Painting

[sus]

I've been admiring some early twentieth century imaginings of future New York

 

[sus]

These ones, of a multi tiered pedestrian city, are really evocative I think

 

[sus]

This pastoral skyscraper concept from 1908 is a totally different vision but also lovely

 

[IdleRich]

I can see why someone wouldnt like this but there are a few interesting things going on

The way the smoke, the clouds, the water, the snow in the mountain all echo each other, and the smoke/clouds seem to blend into the atmosphere, so you get a sense of this cycle of vapor and condensation

It's pleasant but it's very sentimental. It's like a saccharine pop song, it's not necessarily bad but I understand why people might be limited in how many they can consume at once and why they might prefer something a bit more substantial at times.

For me if I were in a waiting room or something and it was on the wall it would make me look at it and think "Oh if only I was in that cabin with my wife just about to cook the fish I heroically caught for her - that would be so much better than being here in the modern world with all its hustle and bustle and where I anticipate that I will shortly experience great pain when the doctor tries to fix that botched implant". Though pronably in that instance it's relying on the fact that people in a vulnerable state want easy solutions.

By way of contrast, if it were on my bedroom wall and I saw it every day I would very quickly get sick of it and rip it off the wall, put my foot through it and then frisbee it out the window.

I think it does have a place but ultimately that place is not going to be somewhere that people want something they can study for years and be constantly rewarded with new discoveries.

 

[IdleRich]

Kind of stuff Corpsey looks at and pictures himself living in as a hobbit.

With one of those girls in an Improbable bikini-armour combo with CGId ears like a rabbit.

 

[woops]

These ones, of a multi tiered pedestrian city, are really evocative I think

puts me in mind of le corbusier's less appealing plan for Paris

 

[sus]

It's pleasant but it's very sentimental. It's like a saccharine pop song

Well yes but this is what's been said a thousand times about Kincade it's not even a real response we have it's a learned habit

 

[sus]

I want to try to spring some new projection

 

[sus]

Still, I pity him. He has not mastered the art of Return-Maximizing Reading. The trick is to first assume that you are experiencing a world historically great piece of media, and then figure out how that might be the case.

 

[IdleRich]

Well yes but this is what's been said a thousand times about Kincade it's not even a real response we have it's a learned habit

Because it's true - although I've not knowingly seen his stuff before - but what I'm kinda adding to that is that we shouldn't necessarily assume that that is a bad thing. There is a place for that kind of thing... noone can in good faith pretend it's not sentimental but we can possibly mount a defence of sentimentality itself.

I myself can be a huge suckered for sentimentality, particularly when in certain states such as morning drinking through a hangover in a pub, if they stick on a "best of really shit music" I can find myself crying into my beer and I think that is a phenomenon worthy of note rather than dismissal.

 

[IdleRich]

I think I mentioned that time I went to the cinema with my friend and he said "I knew I was doing too much ecstasy when I cried at the volkswagen advert before the film" - easy to laugh (and i did) but it was designed to try and tug at the heartstrings in that way so in some sense it succeeded.

 

[IdleRich]

The thing is you could contort yourself to create an argument about how that painting is actually a hard-hitting and bleakly ironic take on the loneliness of such a cottage cruelly juxtaposed with the expectation of cosiness which is forced on the occupant - but that would be an emptily dishonest intellectual game. I think it's better to engage genuinely and consider what it means.

 

[sus]

noone can in good faith pretend it's not sentimental

Well, but I want to anyway, as an experiment

 

[sus]

What you're saying is reasonable but as George Bernard Shaw said about reasonable people...

 

[sus]

A honing of imaginal powers through interpretation

 

[luka]

what song are you two arguing about?

 

[IdleRich]

what song are you two arguing about?

We're talking about a painting... basically it's a rehashing of what you said the other day about how Gus doesn't understand art but just makes something up and then tries to fit the artwork into his theory. Kinda like you but he does at least watch/read/whatever the work to provide a tiny figleaf of justification for his interesting but ultimately barren intellectual games.

 

[IdleRich]

Arguably cowardice compared to your refreshingly bonkers balls to the wall "I don't need to have read it or even know what it's about to explain it to you" approach.

To me it seems you can genuinely try and work out what something means as say @vershy versh or @shakahislop might do... or you can just make some shit up - @luka style - but the middle way of K-punk or @sus where you read the book and then explain how it justifies your theory whatever it says strikes me as the most pusilanimous

 

[Corpsey]

I can see why someone wouldnt like this but there are a few interesting things going on

The way the smoke, the clouds, the water, the snow in the mountain all echo each other, and the smoke/clouds seem to blend into the atmosphere, so you get a sense of this cycle of vapor and condensation

Interesting—what is it that's so vulgar and disgusting about this?

Is it the garish colours?

Thomas Kinkade, the Painter Art Critics Hated but America Loved

Kinkade fanned the flames of a cultural rift between the art world elite and the working class, and made millions in the process.

www.artsy.net

I prefer this one cos it's so batshit OTT, it's like a bad drug trip

Interesting how his stuff looks like AI art.

 

[Corpsey]

Does also beg question of - what makes a Monet like this so superior? The colour is heightened, garish in a way—the surface is much more interesting, the use of colour more original, the composition much more interesting... Or have I just been trained to like Monet? After all, at the time many critics/normies thought Monet was mad or shit.