The King's New Clothes.

[retepsnikrep]

I did not post this in the Art's and Crafts Forum as it's not that sort of art i'm talking about, I did not want to upset the members there either. It's just my view of course and no offence is intended. :----

I'm afraid you are too ignorant to really appreciate art. At a low level you may respond to Constable with his many flaws, or regard yourself as 'avant-garde' by liking Renoir. The very word 'liking' is subject to narrow objective appraisement. I hate the word 'liking', preferring encompassment. Encompassment by all the senses of the subject fully, in an ethical, moral as well as a physical sense.

Correct. That's all cobblers, means nothing.

Is Bach Good? Or Andy Warhol? What do you think? Come on. What does the real person in you think? Or has the actor persona, which we all develop, silenced him? (or her?) completely.

The Cistine Chapel. Ohhhhh Ahhhh. Ankor Wat. What? 'Worth seeing, but not worth going to see.' I agree. And scenery. Good Heavens. Tall bits. Flat bits. Green bits. Very dusty sandy bits. And that's it. I grant you things are nice to look at. It's life. Gawping about you all the time. I like the conker tree I can see from my kitchen window, but I'm not flying to Canada in the Autumn to see square miles of trees. It's a matter of scale and I have sufficient imagination to picture trees writ large. The fish and chip shop has fish and seaweed painted on one wall. And a crab! So I don't need the Cistine Chapel.

We're very fallible, us humans, very weak. What we really think is hard to get at. We confuse ourselves between our first reaction and what we think our reaction should be.

Andy Warhol photocopied Marilyn Monroe lots of times, red and blue. It's nothing. It's a waste of time, his doing it, and anyone else taking trouble to see it. Andy painting a bean tin I can relate to. It's good painting as it looks very like a bean tin, but I wouldn't get up from a comfortable chair to look at it or have it on my walls. If you can paint something that looks like something, fair enough, do it if you must but it's all pretty unnecessary.

So, in art matters, go with what the real person in you says, never mind the 'experts'. The more expert they get the more constricted by jargon and pompous they are. They are seduced by the pseudo-intellectual hot-house and come to see some imagined significance where other low-brows can't. There is no significance in deck chair canvas patterns or splodges. Don't let them tell you there is. Pay no heed to anything which is called 'untitled', or 'design' or 'movement' or 'sub-space strategy annihilation.'

The musical equivalent of modern art, a hundred and fifty years ago was Bach and his family and his baroque ilk. Bach's music is mathematically precise tootling. How people ever sat in the Esterhazy Salons listening to Chamber Music for hours, I don't know. The expectation of life was less then and this may have had something to do with it. Music that 'makes you think' i.e. Schoenberg, Bartok, Schopenhaur, Schopenbasket, etc. is not worth the effort, do a crossword instead. To absorb the music you have to sit absolutely still, shut your eyes and try to work out how discordant it can actually get.

A large area of 'humbug' are writings about modern art. Recent masterpieces are an unmade bed and an exploding shed. Don't want them. My wife would make the bed and knock £20,000 pounds off it's value and with the shed, you daren't nip in for a screwdriver unless you became a bit of moving modern art yourself. This is called a 'happening'.

Apropos the unmade bed. If enough pundits say an unmade bed is worth a fortune then someone with more money than sense will want it. These 'more money than sense' individuals are a bit of a paradox. I would think it needs acumen to get a lot of money, more than enough acumen to correctly value an unmade bed at about eight pounds. Perhaps masses of money changes you drastically, or you've got so much there's nothing else to spend it on. I don't know the answer as I haven't got even a small mass of money.

Don't fall for the 'King's New Clothes'. Better the old saying. 'I don't know much about art, but I do know what I like.' Those who know how much lead Leonardo had in his pencil are too rarified. If you you like a picture of three kittens in a top hat, fine, and you're as good as Gungadin the expert with his bristle counting any day.

There was a concert in London a while back called, 'Four Hundred Years of Modern Music.' Were you alive four hundred years ago? Of course not, it's complete bollocks. Too clever by half. I rest my case.

Peter :-5