On Art.

Came across an article this morning that kinda' falls in line with some work we've been doing in one of our classes. It's an opinion piece from this guy, Paul Wallis of Digital Journal. He talks about contemporary art and, seeing as we've recently been exploring some aspects of art, namely kitsch, thought it was interesting.

He reminds us that contemporary art is a business:

Contemporary art, whether anyone likes it or not, is an industry. It has all the howling spiritual sincerity of a fast food chain. Even the fountains of verbal futility in the art world are essentially marketing exercises.

In one of our classes, we are kind of exploring the idea of 'art' and what defines it exactly. This past week we had to explore kitsch art and determine how we personally feel about it and then determine whether it has any value/need in society today.

If we define "art" as the products of humans creativity, and creativity as the use of our imagination, and imagination as something that is perceived and unbounded, then how can art be categorized in the first place? It seems a bit backwards for artists and people to cast art as being in "poor taste." Everything in life is subjective - it is in the eye of the beholder. Obviously, art especially carries this essence. The age-old debate of modern art: some see modern art as beautiful, others do not. So how do we classify any one piece of art as 'kitsch', in 'poor taste'? Its syntactical, no? And then how much does the market for art determine its 'taste' level? There have been pieces of toast depicting the virgin mary that have sold for thousands of dollars...

Wallis goes on to say that contemporary art is dictated subliminally by the market for it:

The raison d’etre of art has moved a long way from the passionate, to the purposeful. Sadly, it’s also moved to the very predictable. Contemporary art is running on rails. Whatever the artistic values, the social values are now buried in cultural innuendo with price tags.

This is a question which shouldn’t be rhetorical: What does art do?
Before the Second World War, there were real schools of art. Even the Expressionists, lazy sods that they were, and Max Ernst, my hardworking idol, could legitimately claim to be individualists. The Beat Generation artists, who will be unfairly remembered as the ancestors of modern contemporary art, were perhaps the last real school, so nebulous and diverse they were never really defined except as Modern Art.
Whether or not art does ]things like that to culture now is debatable. Art is literally a splash of color to interior designers, and a milch cow to galleries. Publicity is the defining factor. Its relevance to anything is strictly nominal.
The definition of Contemporary Art now covers anything and everything.

Find the full op article here.

Just some random food for thought for today.