95%, finally I've got a higher grade on Ape! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Get him! Hang him! The satire was too obvious, I see. I shall be more subtle in the future. Let's all collectively write a sciforums guide to great art. It should be unbearably snobbish. It also should be constantly updated and amended, so that whenever people start thinking they understand great art, we can pull the rug out, changing the criteria and supplanting trends. This will create a need for experts and their valuable opinions. We could probably make a few bucks in the process. Somehow. Here's the starting concept for anyone who wants to get the ball rolling... Ugliness is the new beauty. Confusion is the new order. Excrement is the new sustenance.
Sadly, this concept is not new, but it was indeed the obvious starting point for much contemporary art work.
Steve Martin has a new book about art. When he was on the Colbert Report, he had to do a similar test. He didn't recognize Hitler's paintings but I did. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Woah...lego escher. I imagine what makes art "great" is popular acclaim? Personally, I either like it, I really like it, or I don't like it...and that seems to have very little relation to what art critics or art historians think about any particular work... Mostly don't like Picasso, like some of the post-impressionists, Kandinsky's fun with his little synesthete self... I like lowbrow-pop surrealism lots or I wouldn't attempt to paint it. Abstract expressionism-man, if I could slap paint on a canvas and charge some sucker $1000 for it I'd be a happy camper...no artistic integrity, but happy to sell out! I haven't sold out yet to The Man, but the instant The Man's buying...poverty bites.
So you're saying I'm 40 or 50 years too late? Never! Bring ugliness back! It's never too late to revive bad ideas. And on your Bach slayings, I can only say, that "plagiarism" as you described it, was prevalent in the Baroque era. Composers would often "sample" a melodic line or motif and either incorporate it into their own work, in which they would often put in the title "after ________ composer" or they would completely transcribe a work by another composer into a different format. In the case of Bach, he had several famous transcriptions from Vivaldi that he made into different translations, keyboard concerti and whatnot. Composers would also borrow themes from their own works if they liked them or they were popular. I would not call that plagiarism. Take for instance really old favorites like "La Foglia" on which many variations were written. It was basically an anonymous melody or theme, and people wrote variations on that theme. Speaking of Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had a very early concerto based on a theme by Johann Christian Bach. You want the proof of this plagiarism? WA Mozart Concerto KV 107 n 1 after JC Bach Musica Amphion From what I have gathered, doing such, and crediting your inspiration, was generally a compliment.
I know what I like - that's as far as art goes for me. I couldn't care less if the art / artist is "great" or an unknown. To be honest I would rather have a perfect rectangle of red or blue paint on my wall than what generally passes as "great art". Mondrian I quite like, and Dali's ideas/cleverness if not his actual paintings. But I'd be just as happy with a blank patch of colour, or even nothing at all. I'm aware that the "great"ness is often in doing things first, and maybe there's a level of "greatness" that I just miss due to not knowing the history / detail, and thus not the appreciation of why they should be "great". But then my interest in art is not in the style, the textures, the history, but in what it does to me when I look at it. I do find the price of "great" art no longer to be associated with its value as art but with its history... and has become an asset rather than a work of art. And "modern art"... well, if people can make money selling sh1t to those willing to buy it... good luck to them.
In the short run, i.e. the contemporary art of an era evaluated in its own time, "great art" is art that is regarded as such by the art critics and art scholars. They have as much disdain for the tastes of the masses as any curmudgeon on this website. Popular acclaim only identifies art as popular--oh yeah, and it means that the artist can make a living. I'm more familiar with music than the visual arts, and you can certainly see this dichotomy in contemporary music. Popularity is often fleeting: "I'll be put in the back on the discount rack like another can of beans," to quote Billy Joel's introspective song, "The Entertainer." (How nicely ironic that he's still out in front.) A few artists are recognized as "great" by the critics and scholars in their time, and this judgment is often borne out by enduring popularity: The Beatles, CSNY and Pink Floyd, for example, are still beloved in anglophone countries and elsewhere. "Dark Side of the Moon" would still be on the Billboard Top 100 if they hadn't made a special rule to disqualify it, just like the New York Times Book Review doesn't have to keep listing the Bible and the Boy Scout Manual as the two best-selling books every year. But pick a week in the 1960s or 1980s at random (skip the 1970s, which produced most of what is now called "classic rock"), look up the top-sellers for that year, and see if you even recognize the titles. In any art, you have to recognize the enormous difference between a work's ability to communicate with the people of its own era, versus speaking to the people of the future. Again, sticking to music because as a not-very-visually-oriented person painting is not my strong suit, some songs absolute tear at the heartstrings of the people who first hear it, and then don't relate to those who come after them at all. All the "protest", growing-up, and discovering-life songs of the Generation Gap in the late 1960s and early 70s: "Universal Soldier," "Woodstock," "Eve of Destruction," "Little Boxes on the Hillside," "Society's Child," "The Circle Game," "Both Sides Now," "Puff the Magic Dragon." We cried and/or marched to those songs, and to many of us War Babies and Baby Boomers they still bring a tear to our eye, but younger people just don't feel them, or even understand them. Whereas songs about more general, eternal themes, like heartbreak, having fun, feeling bad, and love (of a person or a place!), are still on the radio. "Sweet Home Alabama" is full of references to the politics of the 1970s that no one gets any more, but it's also a sweet love song to Alabama, and in this era of globalization, to America. (Kid Rock is a Yankee from Michigan!) Composers of music without words--symphonies, etudes, concertos, string quartets, etc.--don't have to worry about the topicality of their references. And indeed far more instrumental music from the past is still in the repertoire than vocal music. But they have to find some other way to connect with their audience or they just end up writing ditties that strike the public's fancy for a few years and then vanish into obscurity. Just like "Rebel Rouser," "Baby Elephant Walk," "Walk Don't Run," and "Music Box Dancer." Those were enormous hits--do you folks even know them? There's nothing wrong with creating art that speaks to your contemporaries, even if it won't speak to their grandchildren. Today it's generally only lyrics that are copyrighted. It's very difficult to protect the instrumental portion of a song. You have to very nearly perform the whole thing exactly as scored to be sued. Iconoclasm has been a very popular philosophy for the last few generations, so there has been an increase in the population of people eager to support artists who produce crap. But still, you can hardly dimiss all modern art as crap. Mikhail Chemiakin is so "modern" and iconoclastic that the Soviets locked him in a mental hospital, but we love his work and have it on our walls, and my wife can even explain it to me. Humboldt County, where we live (except for my extended stay on the other side of the country finding work) has the highest concentration of artists in the country so we go to a lot of art shows. Although some of their stuff is patently crap, much of it is astoundingly good, despite being "modern." And considerably more affordable than a Chemiakin. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
"Good" by what standard? I would suggest that you deem it (Chemiakin's work, for example) "good" because it does/means something to you, whereas I am probably among the board's curmudgeons and find it rather uninteresting. I could probably understand why something is appreciated, if someone explained it to me, and maybe that is as close as I'll get to accepting "greatness" in such a subjective area. I also apologise for any confusion in the term as I have used it, but to me "Modern Art" is anything where the concept of the piece is promoted as far more important than the physical aspects. At least what Chemiakin produces has artistic merit (to me) - i.e. I would consider him an artist of the modern era... compared to the likes of Tracey Emin where it is all idea - and she is what I would categorise as a "modern artist". I have always seen it as a relatively modern phenomena, hence my usage of the term. This is undoubtedly not the correct usage, hence this explaination (and apology). Art, to me, must stand on its own without someone having to explain the concept. If the piece automatically provokes the concept then it can at least be deemed successful, if not necessarily good. But I'm a curmudgeon. And happily so. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
It doesn't mean anything to me. I just enjoy looking at it. The geometry, the colors, the shapes. When someone explains what the various components represent, I can often see it, but the small left-brained satisfaction I get from that doesn't materially enhance my appreciation of the painting. In this case I dare to call it "good" because Chemiakin seems to be respected by the critics and scholars. "Modern Art" seems to be narrowly defined as the non-traditional styles that were developed and came into vogue in the more-or-less hundred years starting around 1875. That means that we're now in the "post-modern" era, and I always love it when scholars have to coin that phrase to make up for the shortsightedness of their predecessors. Apparently Impressionism was considered Modern Art; today I think most people who simply enjoy looking at art rather than studying it would consider Impressionism to be really old-fashioned and traditional. I certainly see a chasm between Renoir and Picasso that I don't see between Renoir and Da Vinci. I don't think anyone worth paying attention to would argue against that statement. The whole point of non-verbal artforms is... to communicate non-verbally!
Pshaw. I thought it was highly representative: two-dimensional, simplistically painted, offensive and profane. One could hardly ask for a more accurate likeness.
