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Re: Fairy Doors, Toynbee Tiles, and Vincent van Gogh
Posted by pancho (Guest) – Friday, June 1 2007, 16:37:44 (CEST)
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thanks for that.

We`re all of us puzzled by modern “art”. So many cliches surround…”if my aunt Tilly can do it, it ain`t art”….”if you don`t know what it means then I can`t tell you”…etc.

At its simplest art is an attempt to say something to someone. Say what? How? You are at the top of a mountian where you behold a spectacular sunrise that makes you feel a certain way. No one else is up there with you to see it and perhaps feel the same, or something different but equally poignant. Who knows where the urge comes from to want to share your experience with others….maybe because, as social animals, we wish to communicate with others and find common ground while at the same time distinguishing ourselves to keep from being swallowed up entirely by the group….and so we write a poem about what we felt on the mountaintop to try to convey a little of the feeling to all of those who were snug in their beds at that hour, or involved in other, perhaps more mundane, affairs.

We write the poem with the intention of making the person who reads it feel something like what we felt up there…we bring that feeling down with us and the only way to convey such a heightened feeling is with heightened language…which is what poetry is…if we do it well, people will get some of the feeling the artist had…the only one among them, perhaps, who cared to go up that mountain at such an hour…and maybe even the desire to climb mountains is a part of the poetic sensibility that will allow him or her to put those feelings down as words.

But something else about modern art is that people don`t want to be driven to their knees, stunned by the appreciation of skill and talent so overwhelmingly unique that it leaves them speachless with admiration…makes them feel small in comparison. If you walk through the Louvre or the Vatican Collection you feel your insignificance….you feel in the company of exalted masters who need nothing from you. I can`t be sure but I think the modern world has cancelled individuality…through modern media and earlier and earlier training we are producing “types”…standard issue. Though the Church was much stronger once and moulded character pretty well, I think the modern age has far more effective, because more subtle means, of making us all alike…and yet people can`t help but feel inauthentic…feel as if they are walking around in someone else`s skin….not knowing who they are and what they really might want, besides what they are taught to want…to need.

The motorcycle that is advertised as having been built with only “you in mind”…is a good example. If you think about it no product can be manufactured that is aimed at a single individual for that flies in the face of mass consumeriam…no one can afford to set up a plant that caters to the tastes of one or two individuals. In reality that motrocycle has been carefully designed so that thousands can be built easily and as cheaply as possible…only no one in the marketing arm is going to put that in print…instead they`ll write down the exact opposite of the truth…of the facts…they`ll claim their mass-produced article, built with the idea of selling all they can, was really made with “only you in mind”….the curious thing however is that customers believe this…because they need to…they need to believe there is something unique about them, and only them….so that when they buy this thing they affirm a uniqueness, a specialness, they in no way truly feel.

People want to be distinctive…they don`t like being mooshed together into interchangeable units…hence the “different” look…which is copied by 200,000 people…each of them convinced they have become “different” or expressed their “individuallity”. We don`t dare risk, most of us, a path that leads through any dangers necessary to arrive at our “self”. But we want to think we have…and clever advertising allows us to believe so.

Modern art demands skills and talents that anyone can attain…you are not supposed to have your breath taken away when you view a Lipschitz or whatever…we demand to be participants….we want to look at a painting and be able to bring our own “meaning” to it…we want to participate. Michaelangelo`s works need nothing from me except admiration…who feels qualified among the general public to “explain” a Rembrandt? But what piece of modern art, since the 1950s, can`t be commented on, even “improved”…or be “critiqued” by anyone? Indeed it is often the viewers comments and reactions that give life, so to speak, to splotches and blobs and geometric patches of color. Modern man and woman…manufactured articles themselves…made to pattern and so well that there is even a pattern that says “no pattern”, if you want…we are needed…we are necessary…we are the missing piece in the puzzle that is modern art….we are the ones to confer meaning…hells bells so many works of art are titled “untitled” you`re forced to believe the artist didn`t know what he was about…and that`s perfectly okay, because it gives the modern viewer a chance to express an “individual” critique…to complete the work of art.

…we need the art we have.

I found your thoughts on art to be informed and interesting. Thanks for putting this blog out there for all to see. I even forwarded it to a friend of mine, an old sculptor, because outside of him, I’ve never really heard anyone else discuss art in this way. (I guess I hang around with the wrong crowd?). Perhaps I need more Ahn-Arborvores in my life.

Talk to you soon…

Fairy doors are not intended as “art”.
Well maybe the one at Zola’s is…I was not aware of that one.

I do agree that there is some “degeneration” (degradation?) that occurs with familiarity and repetition. With regards to “Art” AND fairy doors.

I went to your site trying to show this girl I met your film list, because she also has a film list, which I will show you.

Then when I got there I see that by the first sentence you have slandered my name! (libeled?) Fortunately I *am* the kind of person who pays most of his attention to himself, and that type of person enjoys reading about themselves, on those rare occasions where their attention isn’t focused on themselves directly.

It’s good that when we can’t criticize people directly, at least we have our blogs so that the criticism can eventually trickle down to them through the ether. You demonstrate very clearly, my friend, that criticism is indeed not art.

Etc. If I have learned one thing recently it is that sarcasm is frequently lost in writing. I’m being sarcastic here. This sentence is false.

No, seriously: thanks for the thoughts.

Excellent essay by the way.

P.S. I happened to reference John Malkovich at the end of my last blog entry. (“Pretty Girls” — you’re supposed to read it!) Is this co-occurence merely coincidence or something more mystical? (I couldn’t find the word in my thesaurus.)

For some reason, John Malkovich — like Mark Meves — is in the air today.