Writes Laura Freeman in "Galleries should drop the cringing and tell our story" (London Times).
June 7, 2023
"Visiting our museums and galleries, you might believe there is no such thing as art, only appalling artists and their still more appalling subjects."
"In the last few years, we have witnessed museums in acts of mass self-flagellation. Collections must be decolonised, recontextualised, purged and sent for conservation in perpetuity. Naughty Gauguin, nasty Picasso, horrible, horrible Hogarth. There is a card on sale in the Royal Academy shop designed by the illustrator David Shrigley. It reads: 'It’s a complete disgrace I am deeply offended by everything.'"
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Go Brits. Tell a little truth, maybe it will be contagious.
"acts of mass self-flagellation"
Faux flagellation: they wallow in it, and get rewarded for it.
'It’s a complete disgrace I am deeply offended by everything.'
Tongue in cheek, I know (hope). Nonetheless, the offense taken by earnest progs is also phony: just a stragey to signal virtue and impose prog demands.
"Galleries should drop the cringing and tell our story"
A little naive at this late date. Progs rule. The ruling stories are the stories of the ruling class.
I smell a lefty collaboration with the ghost of righty Edwin Meese.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/politics/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/meese-commission
Where is my crucifix submerged in urine when I need it?
https://magazine.artland.com/immersion-piss-christ-stories-of-iconic-artworks/
A big “cleanse” doesn’t change the past. Why don’t we start from now and see what we come up with going forward?
I expect this author is all supportive of the current cultural trends.
One may condemn the artist (if warranted by the artist's behavior), but the artist's work must never be canceled, but shown, heard, published, performed, celebrated, and preserved (if warranted by its memorable and sustaining quality.) Most art produced is forgotten over time without anyone having canceled it, simply for lack of memorable or sustaining quality.
"Where is my crucifix submerged in urine when I need it?"
https://magazine.artland.com/immersion-piss-christ-stories-of-iconic-artworks/
I think PISS CHRIST is the most beautiful rendering of the crucifixion I've ever seen, (though it's odd to speak of any depiction of an agonizing execution as "beautiful"). It's the only one that conveys an aura of mystery and awe (to me). All others, the better or worse quality of any given one of them notwithstanding, just seem to be illustrations of a man on a cross, merely corporeal in nature.
Photography is the last art form standing. And I don't have to go to museum to enjoy it.
See also the de Young in San Francisco, vs. the Legion of Honor.
Never going back to the de Young.
Also, two observations. One of the largest pieces at de Young is a blowup of a US alien ID card of a 30-ish latina. We are meant to recoil in horror at the inhumanity, but what I saw first was the words "Permitted to Reside" or similar. Official grant of legal status. How wonderful, was my thought.
Second, the new building. Looking at the exterior, I finally realized where I'd seen that aesthetic before. It looked like a First Empire fortress from one of those execrable Star Wars sequels. In SF. Effing hilarious.
I feel lucky to have seen some of the world's great art museums before this era of nonsense. The Louvre, the Tate, the National, the Chicago Art, the Beck and a few more. In time normalcy will return. I'd really like to have seen MOMA but that would have required going to NYC.
"The empty-handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets"
Everywhere we turn, there is ample proof that…really…the lefties are such nasty little shits.
- Krumhorn
Gauguin and Picasso used to be celebrated for the way they used to thumb their nose at bourgeois morality. I guess there's been another turn of the screw and their behavior is now, again, held against them. Tough sledding for priapic artists from now on. Rock artists will be hardest hit. Gauguin and Picasso, for all their efforts, are pale ghosts compared to most halfway successful rock singers. I wonder if Tipper Gore will at long last be vindicated and honored by the Rock Hall of Fame.
Byron was the most celebrated artist of his time and for several generations afterwards. He touched all the bases: incest, pedophilia, homosexuality. (I wonder if he abused the body of that drowned poet. It would be a shame if he missed out on necrophilia.) I think he was the one who made sexual excess part of an artist's journey.
Sigh yet another panic about a supposed panic. Are there real, concrete examples in the article other than the Brooklyn Museum's universally derided Picasso exhibit brought to you by Hannah Gadsby?
(This is most assuredly not an example: One of the largest pieces at de Young is a blowup of a US alien ID card of a 30-ish latina. We are meant to recoil in horror at the inhumanity, but what I saw first was the words "Permitted to Reside" or similar. Official grant of legal status. How wonderful, was my thought.
Nobody is preventing you from experiencing the art as you would like Fred. And that exhibit does not seem to have been about trashing the artist for moral failings.)
I have been to dozens of major contemporary, modern, and classical art museums in the last several years and seen nothing like the Brooklyn Museum exhibit.
I'm calling BS.
As long as the paintings are there on the wall, I'm still fine. I occasionally read whatever text has been thrown up there by the curators, but honestly, even before whatever this new fad is, I hadn't found that it particularly enhanced my enjoyment. I don't have any examples close to hand and I'm not sure how to describe it, but there's a particular somewhat fatuous way of writing that I see a lot in specially curated exhibits. It's not a total waste -- sometimes there's interesting information about commissions, imitations, media, technique, public reception, etc. But when the placards get prosy about meaning and society and whatnot I usually skip over. This stuff just seems like a (bad) continuation of a longstanding trend.
If I'm really interested, I'll just google the artist's name and read the wikipedia article.
Re: Robert Cook:
I think PISS CHRIST is the most beautiful rendering of the crucifixion I've ever seen,
It looks pretty banal to me, like a bit of comic book art, but I've never seen it in person.
That said, I was originally going to reply: what about that huge, ominous sculpture in the Pope's throne room? But then I looked it up and it's actually the resurrection, not the crucifixion.
My wife and I enjoy museums. Whether it's the Prado in Madrid, the British Museum in London, the Vatican Museum in Rome, or the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. We always head straight for the classical, medieval, and renaissance sections. Then if we have any time left, we will walk quickly through the modern art section. I guess I just don't "get" modern art.
I won't go near any big museum. For the last 30 years they have been run by leftist assholes with some agenda to promote.
"Gauguin and Picasso used to be celebrated for the way they used to thumb their nose at bourgeois morality."
No, they were celebrated for their innovative painting, in Gauguin's case, all of it beautiful, and in Picasso's case, because of his fecundity of styles and media, (if not always traditionally "beautiful"). Most people either couldn't give a damn about their personal behavior, or appreciated their art even while disdaining their behavior. The only persons who might have celebrated them for their nose thumbing behavior are those who care only about that, and not the art.
"That said, I was originally going to reply: what about that huge, ominous sculpture in the Pope's throne room? But then I looked it up and it's actually the resurrection, not the crucifixion."
Nah. I'm at a disadvantage at seeing only a photograph of this, but, to the extent I can make much of it, it doesn't do anything for me.
Robert Cook said...
"I think PISS CHRIST is the most beautiful rendering of the crucifixion I've ever seen, (though it's odd to speak of any depiction of an agonizing execution as 'beautiful'). It's the only one that conveys an aura of mystery and awe (to me). All others, the better or worse quality of any given one of them notwithstanding, just seem to be illustrations of a man on a cross, merely corporeal in nature."
Too bad most Catholics don't agree with you, Robert. Otherwise, you could go to your local church festival and get little crucifixes submerged in clear unflavored jello with a toothpick partially inserted where the lanced pierced the side.
A lot, maybe all, of art is self-indulgence by the artist, and the patron for commissioned stuff. The amount of pretentiousness to the whole business of art and its evaluation would, if it could be converted to usable energy, give us electrical power for centuries.
If tolerating pretentiousness is the cost of great art, I'll pay (and maybe even learn something).
I've never seen PISS CHRIST in the flesh, and I wouldn't seek it out.
Writing clear and informative, but brief, exhibit and display texts and captions is hard. I had to do a lot of that at work (archives and library special collections) and also collaborated with museum curators at times.
When I'm in a great city I want to see at least one great museum, more if time allows.
Lots of humble bragging by lefties about all the museums they've visited.
My daughter took me to the Museum of Modern Art in London a few years ago. One exhibit was a board with nails in it in the outline of a fish. There was string around the nails. I wondered who was in charge of replacing the string. Modern art.
"Too bad most Catholics don't agree with you, Robert."
Well, I'm not concerned with that and I don't doubt most would disagree with my appraisal, but why? What is the objection? Because the artist's urine is one of the elements used in making the image? What's innately objectionable about that? I guarantee you that if the fluid the crucifix was immersed in had been identified as wine or ginger beer or apple cider or some other yellow fluid, no one would be upset with the image, and many who now condemn it would probably appreciate its beauty.
There is a lot of pretentious nonsense and incompetent tripe produced under the umbrella of "modern art," but, as is always true, most of the dross will fall away and be forgotten in (not very long) time, and only that art which continues to touch or speak to people in future decades and centuries will survive.
Daniel: the enormous ID card at the de Young is not art at all, it is a blow-up of an actual person's card. It is there to introduce the museum's exhibit about the inhumanity of California's history with "undocumented" immigrants. Ironic, in that the subject woman was a) documented, and b) successful in the US.
I mention it as simply the most blatant example of the tenor of commentary everywhere in the museum, namely, that colonialism, racism, and sexism was and is in everything (arguable I suppose) and that I, personally, should feel guilty about it.
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