[BigTex]

PMS, how do you like the piece in my avatar?

I started bawling the first time I saw it.

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BigTex', 'P')MS, how do you like the piece in my avatar?

I started bawling the first time I saw it.

[BigTex]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BigTex', 'P')MS, how do you like the piece in my avatar?

I started bawling the first time I saw it.

[FreakOil]

Thanks PMS and everybody else. Here's my contribution:



This is called "Walking Wealth," by Wu Shaoxiang, a mainland Chinese artist who took up sculpting after being taken out of school and working as a farmer and bricklayer. The sculptures in the series - one of which is on display at an art gallery near my office - are made of cast-bronze hundred dollar bills. If you look close enough, you can see the grinning face of Benjamin Franklin.

The sculptures are (I believe) intentionally derivative of the "Walking Man," by Alberto Giacometti. The Swiss artist was closely linked with the Existentialist movement, and Jean-Paul Sartre wrote an essay on his work entitled "The Search for the Absolute."

According to one art critic, Giacometti's gaunt, elongated figures express "the alienating experience that occurs when you are surrounded by human life and swamped by what seems like faces without meaning and purpose; the bare reality of human existence. This compares directly to the isolation of what Sartre called Nothingness in which 'human reality carries with itself the nothing which separates it’s present from all the past.'"

Wu seems to be saying that wealth does not save one from nothingness; money cannot eliminate the absurdity of a human reality without meaning and purpose. It's a direct attack on modern China and the quest to become rich, the Zeitgeist of the Middle Kingdom.

This is a great period in Chinese art. Iconoclastic painters, sculptors and photographers are assailing all that is held in reverence or supposed to be held in reverence - communism, wealth and even ancient symbols. One painting I saw recently depicted pigs - an animal the represents completion and is a model of sincerity, purity, tolerance and honor - driving a sports car and drinking Coca-Cola. Mao can often be seen in the background of many works, but only in a disparaging light.

It's as if the present and the past have nothing of value to offer.

[Narz]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', 'N')arz, that painting of the night time meeting in the forest appears to be a book illustration of a scene. Where did you find it?

[oowolf]

a new one by Mark Bryan (T. H. Benton on acid?)
http://www.artofmarkbryan.com/last_idiots.html

[bodigami]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Novus', 'S')ometimes I think the art critics exist simply to keep the good stuff out of the art galleries. I prefer not to have the other people decide what is and what is not good art for me. The best stuff by far is drawn by nobodies and does not hang in art galleries. Here are an example:

[evilgenius]

I hate Thomas Kincaid. His so called painting of light doesn't hold a candle to someone like Andrew Wyeth. Every time I see one of Kincaid's paintings I expect to find little hobbits staring out of the window or playing in the garden. It is so much more removed from reality than Picasso and removed in a way that doesn' purport to convey any meaning beyond a retarded sense of safety.

[mercurygirl]

Women in Art

[Narz]

Nice mercurygirl, I sent it to my girlfriend.

[oowolf]

Kinkade? Art for the culturally retarded.
http://galleryoftheabsurd.typepad.com/1 ... kades.html

[spear]

couldnt get the size of the pic right try tomorow