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Most Overrated Artists...

My mother puts up a Norman Rockwell calendar every year, and I've never understood why people thought those images were pleasant to look at. He has a great talent for making people look absolutely hideous: a mass of wrinkles and bumps. And of course the idealized pictures of American life are boring.
 
logical muse said:
Oh Sefarst, don't you know? All art is crap!

Well, all art that people pay millions of dollars for, anyway. And by that I mean that there is nothing inherent in art that makes it worth that much money.

There is one reason and one reason only that some art pieces are traded for millions; the speculation that someone in the future might pay more. It has nothing to do with any 'artistic' merit of the piece in question.

There, I've said it.
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I agree to an extent in that art doesn't necessarily have any inherent value or usefulness, but I think it deserves some value for its uniqueness. Similar to jewelry, which also doesn't have any true usefulness, I want to say that art derives its value because it represents techniques and imagery that can never again be re-captured.

But paintings like Pollock's, though unique I suppose (in the sense that no one will ever again drip and splash paint onto a canvas in exactly the same way), represent to me pure hype. It seems that every so often, the art world gets bored with carefully constructed masterpieces that pay careful attention to contrast, forms, shadow, etc. and get excited about nonsense (or maybe I just don't get it). This sort of art appears to get the value it does only because high-brow art society types have said it's good.

Because art doesn't have any true practical use, it can get away with anything. In architecture, you can put expression and emotion into a building, but at the end of the day, you're limited by the fact that the building actually has to stand up and be functional. You can put emotion and expression into music, but at the end of the day you are limited by rhythm, meter, and key.

I guess what I'm confused by is why we have art schools when many of the standards of what is "good" are defined by minimalism, abstract expressionism, and so on? Why are paintings and sculptures judged differently than we would a piece of music? A minimalist painting with the entire canvas painted red would seem to me the equivalent of a musician picking up an instrument and sustaining a single note for an entire piece. The Pollock equivalent in music might be a musician randomly banging cymbals and playing wild notes on dozens of instruments and calling it a symphony.

I'm aware that it's mostly subjective, but there has to be some aspect that is at least partially objective. Otherwise we wouldn't have art critics.

My question: Is art really a discipline?
 
quixotecoyote said:
In my limited experience, the more in depth and elaborate the artists' statement are and the more they emphasize their creative process, the more likely it is they're compensating for a lack of quality.
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I have to agree. If you're an artist that has to go to your exhibitions and stand by your paintings explaining what they mean, you're defeating the purpose of the art which, to me, seems to be to portray a certain idea. If the painting or sculpture can't do that without you explaining it, you've failed.
 
Sefarst said:
I agree to an extent in that art doesn't necessarily have any inherent value or usefulness, but I think it deserves some value for its uniqueness. Similar to jewelry, which also doesn't have any true usefulness, I want to say that art derives its value because it represents techniques and imagery that can never again be re-captured.

But paintings like Pollock's, though unique I suppose (in the sense that no one will ever again drip and splash paint onto a canvas in exactly the same way), represent to me pure hype. It seems that every so often, the art world gets bored with carefully constructed masterpieces that pay careful attention to contrast, forms, shadow, etc. and get excited about nonsense (or maybe I just don't get it). This sort of art appears to get the value it does only because high-brow art society types have said it's good.

Because art doesn't have any true practical use, it can get away with anything. In architecture, you can put expression and emotion into a building, but at the end of the day, you're limited by the fact that the building actually has to stand up and be functional. You can put emotion and expression into music, but at the end of the day you are limited by rhythm, meter, and key.

?
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Actually,there are many works of music that are the musical equivalent of many of the works spoken of above - and they are not held prisoner to rhythm, meter and/or key. And they are played on occasion.
 
I think Pollock produced some great art. Including Number 22. I guess I'm in the minority here on that issue; well, opinions, ********, etc.

Wikipedia tells me that this is the second most expensive painting every sold:
Woman3.jpg

It's not that I don't like it, but ... 137 million dollars? Really?
 
Gregory said:
I think Pollock produced some great art. Including Number 22. I guess I'm in the minority here on that issue; well, opinions, ********, etc.

Wikipedia tells me that this is the second most expensive painting every sold:

It's not that I don't like it, but ... 137 million dollars? Really?
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That's what I'm saying. Art is art; love it, hate it, be indifferent, just don't think it's worth $137,000,000.00. Try unloading that piece now there's a global financial crisis going on, and see how much it's "worth".
 
fuelair said:
Actually,there are many works of music that are the musical equivalent of many of the works spoken of above - and they are not held prisoner to rhythm, meter and/or key. And they are played on occasion.
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That would be the anti-music called hip-hop, rap and country.
 
Back when I was listening to the local jazz station every night on the midnight watch, (due to the lack of anything else...) they would play pretty much staightforward stuff early, then get more and more "outside" as the night wore on.
You always knew you were in trouble when the DJ would say things like, "These guys are actually good musicians and they really do know what they're doing..."

Then they would launch into a "progressive" piece that sounded for all the world like a group of 10-year-olds had been given a bunch of instruments and told to "make noise".

Then, to go along with "minimalist" art, we had "minimalist" music.
The "broken record" school of composing....
 
One thing missed here is that individual works of art don't exist in a vacuum.

The pieces we're walking about here are a part of many histories:
The history of that artist's work, where it came from and where it went
The history of a an art movement.
The history of our visual world in general and how these "overrated artists" became the influence for the designers who created the clothes you wear and the buildings of our cities.

The art market is Bull, just like all markets are bull (what is a barrel of oil really worth?).

I don't have any sort of money at all, but if I did, I would gladly pay for a mediocre peice by an artist with an interesting carreer, knowing that it was part of the story.

Just like an old baseball is neither more beautiful or useful than a $5 one from the corner store, if it had been hit by Babe Ruth, I think people would be willing to pay a bit for it.
 
On the subject of "If it requires explanation, it's bad art"

That is such rubbish!

Are you saying that anyone can enjoy James Joyce without a bit of special eduction and outside preparation? How about Chaucer? Proust? Pynchon? Foster Wallace?

The best things that art can give you often require a bit of work to tease out, not because they were deliberately hidden, but because they are complex rewards that can always be accessed that way.

Good visual art can be every bit as serious as literature, and may have a barrier of entry that requires you to KNOW something to appreciate it.
 
Andy Warhol is overrated, in my opinion. I'm not saying that he didn't have some good ideas, but I think he gets more credit than he deserves. Um, deserved. Whatever.

I see the parallel with music though. I personally enjoy some of the more experimental, avante-garde music. And I enjoy some abstract art as well. I remain quite impressed with Pollock's Blue Poles which is still hanging in the National Gallery of Australia.

But art is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. If someone is willing to pay thirteen million dollars for something, who am I to say whether that's ridiculous? It's that person's choice to pay that much, not mine.
 
Cavemonster said:
Just like an old baseball is neither more beautiful or useful than a $5 one from the corner store, if it had been hit by Babe Ruth, I think people would be willing to pay a bit for it.
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But Babe Ruth is independently famous and talented without that baseball. The baseball is valuable because it was hit by a famous, talented guy. The guy was famous because he could play a game well.

In the case of art, however, that argument becomes circular. An artist derives his fame from pictures, so how can the pictures derive their value from the fame of the artist? There needs to be something about the painting itself that gives it value independently from the artist (unless the artist is someone like Hitler, in which case the paintings would derive their value similar to your Babe Ruth example because Hitler is famous for things independent of his artwork). I would think that should be the quality of the work.

I agree that the art market is made of a lot of bull, but I don't agree that it's entirely bull or that all markets are bull.
 
Pablo Picasso (I expect no one to agree. All art is subjective.)

Oh, and for music...Kanye West
 
Cavemonster said:
On the subject of "If it requires explanation, it's bad art"

That is such rubbish!

Are you saying that anyone can enjoy James Joyce without a bit of special eduction and outside preparation? How about Chaucer? Proust? Pynchon? Foster Wallace?
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I think that if Sefarst and I were saying that, we would have said it ourselves.
 
Cavemonster said:
Good visual art can be every bit as serious as literature, and may have a barrier of entry that requires you to KNOW something to appreciate it.
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I don't disagree with you. For instance, I probably wouldn't be able to "figure out" Picasso's Guernica without knowing something about the Spanish Civil War. Just as I might regard Huck Finn as a pointless children's story if I wasn't familiar with American history and literary traditions.

Compare that with my pet example of Jackson Pollock. Even the titles of many of Pollock's paintings give us no clue as to what they are suppose to be about. From wikipedia:

Wikipedia said:
Pollock wanted an end to the viewer's search for representational elements in his paintings, thus he abandoned naming them and started numbering them instead. Of this, Pollock commented: "...look passively and try to receive what the painting has to offer and not bring a subject matter or preconceived idea of what they are to be looking for." Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, said Pollock "used to give his pictures conventional titles... but now he simply numbers them. Numbers are neutral. They make people look at a picture for what it is - pure painting."
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He encourages me to "look passively" and not bring a preconceived idea to the painting. He wants me to look at a picture as just a pure painting. He doesn't even give me a title to work with, just a number. Maybe we could say that Pollock wanted his paintings to bring something out of me rather than me taking something out of it? At this point, though, it feels like we're just reading tea leaves. He splashed a bunch of chaos onto a canvas and is now basically telling us, "you figure it out." Perhaps some people like that--being able to read any meaning they want into a painting. But, at that point, his paintings are really no different than an ink blot test. He hasn't really put anything of himself into the painting.
 
Stubbs.. He Presumably intended realistic portrayals of horses, failed miserably.

I like Cezanne
 
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