HOT Fine Arts Review and Opinion Panel

[Swatopluk]

Not that an ape's autobiography is something new. Kafka wrote one for example

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/71QQASDMRZL._SS500_.gif

[Griffin NoName]

F******  which admin allowed Swato to see this thread?  Please ensure he does not hijack it with Duck Art.

I bow to the patriarch. I agree with Beagle's List. I'm not so sure about his denoument of item 3 in the list. My inferiority (to society, not Beagle) leads me to wonder if it requires more of a leap of imagination to appreciate modern art and then to wonder if that is valid. Should we have to work harder to appreciate Art?

[Swatopluk]

I have no intention to release the ducks here (yet).
And the Kafka thing was meant serious
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Report_to_an_Academy
I hope no GOPster sees Kafka's other animal story*

*not the one about the giant insect, the one about the Middle Easterners and the canidae.

[Griffin NoName]

Rest easy Swato, I would never take Kafka less than seriously, in any realm.

[Swatopluk]

Oh, would you? 

http://kafka.sourceforge.net/kafka-logo.jpg
---

OK back to seriousness: I say Beuys was a charlatan and/or deranged (even ignoring his dead hare/rabbit fetish)
Discuss!

[Pachyderm]

Beuys's first solo exhibition in a private gallery was opened on November 26, 1965 with one of the artist's most famous and compelling performances: How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. The artist could be viewed through the glass of the gallery's window. His face was covered in honey and gold leaf, an iron slab was attached to his boot. In his arms he cradled a dead hare, into whose ear he mumbled muffled noises as well as explanations of the drawings that lined the walls. Such materials and actions had specific symbolic value for Beuys. For example, honey was the product of bees who, for Beuys (following Rudolf Steiner), represented as ideal society of warmth and brotherhood. Gold had its importance within alchemical enquiry, and iron, the metal of Mars, stood for a masculine principle of strength and connection to the earth. A photograph from the performance, in which Beuys is sitting with the hare, has been described "by some critics as a new Mona Lisa of the 20th century," though Beuys did not agree with that. Beuys produced many such spectacular, ritualistic performances, and he developed a compelling persona whereby he took on a liminal, shamanistic role, as if to enable passage between different physical and spiritual states

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Beuys


Hmm. Charlatan? Don't know. Deranged I will accept.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

But isn't that the point of contemporary art? I have found that for the most part the weight on the work of said artists isn't in their art but in their (quasi? pseudo?)-philosophical statements regarding their perception on the subject. In fact I would go further to say that for the most part it is a collection of variations on Nietzsche's, starting by Wagner in what we could call the 'Super Artist'  . I recall that I knew of Kandinsky and Cage from their ideas before I saw and/or listened to their work.

OTOH (and to complement Beagle's points), there is a movement to define a distinguishable style, that makes most expositions a theme+variations exercise, as if there was a desperate search for a niche that then is re-imagined to the death, and certainly the commercialization of art has an extremely strong influence in an artist decision to do (and sell) the same painting over and over again.

[Griffin NoName]

How about society gets the art they deserve?

[Pachyderm]

That seems fitting to me.

Although I suspect every society feels the same way about contemporary stuff.

"I tell you, that Samian ware nonsense will never last. And as for Praxiteles, well, flash in the pan, I reckon."

[Griffin NoName]

Which may not quite explain what my ex-ma-in-law's (long gone) ex everyday china set from Woolworth (well, not Actually Hers - we threw that away  ) is doing in the V&A 

[Opsa]

The Beuys Dead Hare description is hilarious! I don't think he needed the honey and gold stuff, just the act of explaining pictures to a dead hare is a brilliant enough scathing statement about trying to reach an unreceptive audience.

Brilliant, I tell you! Definitely art in my book.