Can They Paint Or Not?

I've found that alot of the time, the people I've met - the practising artists, not the theorists - who use the densest language are the ones who are most unsure of what they have to say and how they want to say it; it's their desire to be an artist that is overpowering their ability to express anything at all, hence it all gets hazy.

However it's required that you have a certain ability to be able to talk that language (see Cerith Wyn-Evans, Christian Marclay as examples) in order to be able to succeed within the given field. Within art, language is NOT the dialogue people pretend it to be, it's a didactic voice of an elite, I don't believe all of this objective voice stuff for one second. And I speak as an artist who's work is very theory heavy.

its pretty easy to have a go at the art establishment for excluding those who havent been to art college but what art comes down to (especially when judging it in a uni situation) is the body of work. You'll have a hell of lot more work if youve been doing it every day than if its something you do every so often, and much more justification of your worth and ideas. This is something I struggled with at uni because I thought that just because I produced a few great pieces I'd be the darling of the professors but I came out with the grade i deserved because I didnt produce enough. The credit system art degrees are judged on is based on hours of work just like every other degree, its graft. Creed may be a chancer but he has a huge body of himself being a chancer and reactions to him being a chancer and debates caused to whether he was a chancer. I think that qualifies him as an artist of note (that running business is rubbish though. unless its a comment on the pathetic flogging of the olympics...aaaargh..)

"it's their desire to be an artist that is overpowering their ability to express anything at all"

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Yeah exactly, I think that's something like what I was trying to get at when I said this on the first page of this thread.

"a lot of wannabes just do something crap and believe that what makes it art is the fact that they are an artist. Of course, the reason that they are an artist is because they make art."

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It's the same as all these kids I see who want to be rockstars and think that if they've got the haircut and the attitude they're there. Probably could make a case about how this is related to reality tv and how everyone can be a "celebrity" as long as they want it enough, regardless of what talent they have.

straight said:

its pretty easy to have a go at the art establishment for excluding those who havent been to art college but what art comes down to (especially when judging it in a uni situation) is the body of work. You'll have a hell of lot more work if youve been doing it every day than if its something you do every so often, and much more justification of your worth and ideas. This is something I struggled with at uni because I thought that just because I produced a few great pieces I'd be the darling of the professors but I came out with the grade i deserved because I didnt produce enough. The credit system art degrees are judged on is based on hours of work just like every other degree, its graft. Creed may be a chancer but he has a huge body of himself being a chancer and reactions to him being a chancer and debates caused to whether he was a chancer. I think that qualifies him as an artist of note (that running business is rubbish though. unless its a comment on the pathetic flogging of the olympics...aaaargh..)

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I do know what you're saying - and I'm really not having a go at you - but I really hate the idea that because you've done alot of work, it makes you better. It doesn't, it just means you've got OCD.

I am the thread kiss of death

The truth kills threads. That's how it should be.

It generally helps if you produce some work though. There are those 'artists' who never do anything at all, and yet have an endless supply of opinions about the work of others. I don't mind that but it's rooted in cowardice, arrogance and self-loathing as far as I can tell, and as such is not pretty.

noel emits said:

Could be that's just the stage in the overall discourse that 'we' are at right now? Happens more or less cyclically doesn't it, with former radicals becoming an entrenched establishment with interests n maintaining their place. The question I suppose is does anyone care enough to think it's worth standing directly against it, or is it a better use of energy to operate on other fronts, mark out new territory, and other military metaphors.

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yes, sure these things go in phases etc. however- just as its hard to imagine a way back from mainstream american film having more in common with theme park rides than cinema its hard to imagine how the balance can tip back-because this is about the interface of art and the media, which is a powerful thing. you're expected, for instance- to have one idea you endlessly repeat to be taken seriously. so you can be the guy who puts shit in tanks, or the guy who copies sci-fi paperback covers- "high concept" art. a great deal of this stuff is so handily summarised you don't really need to go and see it, these are closer to advertising images.

and it takes a lot of balls to be rambo (or even rambu)

straight said:

its pretty easy to have a go at the art establishment for excluding those who havent been to art college but what art comes down to (especially when judging it in a uni situation) is the body of work. You'll have a hell of lot more work if youve been doing it every day than if its something you do every so often, and much more justification of your worth and ideas.

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i knew a man called alan davies- great artist. dead now. he had a hard shake jerking off into a bucket all his life. burned all his work just before he died. and his body of work was MASSIVE. however much you do getting noticed has more to with contacts, networking and shit like that. and he was hopeless at that.

also i was raised to believe graft=good which has led to me begrudgingly admiring the industry of some unlikely public figures, eg stephen king, margaret thatcher...

straight said:

. Creed may be a chancer but he has a huge body of himself being a chancer and reactions to him being a chancer and debates caused to whether he was a chancer. I think that qualifies him as an artist of note

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it's exactly this process i think is a con. also some of this ideas based work can give people a comfortable distance from putting anything too personal on the line. you don't even see an object they've been physically close to as all of them work through assistants. i doubt the rejection of an idea hurts as much as the rejection of something you've poured time and effort into.

mistersloane said:

I am the thread kiss of death

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though you'll have to fight for it now, i think your post just represented a pragmatic and reasonable conclusion...

noel emits said:

It generally helps if you produce some work though. There are those 'artists' who never do anything at all, and yet have an endless supply of opinions about the work of others. I don't mind that but it's rooted in cowardice, arrogance and self-loathing as far as I can tell, and as such is not pretty.

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it's true that the only really admissible response would be to counter with good work.

"you're expected, for instance- to have one idea you endlessly repeat to be taken seriously. so you can be the guy who puts shit in tanks, or the guy who copies sci-fi paperback covers- "high concept" art. a great deal of this stuff is so handily summarised you don't really need to go and see it, these are closer to advertising images."

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I dunno if you're expected to do that or if artists become trapped and don't dare do something different in case the public won't swallow their new idea. Maybe that amounts to the same thing - either way every time Rachel Whiteread announces a new work I'm amazed that she has the brassneck to produce the same thing again. She must realise how empty it is and yet fears to try anything new, I feel very sorry for her.

"a great deal of this stuff is so handily summarised you don't really need to go and see it, these are closer to advertising images"

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My girlfriend is doing a load of stuff in her phd about why, if the idea is paramount in conceptual art, the art cannot simply be replaced by a description making the art redundant. A worthwhile question I think.

"it's exactly this process i think is a con. also some of this ideas based work can give people a comfortable distance from putting anything too personal on the line. you don't even see an object they've been physically close to as all of them work through assistants"

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This has been the case (at least with some artists) since the renaissance though, I really don't think it's important.

"i doubt the rejection of an idea hurts as much as the rejection of something you've poured time and effort into."

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It does if you've poured time and effort into the idea.

IdleRich said:

I She must realise how empty it is

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haha. if she did she'd try and cast it

IdleRich said:

the art cannot simply be replaced by a description making the art redundant.

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that's how the likes of creed "practice" innit...

IdleRich said:

This has been the case (at least with some artists) since the renaissance though, I really don't think it's important.

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the nature of the media is very different now i'm sure you allow. i suppose they didn't have the internet in the renaissance tho

IdleRich said:

It does if you've poured time and effort into the idea.

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are you speaking from personal experience? i think there's a different emotional attachment and resonance to something you've physically laboured over.

"haha. if she did she'd try and cast it"

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Funny but probably true as well.

"that's how the likes of creed "practice" innit..."

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Not sure what you mean here.

"the nature of the media is very different now i'm sure you allow."

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Well yeah but I don't see that much difference between Hirst telling someone to cut a sheep in half and Rodin telling someone to scale up one of his models to full size.

"are you speaking from personal experience? i think there's a different emotional attachment and resonance to something you've physically laboured over."

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I dunno, I think that you wouldn't have any difficult in accepting that a physicist (say) could spend ages labouring over an idea and being desperately disappointed on discovering an irreparable hole in his theory. Likewise a politician whose idea for a better society is unrealised - why shouldn't an artist care about their ideas in the same way?

lmao

fokse vektaire xeven said:

if she did she'd try and cast it

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thread needs more toccowich

fokse vektaire xeven said:

it's true that the only really admissible response would be to counter with good work.

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There is that, but I don't even mean in terms of a response, or how something is judged, I just mean to do something, it's good for the health if nothing else.
I probably have specific examples in mind, but sometimes, often, excessive criticism of others comes from a sublimated and unfulfilled need to make something. Not that slagging shit off can't be fun and creative.

IdleRich said:

- why shouldn't an artist care about their ideas in the same way?

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Yes i agree, you could even say it's more difficult to lose an idea as there is no physical object there to represent the effort and attachment.
Someone said that music is the loneliest of the arts because there is nothing left to show after the sound has gone*. I guess that was in the days before tape recorders, but you get the idea.

IdleRich said:

My girlfriend is doing a load of stuff in her phd about why, if the idea is paramount in conceptual art, the art cannot simply be replaced by a description making the art redundant. A worthwhile question I think.

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It seems the realisation of conceptual art is still deemed necessary by way of illustration and in order to ascribe value to an idea - 'if it's not worth making it, it can't be any good' - and that's still rather culturally atavistic on the part of the art 'world' I think
Weirdly, maybe science has the edge here with a thought experiment like Schroedinger's Cat being a beautiful piece of conceptual art that doesn't need to be made to have an impact.

* It is also true to say that sound waves never actually die so every sound ever made is still vibrating through universe. Man.

There's a Gilbert and George-shaped hole in this thread, I think. To those here who are in some way initiates into the 'art world' (if that doesn't sound completely stupid - I mean people who study/ied art, teach it or make it), what's your opinion of these guys? It's certainly conceptual, but as a rule it seems to go down pretty well with the public. Is that just because a lot of it is self-consciously 'controversial' in a Sex Pistols kind of way, do you think?* Or simply because it's colourful and eye-catching? Or because there is enough of a 'technique' about it for people to distance it from the really theoretical stuff like Creed or Damien Hurst?


*although, as has been already discussed, what isn't these days?

I think they're popular as a brand, whether or not you go there as to whether that's interesting or not is another matter, they've certainly been successful.
I don't think 'the public' go to see their work as much as to buy into the idea of British eccentricity they sell; for the life of me I don't know why they haven't released a line of 'G&G' underpants with Marks and Spencer yet.

at all dismissing art degree shows

you get free wine at most of the opening shows
at some you even get free food

i agree with 3bodyprob;lems point that it is essentially harmless, if you dont dig it then fine, but you might find something that you do like right? and then thats all good aswell.

art is so subjective anyway, thats what i like - sometimes i like seeing something, and not even recognise that it was made by someone else as a piece of art, and just let my imagination be sparked off by the image thats in front of me, whats wrong with that?

i find its mostly better when you dont know who's done what, i.e. dont go on opening night because the "pretentious wankers" will piss you off.

they are all free events, anyone can go to them, you dont even have to understand anything about anything, but if you go into a show with that mindset that its gonna be "pretentious crap" then i think thats what you'll condition yourself into seeing

people need to spend more time thinking about and making art, not less. i just wish i had the time to do so aswell.

MaurizioCattelan in an interview;

Spector:Are there other artists whose work intrigues you enough that you want to adopt it as your own?

Cattelan:The problem with that question is that i am not an artist. I really dont consider myself an artist. I make art, but its a job. I fell into this by chance. Someone once told me it was a very profitable profession, that you could travel a lot and meet a lot of girls. But this is all false; there is no money, no travel, no girls. Only work. I dont really mind it, however. In fact, i cant imagine any other option. There is, at least, a certain amount of respect. This is one profession in which i can be a little stupid, and people will say, 'oh, you are so stupid, thanks you, thank you for being stupid.'

"thread needs more toccowich"

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True, but you could say it about any thread.

"it seems the realisation of conceptual art is still deemed necessary by way of illustration and in order to ascribe value to an idea - 'if it's not worth making it, it can't be any good' - and that's still rather culturally atavistic on the part of the art 'world' I think"

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But the question she was dealing with was more to do with philosophical necessity rather than the pragmatic necessity of making it acceptable to the art world. I mean, I suspect that if she thought that the only reason that CA needs to be realised was because it's easier for people to get a handle on that way then she would have concluded that it's not actually necessary and that CA can in fact always be replaced by a description of it.

"There's a Gilbert and George-shaped hole in this thread, I think. To those here who are in some way initiates into the 'art world' (if that doesn't sound completely stupid - I mean people who study/ied art, teach it or make it), what's your opinion of these guys? It's certainly conceptual, but as a rule it seems to go down pretty well with the public. Is that just because a lot of it is self-consciously 'controversial' in a Sex Pistols kind of way, do you think?* Or simply because it's colourful and eye-catching? Or because there is enough of a 'technique' about it for people to distance it from the really theoretical stuff like Creed or Damien Hurst?"

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I don't think that they are more technical or controversial than Damien Hirst - I think it's just that they've got a gimmick of being these two weird guys who hang around together the whole time (seemingly) and eat in the same restuarant every day so that they can become local "characters". Er, basically what Mistersloane said in fact.

"they are all free events, anyone can go to them, you dont even have to understand anything about anything, but if you go into a show with that mindset that its gonna be "pretentious crap" then i think thats what you'll condition yourself into seeing"

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But I genuinely don't think that anyone on this thread is going with that mindset.

IdleRich said:

But the question she was dealing with was more to do with philosophical necessity rather than the pragmatic necessity of making it acceptable to the art world. I mean, I suspect that if she thought that the only reason that CA needs to be realised was because it's easier for people to get a handle on that way then she would have concluded that it's not actually necessary and that CA can in fact always be replaced by a description of it.

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Yeah I'm sure she's tackled it in depth. That was a just a one sentence thought I had about that as an aside really. It is still a philosophical question as to why it needs to be realised though and I acknowledge that. And of course CA is by definition a huge open space and in many cases the concept itself will call for the necessity of a physical manifestation, so to speak. Interesting area to ponder though, if you have the time.

"Yeah I'm sure she's tackled it in depth. That was a just a one sentence thought I had about that as an aside really. It is still a philosophical question as to why it needs to be realised though and I acknowledge that. And of course CA is by definition a huge open space and in many cases the concept itself will call for the necessity of a physical manifestation, so to speak. Interesting area to ponder though, if you have the time."

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Sorry, didn't mean to sound negative and I think what you said is definitely true anyway so didn't mean to disagree either.

mistersloane said:

I think they're popular as a brand, whether or not you go there as to whether that's interesting or not is another matter, they've certainly been successful.
I don't think 'the public' go to see their work as much as to buy into the idea of British eccentricity they sell; for the life of me I don't know why they haven't released a line of 'G&G' underpants with Marks and Spencer yet.

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Yeah, I suppose you can never underestimate the British public's love for a real 'character'.