Art With a Capital F

I don't know about The Fountain. The only response I have to it is a need to rush to the bathroom. Its philosophical point flushes.

Maybe Duchamp, using his subversive and ironic wit, was merely trying to draw attention to successful resolutions of design in banal objects....

I imagine he took gleeful delight in shocking everyone, as did his successor, Warhol.

Exactly what I thought from the beginning, shepaints. That's why I compared Duchamp to Samuel Beckett's Breath.

leltty, i'm still on duchamp here.

when i was in art school Dwayne Hanson came to speak. he introduced his lecture by showing a slide of Duchamp's "nude" and he made a comment along the lines of "if this is a nude descending a staircase then pigs can fly". the comment was made to get a rise out of the stuffy academics of art. the ones who hd spent early, endless hours in ther studios hoping to one day make a painting that could achieve what duchamp did without self-consciousness.

well, his coment worked. the faculty and students gasped, afterwards, during the Q&A session they attacked him. the tone was "how dare you".

i thought it was hilarious. the very foundation of their careers, painting. architecture, what have you, was based on this stuffy, never "deride the masters" approach.

i say, more power to Hanson for saying it. he single handedly deflated ther egos and the group mentality of what was "valuable" in art.

lightwizard, duchamp's nude was not conceptual, it was figurative. although it was based on the concepts of cubism, his referencees were from the human form. he summed it up in one painting and then he was done with paintng.

and, as someone who went to art school i can attest to all the posing, pretense, politics, snobbery and ass-kissing that took place.

you were unlucky. At my university they expected you to experiment, question, challenge, defend your viewpoint and discuss. Any of the above would have been put down fast by the majority of tutors.

The odd poseur tutor who was like that didn't stay long and i avoided their classes like the plague!

interestng, vivien. over the years, anyone i meet who went to the same school has at least one horror story.

Ah, Gala. I applaud you for applauding Hanson.

Nothing would do me but to try Dom Perignon. After all, it's the bubbly of choice for James Bond. I was certain there was something wrong with my taste buds, because it was just not what I expected. As a matter of record, it was really not bad, but not good, either. We are often brainwashed into thinking that if the upper echelon deem it proper, then it must be so; if it's expensive, it must be desirable.

There was a joke that circulated once that had to do with haute couture. You turn to someone who you might think is a dilettante and ask?


What goes well with a henway?

The phoney, might pause and study for a moment, pretending to think it through.

The straight shooter will probably ask, "What's a henway?"

Then comes the punch line:

Oh, about two or three pounds.

letty here's another example of the ruthlessness of the environment:

when i was in school, i had a painting teacher that they they were tryng to get fired. he was fantastic, and completely into letting us discover on our own.

they were trying to can hm cause he challenged the conventions of the painting department and he came from the "outside". out of the 9 painting faculty, 7 of them had graduated from this school.

so to save his job, he did some research. he found a letter from alumni, Jenny Holtzer, who by then had become quite famous, (one of her lines that she engraved into park benches was "stupid people shouldn't breed") but she had been a student, long before fame, at my school.

her detailed letter described why she refused to partcipate in an alumni exhibit, she was offended by their wooing her when they made her life hell when she was a student. and she named names. all the names were familiar to me cause the professors were still there. they threatened to not let her graduate because she was dong art that appealed to her and not to them.

that's a digression. what's this about a delacroix painting you mentioned?

To all here, and to Gala.

I must return later, because I am in the middle of a masterpiece.

It's called Beef Stroganoff. (poor man's version.)

Gala...I went to a lecture once called "The Eye is not an Ear".....the lecturer, Canadian Artist, Harold Town, ripped to shreds some of the
mistakes of the maestros of art history. ......The gist of his message
was, "less awe and reputation, more real visual discrimination".......It was fun....and ....shocking!

Well, hey, I always respond personally to work first, last, and, as I said, always. But I also like to hear what is going on, or was, in the art conversation between artists (in any field) at the time the work was done because so much is a call and response thing, a dialog. That has brought me around to enjoy some work I sloughed off.

White paintings, there. I remember seeing a white painting by Eva Hesse at the Norton Simon museum long ago, (hmmm, I think it was white..), and grumbling to myself. Now I get it that white has rivers and valleys of whiteness and textures and variations in luminosity and so on. I've just learned to look more from listening.

Letty, as one who prefers Lambrusco to expensive wines I'm with you on that one! The pretentious collectors and critics are unimportant in the long term though.

Yes Osso, I have often been brought round to appreciate, if not like, art work by the intelligent insight of others.

Gala what a shame your college was so bad, My foundation year was rather like that many years ago - a prestigious college but the tutors told us at the beginning that they aimed to give us nervous breakdowns and change our work entirely

My degree course many years later (I got married and had my daughters in between) was so different, with tutors pushing us in our own directions whilst making us experiment.

shepaints, it's enjoyable to see the stuffies of art academia get a jolt.

i spent my last semester of art school in italy. i was thrilled to be there. i was under the false impression that my school would hire italian painters to come and speak. instead, they brought in their own-- more stuffy academc artists from the american academy in rome.

one lecturer was this american artist who had this sort of 1930s boston accent. his stuff was just remedial-- hazelnuts photographd on an industrial carpet aand he gave a long winded, tedious overeducated lecture.

i challenged him. boy, did i pay for that. the message was clear, don't upset those in power.

and, when the teacher i mentioned, the one they tried to fire came to visit the school in rome, i told him about the subtle and not so subtle ways the director of the rome program was treating me.

he told me that when he was at yale, he challenged Robert Motherwell, an icon, and he payed for it as well.

Good morning, all.

I am a little under the weather today, so I will thank you all for your input and enlightenment.

Gala, If you have a moment, you can go back and look at my post about De la Croix, and perhaps you or the other folks here can find out something about what he painted. Joseph the Carpenter, with which I was so taken, was not done by him, but another Frenchman. (De la Georges, I think)

Later, my friends

Letty, I don't know the painting you are speaking of.

Gala, what a shame! I have learned the importance of keeping my mouth shut in such circumstances (and speaking my mind when I get home/on the internet/ in formal papers!)

Well, I looked up the name De la Croix on google and came up with this -
Charles La Croix

then the light dawned! Delacroix!!
Eugene Delacroix

Letty, to read about Georges La Tour, see this web page - and then click on the title, Joseph the Carpenter
Georges La Tour

There's also Michel Delacroix, the more commercial living artist who is classified as a naif painter (a trained painter who paints in a primitive style).

"Nude Descending a Staircase" is figurative but that doesn't disqualify it as a precusor of conceptual art. Showing movement on a two dimensional surface is a concept. "The Large Glass: Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors" has the same reference to movement and is contraptional as well as conceptual. It's a kind of sophisticated picture puzzle.

It depends on who is trying to debunk a Motherwell or a Duchamp. It often cannot counteract a real expert's opinion like a respected art historian. It's freedom of speech to have one's own opinion on whether they like or dislike a work of art. To try and convince others is another story. One would immediately question the credentials of the dissenter and the motive which could be sour grapes. :wink:

Michel Delacroix:

http://www.axelle.com/indexsoho.htm

I've sold a lot of the limited edition prints in the past as well as original paintings at $5,000 to $75,000.00. It makes more sense on his limited edition prints that they are considerably less expensive at around $1200.00 for new editions.

Hmmm, I noticed Gretchen Dow Simpson listed on the same site. I used to like her New Yorker covers, which stopped about the time Tina Brown became editor.

Betram Delacroix, Michel Delacroix' son, runs Axelle Fine Arts and they have three retail galleries. I've been trying to get them to open one up in Laguna Beach, California.