Here's a link on Koons - and people being polarized about him..
Jeff Koons by D. Coupland
ohhh... nice one JL!
Those damn lurid statues of La Ciccolina
uugggh yes - the phrase Emperors new clothes springs to mind - on a par with Hirsts pickled cows
we had this enormous flower dog in Sydney for a while too - so kitch. Where has Koons gone anyway? Taken his art scam money and ran for it?
Osso -- that link said Koons "is still the crucial bridge between the ironic and post-ironic worlds..."
I'm making myself irrelevant by asking if we need this bridge.
Uhhh... here's an annoying kind of "art" -- William Weman's stupid Weimaraners. I hate those.
I like the weimaraners themselves... but am a bit sniffy about posing dogs in outfits, kind of a using-the-dog sniffy.
But if Wegman had stopped with the first dog, Man Ray, I'd probably have been fine with it; I'd liked some of those first photos, especially as Man Ray grew older. I remember thinking some of those early photos were beautiful.
Some friends lived in the same artist studio building as Wegman did when Man Ray was still alive, and they liked how he treated the dog.
On Koons and the bridge, eh! I think a lot of that kind of art is trivial, but, hey, I've been wrong before. I can see what Coupland was saying, I just don't care very much.
What upsets me about charlatans like Koons and Hirst is not that they are making money. If there are people willing to play the game of the art (investment) industry and make and lose large amounts of money, who cares? But the success of people like Koons and Hirst (mis)leads the public into thinking of the goals of art as fundamentally different from those of artists like Van Gogh and Matisse who sought only (or mainly) to bring beauty into the world.
That is the point, isn't it, JLN? The art world is getting such a bad name from conservatives... it makes it even worse when the art isn't based on aesthetics but some expectation of being clever.
There is always that element now of how clever it is...
The thing I dislike the most is people reading crazy sh*t into your work and your standing there wide eyed thinking "what the? Did I mean to say that?" - when all you did was create what was in your mind or what you saw.
Maybe we can put those people into the Annoying Art Category (bit like a leech or something).
Yes, Piffka, clever, and the virtue of being ORIGINAL in the sense of being different (for its own sake). It seems to me that artists need primarily to be authentic, in the sense that they produce what their sincere eye tells them is worth producing. If one is authentic, originality will follow by itself. But originality, in the sense of shocking innovation, especially when it represents an iconoclastic idea, is the result of that most pernicious of notions: the avante garde, with its high priest, Marcel Duchamp,
Oh, these words sound so good... Authentic... Sincere Eye... Originality... and of them, I think I love "Sincere Eye" the best.
