shit in art galleries

[shakahislop]

a trip to tate modern always feels like walking round ikea. they've somehow sucked all the aura out of the art. it's a neat trick.

i've seen some class stuff in the tate modern over the years and massively appreciate that it's free coz when i was like 18 we could just go there if we were in london, no way we would have gone if it was the standard 20 quid or whatever.

i feel the same way about the tate modern and MoMA now though, it's hard to get much out of them. i think its partly the art itself, i mean i don't get a tonne out of modern (as opposed to contemporary) stuff these days, but its also the fact that these modern art museums are now also the sites of mass popular tourism. that kind of high volume tourist attraction thing is what these museums seem to have adapted to - the assemblage of the museum as an institution and the modern tourist trail.

 

[Corpsey]

Visiting this modern art gallery in Munich made me realise that it isn't necessarily modern art that puts me off Tate Modern

PINAKOTHEK DER MODERNE - Ein Haus, 4 Museen

Mit vier Museen zu Kunst, Graphik, Architektur sowie Design unter einem Dach stellt die Pinakothek der Moderne eine weltweit einzigartige Konstellation dar.

www.pinakothek-der-moderne.de

 

[IdleRich]

tate toilets are ok but shakespeares globe is a better bet, particuarly the ones in the basement.

This was the Tate not Tate Modern though, don't really know any pubs nearby, the Tate toilets are really good I'd say.

 

[IdleRich]

Visiting this modern art gallery in Munich made me realise that it isn't necessarily modern art that puts me off Tate Modern

PINAKOTHEK DER MODERNE - Ein Haus, 4 Museen

Mit vier Museen zu Kunst, Graphik, Architektur sowie Design unter einem Dach stellt die Pinakothek der Moderne eine weltweit einzigartige Konstellation dar.

www.pinakothek-der-moderne.de

Germany is very good for museums, Dusseldorf has extraordinary museums for its size.

 

[shakahislop]

Visiting this modern art gallery in Munich made me realise that it isn't necessarily modern art that puts me off Tate Modern

PINAKOTHEK DER MODERNE - Ein Haus, 4 Museen

Mit vier Museen zu Kunst, Graphik, Architektur sowie Design unter einem Dach stellt die Pinakothek der Moderne eine weltweit einzigartige Konstellation dar.

www.pinakothek-der-moderne.de

Germany does modern art museums really well I think. The one in Hamburg is killer. For whatever reason they don't seem to be rammed as well. Also its great that they have have 'kunts' in the name.

 

[sus]

ian check your dms

 

[luka]

shaka answer your own question in your characteristic, adorably earnest way. youre always saying how great modern art is and how much amazing stuff you see in modern galleries.

 

[shakahislop]

shaka answer your own question in your characteristic, adorably earnest way. youre always saying how great modern art is and how much amazing stuff you see in modern galleries

this is a thead about shitting, once again the berks of dissensus have got completely the wrong idea. for the record the best toilets are in regional mexican art museums, like monterrey, they are publicly funded and absolutely empty, you can spend hours in there. the other great thing about toilets in musuems that no-one goes to is that you've just spend an hour looking at things, if its clicked and you're into a kind of visual space you can spend ages staring at yourself in the clean mirror in the empty bathrooms

 

[Leo]

Not to be pedantic, but modern art is a specific thing, covering the roughly 100-year period ending in the 1970s and spanning specific styles and philosophies. What Shaka has mostly been talking about is contemporary art, which includes many types of art but is distinct from modern art.

 

[luka]

why are you being shy and timid?

 

[shakahislop]

Not to be pedantic, but modern art is a specific thing, covering the roughly 100-year period ending in the 1970s and spanning specific styles and philosophies. What Shaka has mostly been talking about is contemporary art, which includes many types of art but is distinct from modern art.

that's it leo rough him up

 

[Mr. Tea]

Not to be pedantic, but modern art is a specific thing, covering the roughly 100-year period ending in the 1970s and spanning specific styles and philosophies. What Shaka has mostly been talking about is contemporary art, which includes many types of art but is distinct from modern art.

Admittedly it is a pretty counterintuitive usage of the word "modern", which in everyday speech is synonymous with "contemporary."

Then again, I suppose postmodernism is pretty tired these days and people have been talking about post-postmodernism for a few decades now, so is post-post-postmodernism a thing yet?

 

[shakahislop]

shaka answer your own question in your characteristic, adorably earnest way. youre always saying how great modern art is and how much amazing stuff you see in modern galleries.

ok if you want to take this conversation wildly off topic i saw something about a year ago somewhere in chelsea that was one big long plinth with two paralell series of square blocks carved out of various waxy looking substances. i have no idea what it was called or who did it so can't find pictures, and anyway with that kind of thing you've got to be there i think, there's no point looking at it on a screen. it was i think, i don't know if this came from my own head or if there was some explanation somewhere, a representation of life and death, the blocks were small at the start of the sequence, rose up in the middle, and then shrunk down to nothing at the end. obviously this sort of thing is outrageously dependent on whether you're in the mood or not and it helps to be really tired i think. looking at it though, it really was somehow despite being so abstract an accruate representation of life and death, something about the specific sizes and textures of the blocks, it felt like getting access to something that i already knew at the back of my mind but didn't have a way of thinking about.

 

[shakahislop]

something i know the name of and can find a picture of, this is a thing i saw in some little town in mass called north adams which for some reason despite being in the middle of nowhere has a fucking huge warehouse full of contemporary stuff. america kicks the shit out of the UK for this kind of thing. this is by louise bourgois, i mean everything about how she's presented is a bit annoying, she's literally called bourgois, she's in all these big collections, she feels like the kind of thing that you're supposed to like, and mostly her stuff is boring i think. this sculpture though looks like some random boring thing at first but again gets at something i've never seen expressed so well elsewhere, that thing of being in bed and wrapped around someone else's body. this is the best photo i could find but it doesn't do it justice in the slightest

 

[shakahislop]

Dia | Exhibitions | Carl Craig: Party/After-Party

Dia Art Foundation is a contemporary arts organization with locations in Beacon, New York, and the American West.

www.diaart.org

this was a godsend in late 2020 / early 2021 or whenver it was i went there, it's about two hours upstate from nyc. carl craig isn't my thing musically but this installation was fucking great. it was a 30 minute sequence or something in a dark basement full of pillars and a nice soundsystem pounding bass at a central point, gradually coming up to a crescendo of 4x4 and the windows opening to let daylight in. you could just sit and lean on a pillar and get enveloped by the bass. not sure how well it would have worked in normal times but at that stage of the pandemic being able to be in that kind of environment was glorious, wholesome. the other great thing in that period was even a fairly well known museum like this one was basically empty and you had this stuff to yourself / you and your friends.

 

[Mr. Tea]

something i know the name of and can find a picture of, this is a thing i saw in some little town in mass called north adams which for some reason despite being in the middle of nowhere has a fucking huge warehouse full of contemporary stuff. america kicks the shit out of the UK for this kind of thing. this is by louise bourgois, i mean everything about how she's presented is a bit annoying, she's literally called bourgois, she's in all these big collections, she feels like the kind of thing that you're supposed to like, and mostly her stuff is boring i think. this sculpture though looks like some random boring thing at first but again gets at something i've never seen expressed so well elsewhere, that thing of being in bed and wrapped around someone else's body. this is the best photo i could find but it doesn't do it justice in the slightest

View attachment 13937

Rodin's The Kiss mutated by exposure to Jeff Koons's tacky balloon bollocks.

(Although infinitely less shit than Koons, of course.)

 

[IdleRich]

I like Louise Bourgeois... when we were in Porto there is a biggish museum of (it says) "contemporary art" called Serralves and it has big grounds to wander round (like the Gulbenkian in Lisbon in that respect) and there is old but not tatty modernist house which is now empty and you can explore it too, it's cool - but outside the house was where her gigantic spider was living at the time (maybe permamently, I dunno) and it looks pretty great, huge alien outside the house towering over Marienbad-style gardens.

I think the best thing with art is when you engage with it and get some kind of extra understanding of something, but, that rarely happens to be honest, so I'm totally happy with the next best thing when you go "dunno what that is but it looks cool/good/fun etc" eg that Anish Kapoor thing at the RA, fuck knows what it meant but there was a big fucking train made of slime going through the rooms and I left in a pretty good mood.

 

[shakahislop]

I think the best thing with art is when you engage with it and get some kind of extra understanding of something, but, that rarely happens to be honest, so I'm totally happy with the next best thing when you go "dunno what that is but it looks cool/good/fun etc" eg that Anish Kapoor thing at the RA, fuck knows what it meant but there was a big fucking train made of slime going through the rooms and I left in a pretty good mood.

yeah its such a hit or miss thing. with you on the cool/good/fun stuff. everyone loves it, exactly like what you're saying, and it's also something that really feels like it's happening right now rather than some movement from the 70s or whatever that you're looking back on

 

[IdleRich]

Actually literally the best thing I've seen in an art gallery for years (possibly since the Redon thing thirty years ago in fact) was the Xenakis thing at the Gulbenkian in September or whenever it was (I described it somewhere else on dissensus so I won't go through it again here), I don't think I've ever had such a full-on intense experience in a gallery or museum before. Probably it helped that we had been on it all night and all day but I don't think it was just that.

 

[IdleRich]

yeah its such a hit or miss thing. with you on the cool/good/fun stuff. everyone loves it, exactly like what you're saying, and it's also something that really feels like it's happening right now rather than some movement from the 70s or whatever that you're looking back on

Also I think when we went to the Cezanne thing the other day and was able to leave thinking "yeah I've really looked at a lot of Cezanne and can properly confirm that he bores the tits off me" then that was still a sort of worthwhile learning experience. I might have been less philosophical if I'd paid £24 for it though instead of getting in free by impersonating someone called Edwin H****** whom I don't even know but is presumably a friend or acquaintance of the guy who gave us the card. I was sweating like a whore in church every time I used it, almost broke down and confessed everything.