I think it's partially the myth of tallent that puts me off. That we like our painters to be spontaneously gifted and genius with the skills of painted illusion (and dumb to scientific cheating).
Well, that's not what the conference organizers are saying. Do you think all this concern for the inception date of modernism is just a smokescreen, that what people are really upset about is that Hockney is exposing our heroes as...gasp...cheaters? That's even dumber! You could spend a day in an art school and see dozens of people with the eye/motor/spatial reasoning skills that give them the ability to render something "just like a pitcher" almost instantly. You realize something that comes that easily to so many people is just not that impressive, especially if their "pitchers" have no punch.
|
- bill 11-27-2001 10:07 pm
Well, that's not what the conference organizers are saying. Do you think all this concern for the inception date of modernism is just a smokescreen, that what people are really upset about is that Hockney is exposing our heroes as...gasp...cheaters? That's even dumber! You could spend a day in an art school and see dozens of people with the eye/motor/spatial reasoning skills that give them the ability to render something "just like a pitcher" almost instantly. You realize something that comes that easily to so many people is just not that impressive, especially if their "pitchers" have no punch.
- tom moody 11-27-2001 10:40 pm [add a comment]
I realise that but they and their target (wide as possible) audience seam comfortably bedded in a mythic status quo of what determines artistic tallent and yes, their attempt to reevaluate what made late 19th c. avant-garde work important is fruitless.
- bill 11-27-2001 11:04 pm [add a comment]
Personally, I'm all for the artist-as-heroic-genius, I'd just rather it wasn't based on simple rendering skills. That's where the wider audience could use some "edumacation."
- tom moody 11-27-2001 11:58 pm [add a comment]
Evidently Hockney's target audience (buying into the myth of rendering-skills-as-genius), includes Susan Sontag. From Today's Papers, on Slate: "The LAT fronts artist David Hockney's contention that many of the Old Masters—Rembrandt, Vermeer, etc.—used a 'camera lucida' to project images of their subjects onto canvas, thus allowing the artists to trace their paintings. Hockney, whose theory was the basis of a symposium this past weekend, insists that though some artists used an extra tool, it doesn't diminish their achievements. But Susan Sontag doesn't buy that, 'If David Hockney's thesis is correct, it would be a bit like finding out that all the great lovers of history have been using Viagra.'" I can't believe the person who wrote "Notes on Camp" and "On Photography" said that.
- tom moody 12-03-2001 7:24 pm [add a comment]
And since when did Viagra make anyone a good lover?
- steve 12-04-2001 4:54 am [add a comment]
Yeah like ol' Bill Traylor using his cardboard straightedge to draw dogs upside down.
- frank 12-20-2001 7:39 am [add a comment]