Let's have some empathy for the security guard, tasked to watch over something called "The World as Non-Objectivity," an art exhibit at the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg. I mean I'm trying to be non-objective!
Here is the alienating image, "Three Figures" by Anna Leporskaya:
Look at them long enough and they call to you. Have mercy, kind sir, give us eyes!
He got out a ball point pen and drew in little eyes. Who are you to condemn him? An objective observer? What are you doing here, in The World as Non-Objectivity?!
***
The headline at The Daily Mail says, "£740,000 painting is ruined after 'bored' security guard draws eyes on faceless figures on his first day in the job at Russian gallery," but the text of the article says, "The painting is being restored, the damage... can be eliminated without any long-term damage to the artwork." The cost of repair is estimated at £2,470, so that's a far cry from "ruined."
You see? We don't need Russian painters from the 1930s to nudge us, artistically, toward the concept of non-objectivity, which usually tends to mean abstract, without reference to things in the real world, but aren't those supposed to be heads?
Maybe not! Maybe that's the eye-dee-a. They're NOT heads. Not at all. What makes you think they are heads?
But we don't need Russian painters in Yekaterinburg to demonstrate the absence of objectivity, because we've got our idiot press, every damned day, with something as bad as saying a £740,000 painting is ruined when it can be completely restored for £2,470. We've got non-objectivity like mad.
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44 comments:
Art History as a major was a mistake.
What would we do without a press that contorts stories for click-bait all the time. The press lost its objectivity some years ago.
Also, schools don't seem to be teaching the young to be critical of first impressions as they can coral the kids on to the latest scam du jour.
On first appraisal, I thought it was thumbs and fingers identifying as heads… or transitioning.
I love the story about the custodian who vacuumed up a big pile of lint at the MOMA, not knowing it was an "art installation."
Could be apocryphal. But I saw that particular "installation" on a visit to New York museums decades ago, and I would have vacuumed it up too.
I absolutely hate reading anything in the Daily Mail because it is so repetitive and because it repeats itself over and over again and because the writers are apparently being paid by the word so they find several ways of saying the same thing again and again. Read an entire article in the Daily Mail and you’ll find that it’s fluffed up to three or four times how long it should be by repetition. Annoying.
Maybe the Russian security guard was fighting The Man.
I once went to an estate sale in Palm Beach, out of curiosity, and the place was festooned with modern abstract art. I would have killed myself if I had to live in that place with that stuff on the wall, every piece disturbing.
Rather than ruined, it sounds like the painting was defaced.
Dirty Q-Tips I see.
If I was the security guard I'd have cleaned off the edges and made then look fresh and new.
"defaced" or "refaced"? I guess by restoring it, they have defaced it.
Context is that which is scarce
I'm thinking that there may have been vodka involved.
Also, if some bloke paid 740,000 quid for it, it's already served its purpose, eh what, gov'nor?
This can be fixed. The best restoration guys are magicians.
If you keep looking, the eyes were already there. The guard just painted what he saw with the only tool he had.
Art is where you find it. Put Baumgartner Restorations into your browser and follow the YouTube link. Mesmerizing viewing for those with a weakness for this kind of thing - I watch people clean watches and turn oak trees into lumber for entertainment, as well as reading this site.
It takes all kinds...
They could send the guard to Siberia, but ....
Of course, one of the all-time greatest 'restorations' was this one, Ecce Homo.
At the time, I was horrified that this happened. Now it always makes me chuckle, for some odd reasons.
Wikipedia says the police aren't pressing charges because the damage was "negligible." The Daily Mail says otherwise.
I guess it's an interesting picture because it comes from a time when Stalin was consolidating his power, and the regime was becoming hostile to abstract art. Many artists and others probably thought they and their countrymen were becoming faceless.
"I love the story about the custodian who vacuumed up a big pile of lint at the MOMA, not knowing it was an "art installation.""
#thingsicalledbullshitonatthetime
He should have drawn sideways smile emojis on the blank faces. That would have improved it.
I had a friend years ago who was a portrait artist. He was very gifted, and made a living from it. He said that the pressure at art school to paint in abstract images was intense. Some of his fellow students and professors treated him with disdain, because he liked to paint real people, with detailed accuracy. He had to play their game in order to graduate, and create works that were the opposite of what he wanted to accomplish.
Wait ... isn't that Circle Back Psaki inn the middle?
The middle one is Jen Psaki. The blank, featureless face represents her being an empty conduit for State propaganda. If I didn't respect private property, I would deface it by filling in the blank space with one of those cartoonish faces used to show NPCs. I might also draw one of those Russki fur hats with the hammer and sickle, such as Ms. Psaki has been known to wear.
I would have drawn fingernails and cuticles, as if they were fingertips hinged and grasping through holes in a translucent screen.
Just to mess with everyone's perception.
Who paints finger puppets with crazy wigs? Is this the Russian museum of mental illness?
a £740,000 painting is ruined when it can be completely restored for £2,470
It'd be more accurate if £ meant Venezuelan Bolívares, then the painting would be worth US$1.65, a pretty good price for a thrift-shop painting, which is what it looks like.
Those are non-player characters.
Isn't there a woman in Spain who specializes in this kind of non-objective restoration?
How can someone ruin a piece of garbage? He improved it.
"Rather than ruined, it sounds like the painting was defaced."
Interestingly the opposite of "defaced," it was an effort to add a face.
They look like match heads
Refaced not defaced.
The security guard is a hero.
The paintings were ugly and creepy, and they would have been less ugly and creepy with eyes.
The modern art world need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
I don't use twitter, so I don't know what the reference concludes, Ann. I did say the story might be apocryphal. But the "installation" itself looked like rotting insulation with little mirrors here and there. You can find the same at any city dump without paying $25 for the privilege. The museum of modern art in D.C. might be even worse. One "installation" there was merely a bunch of fluorescent tube lights hung at random angles.
One might conclude the artists are showing sheer contempt for custodians and cleaners. But I wouldn't give them credit for thinking that hard.
A lot of people think that NFTs involve paying good money for crap. NFTs join a long line.
"The press lost its objectivity some years ago."
The press has never been objective.
"Objectivity" was a relatively recent self-created and superficial attribute of journalism in order to appeal to more readers and increase sales.
I'm still chilly, so those looked like wooden matches to me.
It's a shame we can't see the security guard's contribution. I imagine big sad doleful brown eyes like in those awful child paintings that were big for a while (in the 80s?)
My father's parents had a family friend--a high school art teacher and talented guy--paint a portrait of the three boys (son #4 was not there yet): my older brother, me, and the then-youngest. We would have been 10, 6, and 4; it's actually quite good; I'm the only one looking at the viewer, the blond (grew out of that) and the only one still alive. I would hang it in my own home if I could stand looking at the other two--for diametrically opposed reasons.
"I once went to an estate sale in Palm Beach, out of curiosity, and the place was festooned with modern abstract art. I would have killed myself if I had to live in that place with that stuff on the wall, every piece disturbing."
Serious question: What is disturbing to you about "modern abstract art?" It simply reduces the aesthetic building blocks of any kind of picture down to the essentials: shape, mass, color, value, and line.
"I had a friend years ago who was a portrait artist. He was very gifted, and made a living from it. He said that the pressure at art school to paint in abstract images was intense. Some of his fellow students and professors treated him with disdain, because he liked to paint real people, with detailed accuracy. He had to play their game in order to graduate, and create works that were the opposite of what he wanted to accomplish."
This was common during the heyday of non-objective art, (i.e., abstract art), though I think it is fading today. I could never understand such thinking among the art school faculty. Learning the basics of drawing, color theory, design, etc., constitute a solid foundation for creating any kind of drawing, painting, or sculpture, just as learning so spell and write grammatically provides the writer with the tools to write in any mode they wish, to be as "traditional" or experimental as they wish.
Some of the most daring innovators and experimenters in writing or picture-making, such as writers James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, or William Burroughs and painters Picasso, Willem de Kooning, or Philip Guston, to name only a few, were traditionally schooled and had mastered the traditional fundamental skills of their respective artforms.
Artists are limited only by that which they cannot know or do.
"The blank, featureless face represents her being an empty conduit for State propaganda."
Jeezus! Can't you address any subject without harping on your current political obsessions? For what it's worth,every press secretary for every administration is an "empty conduit for state propaganda." That's their job.
Lotharskavitch and the Handpeople…
Look like thumbs with toupees.
740,000 pounds for that? OK.
If Banksy had drawn the eyes, it would be worth 74,000,000.
It's all timing...
Back in the day, National Lampoon had a long-running cartoon series with humanoid characters that looked like hands. Poorly drawn renditions of a cheap and ready model. Connected to Canada ISTR?
If I were the artist, I would be pleased at the response of the guard.
My current "political obsession," Cookie, is liberty. Has been since I read Bastiat as a teen, and I hope it remains liberty when they get ready to box me up and bury me. Unlike you. . .
I had a friend years ago who was a portrait artist. He was very gifted, and made a living from it. He said that the pressure at art school to paint in abstract images was intense. Some of his fellow students and professors treated him with disdain, because he liked to paint real people, with detailed accuracy. He had to play their game in order to graduate, and create works that were the opposite of what he wanted to accomplish.
I was in the Milwaukee Art Museum some years ago. I was mesmerized by the exhibit containing the works of various 19th century German painters. Their work was so intricate, the paintings looked like photographs. Every. Single. Detail. That, to me, is talent. I went to the floor with the modern art, took one look and left.
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