The laws of free market in the arts "market" in late capitalism are out of control.
 

You're not kidding. How did it come to be that if Saatchi says it's art, then it's art and worth an insane amount?


 

Oh balls! I missed it then! I haven't been in there for quite a while, Leeds could do with updating the old gallery section to something more in line with the sculpture space they have next door, saw some really good things in there over the years, its a pity really, sculpture and installations etc have taken over stuff that hangs on walls to such an extent paintings and drawings are getting sidelined - fair enough maybe, but mustn't forget the old babies and bath-water aspect.
 

I'm increasingly finding Schwitters to be a person of interest, and it's easy to see how his cut and paste collage methods influenced the cut-up technique, too. Kendal might be the home of mont cake, but it's not the most inspiring place in Cumbria.

I'd been planning to go for a while, as I found out it was on back in the summer, but what with one thing and another I didn't get around to checking it out till the last week. Not that I'd have gone again, but this review mighyt've ben of more use. Hey ho. I quite agree about the volume of sculpture, too: it's rather overrepresented, proportionally speaking. I didn't really get to investigate the rest of the gallery, but intend to at some point.


 

 

 

Ok, it was definitely better than that! At least it looked like it was supoposed to be there!

What irritates me is whwn people criticise Surrealism - and Dali in particular - with the complaint that 'it's commercial.' Er... I don't see that being absorbed into mainstream culture can necessariy be considered commercial. Commercial is what Warhol was about, commercial is intended for mass consumption from the outset...

Moorse's works do have quite tactile qualities, but he did produce an incredible volume of pieces, many of which look very similar....


 

Funnily enough...there used to be a large concrete blob in Alexandra Park (grounds of Alexandra Palace) in London in the early eighties. Rumour had it that this thing was an Henry Moore sculpture, but that didn't stop the local bored teens taking spray cans to it...after that, it vanished pretty sharpish.
    I'm interested in what defines a work of art as "surrealist"  - for example, while Duchamps toilet is recognised as a surrealist work, Sarah Lucases' "Two fried eggs and a kebab" is not, though it seems (to an uneducated onlooker) to share a very similar aesthetic. I assume, educationally, that I'm probably missing something, - but does that diminish my appreciation of the "art"?
   I'm firmly in the camp of "don't know about art, but I know what I like"....and what I like encompasses Bosch, Da Vinci, Dali, Kahlo, M.C. Escher and even (some works of) Sarah Lucas. Hirst doesn't get a look in, and neither does Warhol. Question is, does that kind of artistic ignorance mark me out as a philistine, or simply as someone who refuses to accept the cultural hierarchy implicit in accepted definitions of "art"? Just wondering....

 

Kes if you wish to see the blob that was in Alexander Park you'll find it along with other urban Henry Moores such as the one that was in a Tower Hamlets council estate on display in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park that is a dumping ground of sorts for unloved sculptures that includes one hideous monstrosity that looks like a concrete plug that was apparently originally at manchester Airport until the locals campaigned to get rid of it!!
Yes Sarah Lucas is very surreal at times and a very good artist in as much as you want to see her art and it makes you think, and I can also see the effort involved in making it.
Unlike the works of say Mark Rothko or the boy from Daugavapils as I know see him, who very often seems just damn lazy painting the canvas say all red or all black and then we are meant to find the meaning within, well no its just a wash of colour! Oh and great art should need little or no explanation you should be able to look at it tutored or untutoured and be able to go wow that's a great piece of art, even if you don't like it!!
 

Well Simon, I'm pretty much in full agreement with your last statement there. But I don't feel the need to check out the Henry Moore anymore. Elsewhere in Ally Pally, there's a playground which features an upright concrete doughnut in a sandpit - it's meant to be an "interactive environment" for the under fives, but it bares a remarkable resemblance to the missing Moore sculpture....many a happy evening has been spent there, under the influence of pre decimal currency, so to speak....

 

The playpark in the village where I grew up used to have an upright concrete doughnut, too... kindly donated by the water company who had a spare piece of (unused, as far as I know) sewer pipe they wanted to offload. Ah, the good old days of simple entertainment, when parks were full of things that would be considered far too dangerous now, like swings and slides and roundabouts, all set in concrete...



 

Ah for the good old days of adventure playgrounds with stuff made out of Corrugated iron and scaffold poles wioth ropes you could dangle off of or just planks you could make other kids walk!! With half bricks and other rubble scattered on the ground below you!
Ah I have just figured out the name of the band I'm listening to B-12 and the album is called Moloko and not the other way round as I thought when i bought it, too much russian on the liner notes!! So I knew it wasn't the english moloko, ah the joys of really random record shopping!!
 

Oh yes, my childhood memories are full of adventure playgrounds built by enthusiastic wellwishers, usually on disused former railways/bombsites....
  To refer back to the nanny state motif, most of the playgrounds of my childhood were dangerous places, where careless limbs could easily be broken by a combination of foolishness, concrete and gravity. Yet there were rarely any fatalities, mainly because attentive kids would learn from their mistakes before anything so drastic occurred.
 Yet it seems that later generations, brought up after the concrete floors were replaced by rubber and the potentially lethal rides removed from playgrounds, have grown up with less sense about the reality of risk.

    I was truly shocked to find out that you must now be over sixteen to buy caps for toy guns. The worst personal damage you could do with a roll of caps was the inadvertent burning of an eyebrow, if you doused them in petrol and lit them with a magnifying glass on a hot summer afternoon. I know, because I experimented with all the explosives available to the prepubescent 70s kid....and lived to tell the tale, without a hospital visit to my name. Hell, I even had access to magnesium strips, courtesy of an ancient chemistry set.....and I learned that it was a bloody silly idea to light fires that you can't put out.  "Do not summon anything you can't put back down", to paraphrase Lovecrafts' books....practical understanding of that idea comes only from experience.
   Deny the experience, and you deny access to the wisdom gained from it.

 I'm going to shut up now. I've just reread the above and realised that it makes me sound like the crankiest of old killjoys. Damn....I'll get me incontinence pants and zimmer frame....

 

Kes it sounds like you had a similar childhood iun the 70's to mine, however I only know of one kid who managed to blow himself and the shed he was sitting in up while playing with his chemistry set! Good old Mark Curtis was really bright went to the best grammar and help to run the local Monday club which I don't totally hold against him as we always got on well. Thankfully I wasn't round at his place on the fateful day, but the local press of the day reported that it sounded like a bomb going off!! Ah the 70's when kids were actually given dangerous chemicals to play with!!
Yes far better to have the risk taking than the risk averse society! Bring back murderball as a school gym game I say!!
 

Yes, welcome to grumpy (prematurely) old cunts corner...

There's no denying the fact that there's truth in the adage 'live and learn.' A few bumps and scrapes, you feel pain and don't repeat the mistake (unless of course, you happen to find it pleasurable, but that's a whole other issue). It simply comes down to the fact that by not being exposed to any kind of risk - or life outside the living toom / school, other than the 4x4 - people are growing up without learning common sense. We're supposedly at the peak of ou evolution, but I fear we've passed it and are now regressing into a culture of monged-out crets, bouncing through life in some kind of Brownean motion... which explains why so many people walk into me in the street and don't even seem to notice (apart from the tubby teenager who actually fel over and spilled her McDonald's thick shake a few weeks back. She actually walked into me, broadside, while looking completely the other way - and then looked indignantly at me!). Ahem.

I recall my mother recounting her choldhood, hanging out at the rec... which I used to imagine as like a wreckers yard...

Oh dear, I think the penile dementia's set in. Or maybe I just need more beer.

 

Well, art now is all about raising questions than offering answers, so I feel it only appropriat to respond to that question with another: do you feel that that kind of artistic ignorance mark me out as a philistine, or simply as someone who refuses to accept the cultural hierarchy implicit in accepted definitions of "art"? In fact, more importantly, how do you feel? How does it make you feel? Does it make you think? And herein lies my main issue with so much modern art - it's so oblique (or the concept so poorly executed) that it can't make a statement because no-one gets the point without it being explained. And without the explanation or the 'statement' being overt, there can only be questions... and questions are only interesting for so long.

Duchamp's work I find interesting, but again, it only really works in context of the concept. having said that, his urinal makes a pretty clear statement, whereas a shark in a tankful of formaldehyde doesn't, at least to me.

Surreal is of course a term that's been overused and misapplied so frequently - much like 'iconic' - that what constitutes surreal has become vague. The Surrealists themselves were pretty strict on what was and wasn't Surreal, and were very good at kicking anyone who deviated from their principals from the group in a flash. But really, "Two fried eggs and a kebab" and "Chicken Knickers" look as surreal to me as much of what was on in this exhibition, if not more so.

Someone shold've told Henry 'less is Moore.'

I'll get my goat.

 

I drafted what seemed a great reply to you in notepad, but have since lost it. (The reply, that is....it's been a much longer time since I "lost it" in the sense of "became a full blown nutter"...)
  I'm aware that many people detest Lucas in the same breath as bitching about Tracey Emin, but for me personally, (and I can't think of a more valid basis on which to form a judgement, when it comes to "appreciating" art...), Lucases' work makes me smile and consider a point at the same time, while Emins' work just makes me wonder how the bloody hell she convinces people to pay her for this crap.

   It may well be that what I read into Lucases' work is not something she intended when making it - from personal experience of cartooning and musicianhood, I know that there can be a yawning chasm between intent and the interpretation - and from observation, the person responsible for making the artwork is often the least well placed to appreciate its' impact.
   I'm also guessing that you've encountered the same phennomenon, to a greater or lesser extent.

  So...to return to questions - what does your art mean to you? And does your intent have any bearing on its' reception?
 
  Well, I've ranted enough and have dinner to cook....catch you later, literary dude....

 

I used to detest Emin, but a small exhibition of her early work and sketches here in York of al places forced me to reconsider. I had her pegged as a thoroughly talentless media-whore, but it transpires she dos actually have some technical ability. Ok, so I'm a closet traditionalist at heart. However, it then frustrates me that she insists on producing this overtly 'challenging' installation work.

Having said that, there's a part of me that has to reconcile that line of thinking with the fact that as someone who can write (if not type), I'm perhaps best 'known' amongst the few familiar with my work for my ceaseless crap puns and a 'novel' that barely contains a single sentence and that I didn't even write more than 10% of.

I suppose - at least as I see it - it comes down to how obvious the 'message' is and whether or not it functions with or against the medium, and if the concept's strong enough to sine through an execution that could perhaps be better. To consider it another way, a songwriter who writes great songs but is a shit musician but can't sing a note probably isnt going to do so well as a solo artist or front person - audiences just would't tolerate it. So why is it ok to be an 'ideas' artist who can't execute the ideas in a fashion that is a) remotely appealing or exciting in aesthetic terms b) capable of conveying the concept without exegisis?

On my return journey from Tangents R Us, the wanky answer / reception theory response is that art means what the beholder interprets as its meaning... and while that only goes so far, a few clues from the creator tend to go a long way.



 

(Note to self - edit comments before posting, next time. If you can spell "grammar", then you should be able to use it correctly.)

 

Oh, think nothing of it... believe it nor not, I can actually spell. Unfortunately, I can't type. Or I can, but like a spastic on EST. I'd probably fair better using my elbows.


 

Vive Le Surrealism!!!!
 

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