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biffvernon
Joined: 24 Nov 2005
Posts: 16872
Location: Lincolnshire
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 Posted: Sat Jan 21, 2012 11:14 pm Post subject: Art |
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Hockney has a major exhibition at the Royal Academy. There's a review in the Telegraph and the comments below have the normal arguefying but this little rant caught my attention:
| Quote: | masistios
01/19/2012 06:20 AM
"Why would someone so clued up wilfully paint as though surrealism, colour-field abstraction, minimalism and all the rest hadn’t happened? These images are so passé they feel like a provocation. I don’t get it."
With access to infinite resources, you can indulge every whim and fantasy. You don't "get it", I would suggest, because your thinking on art is stuck in the 20th century mode; a deluded world in which horizons were thought to be infinate, frontierless. No dream was too big, too great.
It was in such a world, that frivolous artistic experiments could thrive; visual art didn't have to be 'useful' or 'educational' or carry any kind of moral message - it didn't have to be anything at all and so, in most people's eyes, it became nothing.
But when resources begin to run out, you have to reconsider your situation very carefully. It should be perfectly clear to everyone by now, that we do not live on a planet with infinite resources and we will not be able to nourish every single one of humanities whims and fantasies.
So, from Hockney's work and from his proclamations, I assume that he is trying to project a message; the money for nothing era is over - in art, as elsewhere in life.
We have an economic system which is thundering up a blind alley toward a brick wall; a system built on the presumption of ever increasing growth - at the same time as rapidly dwindling resources.
By going back to nature, and to the true nature of art, I think Hockney is suggesting, that if art and artists can't retrace some of our misplaced footsteps, then what hope is there of turning around other, much more cumbersome systems?
The world can no longer afford pointless, useless, frivolous, lazy and self-indulgent artists or artistic experiments. Artists need to be useful now more than ever. They do this by leading the way back from the decadent, vainglorious pointlessness of our immediate past, into something more meaningful, earthy and worthwhile.
If you don't "get it" soon, you will be overtaken by the 21st century, and remain lost in the academic dust of the deluded 20th. The frivolous dreams which gave rise to "minimalism" and "colour field abstraction" are over. The new reality is much more serious. Hockney knows this, I think. You don't - yet.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/9018212/David-Hockney-A-Bigger-Picture-Royal-Academy-of-Arts-review.html
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Ludwig
Joined: 08 Jul 2008
Posts: 3850
Location: Cambridgeshire
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| Posted: Sat Jan 21, 2012 11:42 pm Post subject: |
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Re. the article: another aesthetically numb moron gains a pass to comment on things he knows nothing about.
Still, nice to see sense predominating in the comments for once.
The paintings are fab.
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biffvernon
Joined: 24 Nov 2005
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Location: Lincolnshire
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