A few very scattered thoughts on art. I would love to knit them together better but am trying to concentrate on my real homework (honest). Please feel free to comment below.Following a psuedo-structuralist discussion we had in the smoking area about the marvel, or not, of Rothko "Is it red? Is it Burgundy? Does it matter?" I thought you might be interested to read this. The journalist writes how art is replacing the religious experience in this supposedly 'increasingly unreligious world'.
Rothko himself, who committed suicide in 1970 from anti-depressants, found painting to be a release from the pressures that life placed upon him and at the same time gained comfort from the feeling of solidarity from his admirers: "The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.", he said.
Many people ask the questions: what is art? Who gets to say? What is at stake? Is producing and experiencing art a purely aesthetic experience? Is art shaped by the world around us? and many many more...
On a recent rip to the Tate Modern armed with a new found interest in the links between art and politcs I bumped into one of our fellow class mates who had free entry to the Rothko exhibition. At £12.50 a ticket to what was previously a free exhibition in the same museum one has to question whether the next government will keep to their promise of free entry.
As we face the largest economic crisis since the 1930's sales of art are experiencing the same crashes as elsewhere. Read also at Press TV.
When art is produced purely as an item to be sold, rather than as an expression of the artists creativity, art becomes a slave to capitalist competition and consumerist contortions.
2 comments:
I will furtherly elaborate, but it's useful to insert in the discussion the so called Institutional Theory of Art, referring to a culturally and instutituonally constituted 'Artworld' in which art is defined by belonging to it, not the other way around. Theory before 'artistic genius'. For a nice overview see [http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/visualarts/Institutional-theory-artworld.html], and of course Arhtur Danto's famous article 'The Artworld' where he states (referring to Andy Warrol's Brillo Boxes, as a symbol for the whole of contemporary art):
'It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is (in a sense of is other than that of artistic identification). Of course, without the theory, one is unlikely to see it as art, and in order to see it as part of the artworld, one must have mastered a good deal of artistic theory as well as a considerable amount of the history of recent New York painting' (p.851).
Agree or not, let's recognize that 'art', as many other names, does not mean today the same that used to mean in the Renaissance. Beware essantialize art.
Anyway, art and creativity are overrated.
it seemed free to me too, but membership is £50 a year. here is an article i read a while a go about how british museums are freer that american ones. note 'we are the owners of these institutions'.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/24/museums
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