[TheForge] Art, doncha know....

[jolarson at comcast.net]

Wow, Ries. Magnificent.  John Larson

-------------- Original message -------------- 
From: ries <ries at riesniemi.com> 

> I gotta disagree with your thesis. 
> It has been my impression, after a mere 50 years or so of travelling 
> the world and looking carefully at art, craft, and industry, that 
> there has always been crap, and there have always been diamonds 
> scattered in amongst it. 
> I had a high school teacher, of the classics, as it happened, at an 
> exclusive prep school, way back when in the 60's, who advanced a 
> theory, certainly not his own, that 95% of everything was crap. 
> And there is a great Mark Twain quote, something to the effect of "I 
> hate the damn Greeks- they already stole all the good ideas". 
> 
> I would suggest that instead of living in an era of charlatans and 
> cheapjack hustlers, we are actually living in an age of some of the 
> greatest craftsmen ever. But since there are 8 billion or so of us, 
> you have to look a bit harder to separate the wheat from the chaff... 
> 
> As for your theories on modern art- they dont hold up to actual 
> scrutiny. Jackson Pollock, for example, was quite a good draftsman- 
> he could draw and paint realistically, to quote Archie Bell and the 
> Drells, "just as good as he liked". He chose not to, intentionally, 
> depict realistic scenes, after having done it for 15 or 20 years, 
> because he was more interested in other ideas. This does not make his 
> work any better or worse- just different. Personally, I have stood in 
> front of quite a few large Jackson Pollock paintings in the flesh, 
> and I believe that he was extremely skillfull, and created quite 
> beautiful pieces that did exactly what he wanted them to do. He 
> certainly cared almost not at all about money, fame, or publicity- he 
> was, after all, the artist who urinated in the fireplace of one of 
> the richest art patrons of his time, and frequently destroyed 
> paintings that he could have sold. 
> 
> I know a bunch of unbelivably good craftspeople living, and working 
> today- certainly, in many ways, the equals of any that ever lived. In 
> most cases, they have not only 20 or 30 or 40 years of skill and 
> practice, but a comprehensive knowledge of their materials that just 
> didnt exist in the old days. Take blacksmithing and metalsmithing, 
> for example- people like Daryl Meier, or Phillip Baldwin, have a 
> better understanding of alloys, metallurgy, and technique than 
> virtually any mokeme gane or damascus maker from any historical era, 
> and then, on top of that, they have an art history, theory, and 
> general educational background the breadth of which simply did not 
> exist in the 18th century anywhere. 
> I can think of another dozen or so smiths today that can equal 
> virtually any historical smiths- in fact, since the greatest 
> historical work was done by teams of large amounts of specialists, 
> they often know more and are more widely skilled than in the 19th 
> century. Certainly, people like Miccelucci were geniuses, and 
> geniuses are rare in any time. But we have a few. 
> 
> As for modern sculpture- you need to dig a bit deeper. I have the 
> feeling you made your conclusions first, then found examples to back 
> them up. Sorta backwards, if you ask me. 
> You are certainly entitled to dislike any artist, living or dead. But 
> to say somebody like Richard Serra doesnt understand form, mass, 
> materials, space, and fabrication as well as Bernini- well, it just 
> aint so. I once saw a film of Serra working with a crew in the Ruhr, 
> in Germany, in the 70's, forging 6 foot cubes of solid steel with a 
> 20,000 ton press- and believe me, the man is no faker- he knows, and 
> understands, steel, on an intuitive level, as well as anyone alive. 
> 
> I have also seen quite a few of Chris Offili's paintings- the ones in 
> which he occasionally wraps up an elephant turd in gold leaf, and 
> uses it as part of the frame. He doesnt toss it at the canvas, he 
> paints, and again, he is a skilled draftsman who paints the way he 
> does out of choice, not ineptitude. He is of african descent, living 
> in england, and to him, the elephant turds have meaning, alluding to 
> colonialism, and the fact that western donors will spend millions to 
> preserve elephants, while in a village a few miles away, children die 
> every day of diaharrea due to the lack of a hundred dollar well- the 
> gold plated turd, if you will. 
> 
> I could go on about a hundred more artists working today, in styles 
> and subject matters you may dislike, but whose command of their 
> materials and degree of education and intensity of thought is totally 
> first rate. 
> 
> You have chosen to become extremely good at what interests you. And 
> naturally, it disappoints when the entire world doesnt see how great 
> many of the things you love are. But this is due to lack of education 
> on the part of viewers, on our capitalist system of cranking out 
> cheap crap for quick consumption- it is not because other artists, 
> who have chosen other areas of interest, are somehow dragging down 
> the civilisation. 
> 
> Ries 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Nov 6, 2007, at 8:01 AM, George Dixon wrote: 
> 
> Looking for a Silver Bullet for Our Silver Age of Art 
> 
> You live in historic times. I am not referring to the issues of 
> climate, war or politics.....I am 'talking art' here. 
> First some perspective: 
> A common touch-stone in history is Rome. Roman society was 
> different than ours, very different, but at a level of human 
> commonalities....we are them and they are us. Humans act, at a macro- 
> level, in ways that have less to do with the times or the society and 
> much more to do with how humans act in large groups when faced with 
> large realities. Call it 'how humans are wired as a species'. While 
> a Roman had to walk to the local arena for visceral amusement, folks 
> today have to be urged by the first responders to "move along" as 
> they slow down to scope out a crash scene. Capice? 
> 
> Rome had what is termed a "Silver Age" (40 BC to 130 AD) in all 
> things creative. Architecture, intellectual literature and art all 
> reflected the dysfunction of complacency. While volumes of 
> literature were generated, they were largely overly stylized and said 
> little that was new. Dogmatic repetition was the order of the 
> literary day. Architecture did nothing new in either material 
> innovation or design. In fact buildings often incorporated the 
> finest details of older structures because those components exceeded 
> the quality of contemporary work. Art followed suit. Sculpture 
> mirrored past compositions and conventions of design, but it did so 
> at a lower level of competency. Skills that were difficult to learn 
> were not popular. Oh....to be sure, there were those who produced 
> and wanted to be recognized as, shall we say 'artists'. However, it 
> appears that they put more intellectual capital into wanting-to-be- 
> known-as or into self-promotion than they did in achieving mastery of 
> their medium. 
> Rome in its Silver Age was a powerful, even dominant geo- 
> political empire. War existed, but far away...the threats of 
> tomorrow seemed to be several tomorrows into the future. The 
> economy worked, goods and food flowed, water flowed, mass 
> entertainment was common and cheap. Things were 'historically good'. 
> That is the backdrop of (and perhaps the criteria for) an age of 
> mental complacency. 
> 
> "History does not repeat itself but people always do" 
> said Voltaire, the 18th c philosopher. 
> 
> Art used to mean that one achieved a level of mastery of the 
> tools and materials and then transformed those materials into objects 
> that were pleasing to the viewer, qualitative in their design and 
> construction and challenging enough in their execution to put demands 
> on the artist. 
> Fast forward to now. The 20th century displays a devolution in both 
> innovation and execution of 'art' that can be measured in generations. 
> 
> As the 20th century dawned, Claude Monet was innovative as well as a 
> master of his oil paints. Impressionism showed a world that 'new' 
> could be complex, different and still demand a growth curve of its 
> practitioners. The work was not literal images of trees or 
> buildings, it was stylized impressions of the subject. But it had to 
> represent the subject well enough that a casual viewer could figure 
> out what was going on in the painting. That took clever, masterful 
> use of color and shape to convey an impression from one mind (artist) 
> to another (viewer) in a manner that everyone saw the same 
> thing....no easy task. 
> 
> Impressionistic and realistic depictions take effort and time both to 
> learn to do and then to do. It is called 'delayed gratification'. 
> Post WW2 was the onset of instant gratification. 
> 
> By mid-century the slippery slope had produced the Jackson Pollock 
> generation. Paint was tossed at the canvas. Since there was no 
> possibility that anyone could recognize the imagery as representing 
> anything from their world, titles became more important. Frankly, it 
> takes no skill to toss paint, bend bars, or stack fired clay sticks 
> into pyramids....and then call it 'art'. It does take clever titles 
> (if it comes with an explanatory title then the imagery failed to 
> work....it must be art) and some marketing to turn a buck with it. 
> 
> "No body ever lost a dime underestimating the taste of 
> the general public" P T Barnum. 
> 
> As the last quarter of the 20th c moved toward the millennium 
> minimalism came to the forefront. The rich artistic traditions in 
> metal, ceramics, jewelry and paint were eschewed (or were considered 
> too difficult and time consuming to learn or master) and in their 
> place we got red boxes placed in subways, cloth draped over both the 
> German Parliament building and some dinky island in the Florida Keys 
> followed by plasma-cut silhouettes in cor-ten steel. Cor-ten has one 
> art property beyond being plasma cutable and wire-weldable....it 
> rusts. It rusts just so far and then stabilizes. Wow! 
> 
> The equally rich traditions of craftsmanship faded as well. A 1990's 
> waltz through the Sculpture Garden of the Hirshorn Museum on the Mall 
> in Washington, DC takes the viewer from silhouettes in the distance 
> that are not unpleasing, up to a more intimate range where the crappy 
> welds and the low level of craftsmanship are dominant. That work 
> simply will not last, too poorly joined, and it has nothing about it 
> that rewards someone who takes distant notice and then walks over to 
> look more closely. The outline at a distance is all the satisfaction 
> you are going to get. Get closer and the basic flaws overwhelm 
> whatever gross design was attempted. Anyway, the walk over is a 
> waste since there are no details to see when you get there. 
> 
> What we have now in our Silver Age is painfully obvious. What got us 
> here was the both intellectual laziness and complacency in prior 
> generations (a by-product of instant gratification)....from which our 
> generations have drawn too accurate a lesson....and a philosophical 
> attitude that the past (pre 20th c) was dead and not to be reflected. 
> Time for something 'New". In that the past had incorporated 
> competency, mastery, material manipulation and a classical sense of 
> design (which was a natural human-wiring evolution by the way...) as 
> its hallmarks; to do something 'New" meant none of that! 
> Cool....except that when you say none-of-that and toss it off the 
> table you are left with a minimum of options for your 'New'. Hence 
> the minimalism shows in our tarnished silver age of one-trick-art- 
> ponies. 
> 
> It is past time for something 'New' again. It's time to toss the 
> tired old 'modern art' conventions and vacuous art-speak baggage of 
> yesterday and today...(see 'found objects' in 'art'). How 'modern' 
> can a 60 year old art concept be, especially in an interconnected 
> time like we have? Let's learn from the Pollock evolution that 
> minimalism is the Emperor's-New-Clothes road to 'art'. Let's realize 
> but not accept that 'art' has been debased both as a term and as a 
> process. (That is, unless elephant poop onna religious icon works 
> for you as art. The elephant worked harder to generate the poop than 
> the 'artist' did to fling it.) Today, good design which is executed 
> with craftsmanship and a masterful manipulation of a medium 
> incorporating rich visual imagery and detail is as strong a rejection 
> of the gray haired status-quo rut of contemporary art as their paint 
> or poop tossed at canvas was a rejection of pre-20th century art 
> traditions. They took a wrong turn, called it art and no-one that 
> knew better spoke up. Then they became academics of art and taught 
> their inadequacies to several generations....and here we are. 
> 
> If you want to have an impact and/or make something which stands the 
> fabled test of time in both design and durability, then you need to 
> consider the pre-20th and early 21st century's art criteria of 
> achieving competency and then mastery of your medium. Once you have 
> done that, start to tackle innovative design. But don't get fooled 
> again. 
> 
> Francis Whitaker used to urge new smiths to strive beyond good 
> enough: "there is plenty of room at the top". 
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> 
> Ries Niemi 
> Industrial Artist 
> http://www.riesniemi.com/ 
> 
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