Conditions for vigorous, innovative art ambience ?

I think Warhol is appropriate for the age. Afterall, art reflects the socio-political-econo landscape of the time. Sure, Warhol lacks the depth of a Rembrandt, but his gifts lie in more of social popular culture interpretation seeing as the camera took the place of representational painting.

No, I will not go play elsewhere. The trouble with these art threads and its contributors is they take themselves far too seriously...

I'm out of my league on this thread. I'm going to the studio. I'm going to get cheap paint and free wood everywhere. Then I'm going to look at it and say to myself "this sucks because I suck. I can't be like them." Then I'll smash, then come back later pick it up off the floor a rebuild it. "Maybe something can be saved." and paint it again and again. Then someone buys it for 500$ and I pay rent buy beer & more cheap paint.

Good luck with "Conditions for vigorous, innovative art ambience ?" I can not contribute. I am not an artist.

Adios, Amigo, but let me say that your post is as profound, moving, enlightening and revelatory as anything the rest of us have said. I do wish you would hang around a bit longer.

cliff hanger, do not go away...
The camera could have taken away the function of representational painting ONLY IF THE SOLE FUNCTION OF REPRESENTATIONAL PAINTING WAS TO GET A LIKENESS.
But...no matter what the style...realism, abstraction, etc...the function of painting was far far more complex than that simple aim. It was the weaving, the touching upon fantastic worlds, the space we were plunged into, the emotions sparked by the colors...these qualities having nothing and everything to do with representation.
It was in this complexity the magic and the mystery and the psychological freedom of painting...oh much much more than representation.\
ACtually, Rembrandt's painting reflects the social and cultural values of a middle class Netherlender...as does Warhol's painting...except that the social milieus and the cultural values have changed. But additionally, Rembrandt's painting touches upon the emotional timbre of his subject, whereas Warhol doesn't seem to much care about going there.

It's what we do not say. When I go to the studio the frustration I have about this thread will come out in the way I swing my arms and the way I plunge my hand into a pile of paint and pick out the dark red not the light blue.

That somebody should think we need to seek them instead of them seeking us. I don't know what to say. The art is the ambience. If you fill a museum or a show with a bunch crap the ambience is crap.

If you are looking for where all the good art is it's where it's always been.

Cliff Hanger, there is a difference, I'm sure you'll agree, between taking oneself too seriously (read: "ego trips") and taking one's life seriously. Artists must take their lives (read: their art) very seriously. If they did not there would no great art in the world.

If the function of painting is to get a likeness of the visible world (and that WAS a major function before photography), the function of ARTISTIC photography is look like painting. Ultimately, the force of art is human subjectivity, not objective representation. I want to see the creative, the aesthetic power, of the artist, not images of sunsets, still- lifes or landscapes for their own sake. When my wife asked me to create an image of something she appreciated in nature, I told her that God (we're both atheists) has already done so. My goal is not to represent but to present images, and I'm confident that painters who paint nature scenes ARTISTICALLY are doing the same thing: presenting THEIR impressions and responses to what they see in nature. I am not a camera, to paraphrase Christopher Isherwood.

G-S, if the artist is a lightening-rod, you are it.
Thank you for your impassioned post. At the
end of the day there is room for us all Cliffhanger.

From the schoolkid who inscribes his name on
a desk, to the tagger who spraypaints his
identity on a freight car or inner city wall, the message is....
"I was here, and this is what I saw"..........

Some achieve the profundity of a Rembrandt,
others the ever changing headline news du jour.

Let us not stop the questioning..............

I guess my impassioned plea, hah, is for consciousness of the difference between where we have been and where we are going.There is a vast difference. Change in art denotes change in culture.Art is a barometer, one of many...but a very important true one.
Amigo, I didn't understand your post about seeking. Can you explain further?
Re : seeking. The process of art is the process of searching....searching for the "real" to paraphrase Hans Hofmann.

Blah, blah. Look, everything you said about Rembrandt and more can be applied to the others before the camera-- sure, Rembrandt had a mysterious, unfathomable technique-- no one has figured out how he did it.

Perhaps I need to make myself more clear-- I am not speaking about Rembrandt copying, I am talking about his painting figuratively. Whatever lush effects were achieved is soley his domain, all the poetry and aesthetics of his work are accepted without question.

However, the camera provided a function that forever altered the painters (and I'm talking about the ones that made the history books) approach to the medium. Therefore, the function of painting changed.

Cliff Hanger, I would generally agree with your last sentence. With the camera, the function of painting changed. But we must also consider the fact that the great classic painters not only "illustrated" the stories requested by their patrons; they also did so beautifully. Turn their paintings upside down and you'll find wonderful abstractions. In that regard the function of painting has not changed.

cliffhanger, please be clear, please.'
What function did the camera provide that forever altered the painters?
How did the function of painting change?
When did this happen?
In whose paintings does one see this change?
Let us wipe out the blah blah, and be explicit.

Yes seriously, as musicians and writers and other people take their work seriously - we are all painters/artists discussing here - practitioners not mere critics who comment but can't create, weaving ideas and interpretations around art that was often not intended by its creators. Not serious in a pompous way, serious in that we enjoy discussion, polite disagreements, analysis and exchange of ideas.

It doesn't mean that we don't enjoy what we do or have fun as we certainly do - without a degree of 'seriousness', curiosity, intellectual input and thought then how can any work of quality be produced?

look at the poem on this page (scroll down a bit) about our conceptual art loving gallery director

[URL=link]http://www.stuckism.com/[/URL]

I love the poem


(I've never heard of this stuckist movement!)

My problem has been a quickening sense of boredom with the products of art (My previous statements about digital art, if read carefully , have been posted as paraphrases of what has been said to me at shows and exhibits). I find myself rediscovering works by The Bucks County SChool, Connecticut Impressionists,The Cape Ann Artists, The California Impressionists. In each of those separate groups , of less than 100 years ago, there is mostly a real attention to the craft of displaying an atmosphere and emotion to accompany the painting.

As far as whats best, its subjective. I like, and I try to do, work which is realistic but not substitutive of a camera. I do a lot of industrial scenes (shitty snow in a rail yard, or boards stacked up) and I do a lot of nature work, (you arrange the subjecs in vignettes).
My nature work can be very sappy and it sometimes annoys me , but people want to buy it and I, like a damn fool , keep doing it.
I know jl is a great admirer of the AE's and I have to carefully scan that horizon to see what I can like.Maybe because my one teacher <Bill Baziotes, was such a dissipate, I made up my mind early that there was nothing there for me.

STUCKISM LINK

Heres the link from vivien about stuckism. The poem is very cool. I copied a bit from their MANIFESTO,


The Stuckists are, therefore, opposed to the current pretensions of so-called Brit Art, Performance Art, Installation Art, Video Art, Conceptual Art, Minimal Art, Body Art, Digital Art and anything claiming to be art which incorporates dead animals or beds - mainly because they are unremarkable and boring.

The name Stuckism was derived, in the best art historical tradition, from an insult, in this case from 1999 Turner Prize Nominee, Tracey Emin, to ex-boyfriend, Billy Childish: "Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck! Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!"


Id love a name like Billy Childish, cept Id be called Vlad Petulant

Yes, I have heard of the Stuckists. They
award a prize annually, just like the Turner
for the most awful artist under 50. I believe
one year an artist won both the Turner and
the Stuckist prize. Ole!

He must have been a marvelous artist!

Actually, I had forgotten that the prize for the
worst artist under 50 was awarded by a
group who pre-dated the Stuckists....the K Foundation.....

"In 1993, Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond of the K Foundation received media coverage for the award of the "Anti-Turner Prize", £40,000 to be given to the "worst artist in Britain", voted from the real Turner Prize's short-list. Rachel Whiteread, who won the real prize, also won the anti-Turner Prize. She refused to accept the money at first, but changed her mind when she heard the cash was to be burned instead, and gave £30,000 of it to artists in financial need and the other £10,000 to the housing charity, Shelter. The K Foundation went on to make a film in which £1 million appears to be burned. "

from here
http://www.concepttshirts.co.uk/articles/turner-prize.htm

The Stuckists went on to present a "Real Turner Award" to the painter they believed should have
been the authentic recipient.

I especially enjoyed the Stuckist assertion that
"the only artist who wouldn't be in danger of winning the Turner Prize is Turner."

mustnt one be alive? , and thereby Turner has himself been disqualified by remaining sufficiently dead?