[PenultimateManStanding]

There was one song of the Grateful Dead's that I liked: Truckin'. The rest of it: blah, I'm with you. Rockwell:

[Eli]

Yeah I will give you Truckin but agreed most of their stuff is shite.





This is one of the few war posters he did Rockwell purposely chose to paint the subjects he did he avoid the stark darker side of the this world, he chose to paint America maybe not as it was but as many people wanted it to be.

Their is hopefulness and whimsy and sense of nostalgia to most all of his work and a sense of patriotism that many people find patently offensive.

[Hawkcreek]

--

[SinisterBlueCat]

http://www.museumofbadart.org/

[BlisteredWhippet]

I would answer that Art should be beautiful, in some way. Thats a personal preference.

I'd like to touch on Kincade for a moment. I saw a TV special on him a while back. He is a money-making machine. He does his own paintings, but those are sent to a Giclee printing facility. I didn't see any 3rd-world people adding highlights. Most of his time he spends flying around the country, visiting fans and collectors, and administering his retail industry.

Kincade's "Art", and the community that consumes it, is dedicated to the sentimentality for an American life that never existed. That is why people buy and collect Kincade. Similarly, most "high art" traded in the circles of the international auction houses, pushed by the avant-garde of modern art criticism, is not art judged solely on a piece-by-piece basis.

"Beauty" is ephemeral, eternal, and totally natural. It is not the subjective realization of someone's internal bias, however elegantly proposed. Form, function, aesthetics, especially human aesthetics arise from naturally harmonious elements, not because someone plants a flag in it and decides for themselves what is or what is not beautiful. That is the assignation of sentimentalism. That is the beauty of Modigliani: the romance of his foreign sounding name, his peripheral connection to the avant-garde, a romantic fantasy about his desperate life and the sexual adventure connotated by the female subjects in his paintings, and especially his fixture in the canon of Western art by critics and academia. Every failure becomes a masterpiece in a larger, more interesting opera of the personality, lifted centuries later into our own demi-god rockstar and actor celebrity culture. The "artist" and the art become meaningless, as the lower concept of human expression becomes the higher meta-concept of artist as experiencer and creative force in life itself.

Beauty in art is fresh, direct, like a slap in the face. Virtuosity is undeniable and uncomplicated. People that come to understand that beauty is something you sit down and squeeze out of a piece of Art are experiencing something entirely different. Beauty is NOT in the eye of the beholder. Neither is all art about making beauty.

But art should be beautiful, in its craft, intention, and execution- yes. I guess it makes me an aesthete, but.... if I were predisposed to think that absolute crap was beautiful just because I thought it made me a better person, I would just be an idiot with no sense of beauty.

[EdF]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I') feel the same way about music too the Gratefull Dead sucked not a single one of them could play an instrument well they were just stoners that wrote songs for stoners and they sounded like they were stoned when they played(which they were of course).

[PenultimateManStanding]

Here is the most prized possession of the Museum Of Bad Art (MOBA):



And here is the earnest commentary that goes with it (clearly these people are quite serious about what they do, and treat exceptionally 'fine' bad art as worthy of note and safekeeping):

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'P')ORTRAITURE #1
Lucy In the Field With Flowers
Oil on canvas by Unknown
24" x 30"
Acquired from trash in Boston

This single painting planted the seed that grew into MOBA.

The motion, the chair, the sway of her breast, the subtle hues of the sky, the expression on her face -- every detail combines to create this transcendent and compelling portrait, every detail cries out "masterpiece."


Additional Information
Dear Sirs,

!Bravissimo! Thank you! "Lucy" is clearly the key work in the collection. As with all great art, extended viewing reveals endless layers of mysteries: What is Norman Mailer's head doing on an innocent grandma's body, and are those crows or F-16's skimming the hills?

Wishing you good fortune in future endeavors, I remain,
Richard Gleaves
Distinguished Patron, MOBA

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BlisteredWhippet', '
')


"Beauty" is ephemeral, eternal, and totally natural. It is not the subjective realization of someone's internal bias, however elegantly proposed. Form, function, aesthetics, especially human aesthetics arise from naturally harmonious elements, not because someone plants a flag in it and decides for themselves what is or what is not beautiful. That is the assignation of sentimentalism. That is the beauty of Modigliani: the romance of his foreign sounding name, his peripheral connection to the avant-garde, a romantic fantasy about his desperate life and the sexual adventure connotated by the female subjects in his paintings, and especially his fixture in the canon of Western art by critics and academia. Every failure becomes a masterpiece in a larger, more interesting opera of the personality, lifted centuries later into our own demi-god rockstar and actor celebrity culture. The "artist" and the art become meaningless, as the lower concept of human expression becomes the higher meta-concept of artist as experiencer and creative force in life itself.

[Eli]

Is that a Picasso? I really think he kind of sucked, yeah some of it was good but a lot of it was pure shite. Also after watching Anthony Hopkins portray him as the egocentric lout that he was in life I find his work all the more amateurish and repugnant.

I think a lot of art is good simply because "they" say it is good. Well I say screw that Picasso sucks.

He was the Kincade of the cubist movement and was mostly out to just make a buck.




Picasso had to have his buddy here Gertrude Stein sit 80 times for this... and this is the best Picasso could come up with?? I mean if it was not painted by that old prick it would be hanging in the MOBA.

[PenultimateManStanding]

Willem De Kooning painted the famous 'Woman' series. There were a bunch of equally shocking and ugly paintings with the same theme. They put him in the Art History books. People would look at them and notice the finesse and power and talent that went into making them (De Kooning was European classically trained, as was Picasso) while not knowing what to say or think about the psychopathic fury of it. Maybe some of the critics dug that aspect, I don't know. But don't be misled by electronic reproductions of photos of the originals, with De Kooning or Picasso. Those guys could paint very well, and the strength of their reputations hangs in a large part on the impact of the actual physical objects. They create the impression of indifference to the medium, but that is a long-standing goal of artists anyway, even when they were making beautiful paintings. "Art Lies In Concealing Art" as the old saying goes. That notion reached the height of hypocrisy in the Modernist Movement where artists pretended not to care about the one thing they really did care about. Not that hypocrisy is all bad, but it does give off an odor.

[Doly]

Some people like weird things. And some people think it's cool to say they like weird things, even if they don't. The same thing happens with music. Some people do like stuff that for others is just noise. And some people say they like it because it's the latest.

[PenultimateManStanding]

De Kooning was born Dutch, I believe, but came to America and became part of what may have been the last serious avant-garde art movement, Abstract Expressionism, in the hey-day of avant-garde, the 1950s. Then came Pop Art and Post Modernism and the loss of interest by populations everywhere. There was some top-of-the-heap Post Modernist who was a tireless self-promoter, the idea being to be famous for being famous, who said, 'I'm the closest thing you'll see to Picasso in this life'. I don't remember his name and he isn't famous. There aren't any famous Artists anymore, unless you count Thomas Kincaid.

[SinisterBlueCat]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', '.') There aren't any famous Artists anymore, unless you count Thomas Kincaid.

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SinisterBlueCat', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', '.') There aren't any famous Artists anymore, unless you count Thomas Kincaid.

[SinisterBlueCat]

I gotcha.

sad.

of all the old artists of the past...were they "popular" in their day? I know mozart performed mostly for royalty. isn't there a saying about artists becomeing rich and famous after they are dead?

[threadbear]

PMS, Have you heard of Harry Smith? Fascinating man.

"Traditional American music was only one of Smith's musical interests. From the late 1940s, he was a passionate jazz enthusiast, going so far as to create paintings that are note-by-note transcriptions of particular tunes. He spent much of the fifties in the company of jazz pioneers like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk. Smith's involvement with recording continued into the sixties and seventies as he produced and recorded the first album by the Fugs in 1965. His long term friendships with many of the Beat writers led to the release of Allen Ginsberg's First Blues in 1976 as well as unreleased recordings of Gregory Corso's poetry and Peter Orlovsky's songs. Smith spent part of this era living with groups of Native Americans, and this resulted in his recording the peyote songs of the Kiowa Indians (Kiowa Peyote Meeting, Folkways, 1973)."

http://www.harrysmitharchives.com/1_bio/index.html

He was also a great visual artist. Check out his paintings. The untitled on the lower left is so beautiful, imho.

http://www.harrysmitharchives.com/2_artwork/index.html

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('threadbear', 'P')MS, Have you heard of Harry Smith? Fascinating man.

[Ludi]

"unbeautiful" art often becomes attractive to the non-"elites" as we've seen Impressionism and Post Impressionism become "beautiful" to most people. They were considered ugly messes by art critics in their day.

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', '"')unbeautiful" art often becomes attractive to the non-"elites" as we've seen Impressionism and Post Impressionism become "beautiful" to most people. They were considered ugly messes by art critics in their day.

[eric_b]

Pen: Since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, your question is moot.

Ludi: Have any links to pictures of your stuff/art?