Your opinions on abstract/modernist art

You probably don't want to know that he's done dozens like it.

I think they'd actually work better as a group showing than a one-off.

@Saxon: that's the sort of drivel you say when you don't actually want to know much about art.

I think that most the techniques and styles of Modern art were really important statements about art and society's perception of art when they came out. There were the questions someone mentioned before about what the point of realistic art would be when you have photographs (even though portraits were rarely truly realistic); the use of different colors, especially the new ones like neon colors that had been never been seen before; and the reflection of pop culture into the museum, like Warhol's famous silk screen prints of Monroe or Campbell soup cans, which imitated the reproducability of objects in the way they were made while tweaking the process by individually coloring them, much like each individual human is made the same way but is inevitably individual.

That being said, the art community seems to mostly stick to the same line about "making us question art," and it's become a bit tedious. The people who are going to look at art with open eyes mostly do so already, and they're not making any new converts. New schools of art are not being developed; new schools of Modern and Postmodern art are being developed. There's no one trying to reimagine or reenvision the whole mentality of art. The only attempts seem to be trying to coopt commercial art, like comic books and commercial films. A bit underhanded, that.

No, it seems like the exciting days of art are behind us for now. Now the only news about art seems to be the price people can get for buying pieces more than 50 years old.

I have yet to see anything that addressed or attempted to seriously counter postmodernism without being postmodern itself. I'm not sure it can be done.

But you managed to neatly sum up my biggest irritations regarding the art world at present.

I guess I don't see why art has to be "exciting" from a movement perspective to begin with, I admit.

I just enjoy looking at art that conveys interesting stories and emotions. I could and probably would argue that the stories and emotions themselves being put forth by creative works in general are getting stale, but I don't see the big need to do something "revolutionary" with the method of expression itself.

I mean, words, notes, paint on canvas, those are just tools with which to convey your ideas. You don't go around randomly redesigning a hammer when it already is the right shape for pounding in nails, do you?

No, but you might decide you don't need to just drive nails so then you design other tools.

Randomly? No, there's usually a purpose.

@blueharp

Really? A lot of post-modern stuff strikes me as doing something different just for the sake of doing something different, versus doing something different because you have a story/emotion you can't convey with current techniques.

To re-designing a hammer.

Art is of a slightly more complex purpose than hammers, though they are useful for purposes besides driving nails.

It was mostly an analogy. As in, like I said, you redesign things because none of the tools you have are quite right, not just because you feel like doing something different for the sake of it.

So I see a lack of new movements as either not an issue, or possibly a sign of a stagnation in underlying ideas themselves in general (as in, nobody's coming up with ideas that require new tools), rather than an issue with art specifically.

I don't concur that there's a lack of movements, so much as a lack of cohesion brought on by a rather diverse world. There's not one new thing to try, but a dozen.

Back to the other issue, sometimes it may seem random what people are doing, in some cases I suppose it may be, but there may be a purpose, even if it is just...I'll try something new and see how it looks.

Its not that theres a ;lack of new movements, is that thanks to the digital age and accelerating technology, theres so many new things being tried finding any one coherent movement isnt gonna happen till we have hindsight.

I mean hell, much as I'm not a fan of a lot of Deviant Art, they nonetheless are a venuie for an entire new brand of artist.

edited 26th Jun '11 12:22:40 AM by Midgetsnowman

It's weird but my art teachers seem impressed by the following:

1: Somehow incorporating completely foreign art movements into your works which are both ideologically and culturally alien to your Western culture, and somehow succeeding better than the average American foreign film remake of a foreign classic.

2: Making pop art not suck for the first time in nearly thirty years, because you managed to realise the internet is the last place where pop art hasn't really gone yet.

3: Making profound statements about a certain issue with a very abstract image.

The older teachers don't like blatantly internet related iconography in my earlier work, not because it had no meaning, but because they expect the image to explain itself. And my photograph of an Epic Fail Guy cosplayer lunging into the fray wasn't doing that apparently.