I agree with the first part, disagree with the second.
Jackson Pollock was just some idiot with a paintbrush. John Cage was just some idiot with a piano when he wrote 4’33". “I could have done that.” Sure, but they did. Having the concept and then executing it is as much of the art as the finished product.
Those artists at least had a recognizable and identifiable style. It was easy to mimic yes, but they became icons for the identifiable style. If Altman snuck this in to the museum I’d give him some credit for it I suppose, but the style already exists and isn’t novel or identiable to a particular artist. Other people have snuck crap into museums too. There’s no novelty or creativity or unique iconic style here. It’s just sludge.
Yes the bar for what is art is so low as to be buried.
That’s the god damn point. Anyone can make art. That’s the whole damn reason uptight asswads get upset when something new shows up and reminds them of that fact.
What matters is what the viewer think, if they believe it art then thus it is.
I do not believe the paint by number crayon drawing of a 4 year old is of value thus it is not art to me. But to their father and mother? It is of the highest value and the highest form of art.
Disumbrationism was a hoax masquerading as an art movement that was launched in 1924 by Paul Jordan-Smith, a novelist, Latin scholar, and authority on Robert Burton from Los Angeles, California.
Annoyed at the cold reception his wife Sarah Bixby Smith’s realistic still lifes had received from an art exhibition jury, Jordan-Smith sought revenge by styling himself as “Pavel Jerdanowitch” (Cyrillic: Па́вел Жердaнович), a variation on his own name. Never having picked up a paint brush in his life, he then painted Yes, we have no bananas, a blurry, badly painted picture of a Pacific islander woman holding a banana over her head, having just killed a man and putting his skull on a stick. In 1925, Smith entered the banana picture under a new title of Exaltation in New York’s “Exhibition” of the Independents at the Waldorf-Astoria. He made a suitably dark and brooding photograph of himself as Jerdanowitch, and submitted the work to the same group of critics as representative of the new school “Disumbrationism”. He explained Exaltation as a symbol of “breaking the shackles of womanhood”.[1] To his amusement, if not to his surprise, the Disumbrationist daub won praise from the critics who had belittled his wife’s realistic painting.
More Disumbrationist paintings followed: a composition of zig-zag lines and eyeballs he called Illumination; a garish picture of a black woman doing laundry that he called Aspiration, and which a critic praised as “a delightful jumble of Gauguin, Pop Hart and Negro minstrelsy, with a lot of Jerdanowitch individuality”;[2]: 111 Gination, an ugly, lopsided portrait; and a painting named Adoration, of a woman worshipping an immense phallic idol, which was exhibited in 1927.
I agree with the first part, disagree with the second.
Jackson Pollock was just some idiot with a paintbrush. John Cage was just some idiot with a piano when he wrote 4’33". “I could have done that.” Sure, but they did. Having the concept and then executing it is as much of the art as the finished product.
Those artists at least had a recognizable and identifiable style. It was easy to mimic yes, but they became icons for the identifiable style. If Altman snuck this in to the museum I’d give him some credit for it I suppose, but the style already exists and isn’t novel or identiable to a particular artist. Other people have snuck crap into museums too. There’s no novelty or creativity or unique iconic style here. It’s just sludge.
And here we are talking about it.
If I take my pants off and walk down the street people will talk about me. Seems like a low bar.
If.
Yeah, it’s called performance art. You’re not wrong in disliking it as slop, but the barrier for what is art is empirically low.
Last time I did it the cops didn’t take that excuse. You’d think doing it near a school would make it obvious it was an artistic performance too.
Artists have often gotten caught in trouble with the law, many justifiably so for having done generally bad things, still artists though
Yes the bar for what is art is so low as to be buried.
That’s the god damn point. Anyone can make art. That’s the whole damn reason uptight asswads get upset when something new shows up and reminds them of that fact.
What matters is what the viewer think, if they believe it art then thus it is.
I do not believe the paint by number crayon drawing of a 4 year old is of value thus it is not art to me. But to their father and mother? It is of the highest value and the highest form of art.
Except this is missing the executing part. Prompting isn’t work.
You’re missing it. It got sneaked into a museum and hung on the wall. That’s an extremely important part of it.
Indeed, the art is the reverse heist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disumbrationism
https://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_disumbrationist_school_of_art/
Jordan-Smith did too, though, and his work doesn’t qualify. I think that one has to both do and maintain a straight face for the rest of one’s life.