Art (Contemporary and Otherwise)

[Dropt]

The point of contemporary art is to shatter closed definitions of art and bring about a new one that is to be shattered by someone else. It's up to you to enjoy this fully, partly or not at all.

ps: Boltanski is a fascist using the logic of industrial production inherent in the Holocaust to profit culturally and monetarily from his own position of strength and academic consecration. A dominant using the cries of the dominated to his own advantage is nothing if not morally repugnant. That and charging you €5 to record a CD of your own hearbeat so that he can use the sample for a "collective" work that will serve nothing if not further crystallize his own ego-monument.

It's a bit large for a definition of contemporary art, that has always been the point of the art of the XXth century. Dada's cracked head used to think that they shattered the whole world with their "riot" painting, but they were still painting on something


I like the way boltanski charge us with memories that aren't ours, to convey some sort of "grown-up" feeling to his audience. But, it's often pretty boring at the end, mainly cause it's too serious.

[endersgame]

i got outbid by $104,298,000 today..
but that's ok, i probably couldn't afford the buyers premium..

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704259304575043482913970608.html

one of my favourite giacometti's..

[MASUGNEN]

Moderna museet [Modern museum (like you didn't guess!)], Stockholm, Sweden, has one Giacometti sculpture. The live impression is so much deeper and striking than printed mediation.

It's not only the emaciated, ghostly characters, it's also the massively fettering postament. Giacometti really expresses isolation, fragility, hopelessness, exposedness, experiences and prognosis of a century out off orbit, but do you think perhaps also something about the hope still remaining? the sympathy evoked? the still standing? a defiance? the beauty and strength in human perseverance, the integrity in solitude?

Giacometti once was asked what he'd do if he in a fire would be able to save either a cat or a Rembrandt. He said: "I would take the cat. Then I would release it." Life.

[endersgame]

Giacometti once was asked what he'd do if he in a fire would be able to save either a cat or a Rembrandt. He said: "I would take the cat. Then I would release it." Life.

heh, that's great.

i knew someone that briefly worked with giacometti. unfortunately he was too old to remember.

[ronin]

It's not only the emaciated, ghostly characters, it's also the massively fettering postament. Giacometti really expresses isolation, fragility, hopelessness, exposedness, experiences and prognosis of a century out off orbit, but do you think perhaps also something about the hope still remaining? the sympathy evoked? the still standing? a defiance? the beauty and strength in human perseverance, the integrity in solitude?

I definitely feel hope in them. Not sympathy for my part, but an attitude of never giving up because they don't have the choice, as if the essence of human being still shines through them, even emaciated, stripped of everything commonly used to represent life. Especially as they are by themselves, with a blurred line between life and death since there is nothing around them to determine their state, I see them as strikingly alive despite their corpse like appearance. That's a beautiful and positive thing to me.

[MASUGNEN]

I definitely feel hope in them. Not sympathy for my part, but an attitude of never giving up because they don't have the choice, as if the essence of human being still shines through them, even emaciated, stripped of everything commonly used to represent life. Especially as they are by themselves, with a blurred line between life and death since there is nothing around them to determine their state, I see them as strikingly alive despite their corpse like appearance. That's a beautiful and positive thing to me.

They're like the movies of Béla Tarr. The intense tension makes them interesting, and unitarily understood (contents, mood, motif, production cirumstances, communicative presentation in toto) they express full-scope humanity. Since we suffer, the hope is there; given hope, hence suffering. And, one step further: non-causality, hope and suffering side by side, alltogether.

See this page for some Giacometti comedy.

[endersgame]

this kara walker piece entitled "The Keys to the Coop"

i saw this linocut while waiting for someone at a lobby as they were moving it out of their apartment. it looked so fucking cool.

the actual size is about 40" x 60"

[laughed]

The point of contemporary art is to shatter closed definitions of art and bring about a new one that is to be shattered by someone else. It's up to you to enjoy this fully, partly or not at all.

ps: Boltanski is a fascist using the logic of industrial production inherent in the Holocaust to profit culturally and monetarily from his own position of strength and academic consecration. A dominant using the cries of the dominated to his own advantage is nothing if not morally repugnant. That and charging you €5 to record a CD of your own hearbeat so that he can use the sample for a "collective" work that will serve nothing if not further crystallize his own ego-monument.

I love Boltanski's work. I think it's quite different than that of a Speilberg. I have a book of his where he claims that if you aren't an artist living in Paris you aren't an artist. That's pretty absurd but other than that - he's aight.

[imhauser]

Mel Chin, Revival Field, 1990





heres one of my favorite projects by a great artist

In 1990 artist Mel Chin collaborated with Rufus L. Chaney, a senior research scientist at the US Department of Agriculture, on a project to detoxify a 60-square-foot section of the Pig's Eye landfill, a site heavily contaminated with zinc, lead, and cadmium, in St. Paul, Minnesota.

[MASUGNEN]

Was that art? Could and should art be utilized? I loath »political art«.

[laughed]

agreed. There is a big difference between that and a Robert Smithson.
Saw him on Art21 too. That series has just become awful. How do you go from Robert Ryman to some girl making video-game art? which i loathe.

[klangspiel]

various anthony mccall

[klangspiel]

[Vanna]

^Those are great.

I was actually looking through my iphoto library yesterday and ran across pictures I took from his exhibit at the Hirshhorn a few years ago. Or was it the National Gallery of Art? I forget.

[baizilla]

moriyama