I Like Art, But.....

I love art, actually. Who doesn't?

A picture is worth a thousand words, sometimes even a couple of million bucks. Or as in the case of the "Sunflower" almost 15 million or more...

But.....

I have always have problems with the influx or art historians...people that study artworks.

That's fine. I have no problems with that. But in a broader sense, do we really need that many of them?

And the truth is, when someone is a PhD, they have to write papers, they have to try to publish.

So, we get volumes and volumes of books, papers, theories, on artworks.

Take Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" for example. It's been analyzed to death. From that it's his self portrait to that it means he's gay....

come on...

sometimes, I wonder if artists of the modern era create mystiques in arts just because they can play with art critics and art historian's minds....

but I wonder if it was simpler in the really early days of artists. That they simply are drawing/painting exactly what it is....

Then came the snobbish art critics and art historians. Now, theories abound and it gave us the "Da Vinci Code"

which, I couldn't finish. It seems like an interesting book but after reading 2/3rd of it, I had to put it down and said to myself....OK, enough is enough...

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy all the theories and conspiracies and such. But there is such thing as "over doing it"....

on the plus side, it does make one think. On the negative side, it can create something out of nothing....

the most recent "theory" being the one that I read today about Jackson Pollock.

Now, I am not familiar with his work. I've seen some of it.

I must say, I can't say that he is the "BEST" artist to come out of this country. That's a bold statement to come out from ONE critic's mouth.

what makes THAT critic the best critic? And what makes what he says THE statement?

That aside, the theory du jour is that in Pollock's painting, "Mural", an art historian and his wife, another art historian have now made a bold conclusion/hypothesis that Pollock had secretly encoded his name into the painting.

She could make out the letters to all of his name.

But as I read the "argument" for the case. They cannot definitively say exactly where it is...

I tried to look into it. Yes, there are some letters that look like an "S" or "O"

and if we peeled away "Jackson Pollock" we can see that those are pretty common letters.

any lines can look like an "l"
a circle that isn't closed can look like a "c"
snakey looking lines can be said to be "s"

the rest are up for interpretation...

now, these historians work for the Smithsonian...they are "prestigious" in their own rights. They've studied art and devoted their whole life to it. So, who am I to "critique" them...

BUT, who started the "Critic's college" eh??

then, I read that there are art historians that study ONE particular painting for apparently enormous amount of time just to study it....

know what I'd love to do?

I'd love to paint a picture of a bug, become famous with it. Say nothing about it. Make it mystical. Then die and let art critics and historians all over the world study it for the rest of their lives trying to decipher the "bug".

I'd like for them to say that I was trying to encode a curse word into it. Or that it was a nekkid picture of moi embedded within it. Maybe it was a photo of another bug but I painted over it with the new bug and now they are being bugged by why I did it (but I really didn't).

Or, maybe they'll think that I was abused as a child, or that I suffered from split personality disorder because the wings were not symmetrical.

Maybe they'll look at the bug's eyes and theorize that I was blind because the bug's eyes were bigger than the real bug's eyes and that I made the eyes bigger to symbolize sight.

But in actuality. I simply painted a bug the way I saw it. And it was just a bug.

Hmmmmm....by golly, I think I've hit upon another million dollar idea....

I am not knocking that there are important works out there. But are there truly that many of them??? Are all the MAJOR artists out there coding their artworks?

Every year, I would read that this artist's secret is uncovered or that artist's secret is uncovered.
I am wondering, if the artists want to show off their artworks in the first place, why keep it covered??

I guess the mystiques sells the artworks, eh?

I remember one of my friends that was an art student. She told me that for a whole semester, she believed her professor's taste in art and had to agree with all of her choices even when she didn't liked a lot of the artworks the professor chose.

And by the end of the semester, she had even convinced herself to like some of the artwork that she really didn't liked...

I made a bold statement, I told her that is because she was young, and that she was impressionable. And we can be easily influenced by "authorities" because they are in that position to influence us.

At that stage in our lives, we can be easily influenced to buy elixirs and tonics and potions and snake oils and believing that they would work...

in her case, she bought the idea that she liked some of the arts that she later on admitted that she never liked, and still didn't....

Art will always be subjective subject.

And a lot of modern artworks are simply "fads" they'll come and go and be today's big news and tomorrow's forgotten child....

And while I hold an open mind because I do like new ideas, I also question it at the same time.

Do we really need to decipher that Pollock's "Mural" contains his name?

Or can we just enjoy it for what it is, which for me, is a loud, yellowish grey, torrent, mess that was ahead of its time....

I wouldn't put it on my wall, it wouldn't go with anything that we own.

Although in college, it would've gone well with all my milk crates (I had a lot of greyish milk crates in my room)

The "Mural" got lucky, in my humbled opinion. Because there are a lot of artworks out there like that now. But they didn't come out first.

Whenever something is the first of its kind. People are going to say it's "ingenius"...sure...because they'd never seen it before...

but it doesn't mean that others didn't think of it before....

I wonder at the man that invented the first wheel...the lucky SOB...he just was the one that actually made it physically round while others thought of it but were too lazy to actually to physically do it...

not knocking Pollock's importance...but sometimes, timing is everything....

and I am at the stage in my life that I am enjoying "elegance in simplicity"

now, if we were to talk about "The face that launched a thousand ships...."

I can be very subjective about that kind of art...LOL

here is the article on Pollock for those interested:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Decoding-Jackson-Pollock.html#

now, I am sure I have offended Pollock's supporters and fans out there. I sincerely apologize for that. But I will say this and stand behind it.

It's not healthy to believe in something when it is not there....it is not healthy to look for something that is not there.....
(one thing that triggered this thought was when I read that Susan Atkins died today, she was one of Charles Manson's followers that did the actual killing of actress Sharon Tate. Manson believed in "Helter Skelter" by the Beatles. He believed in the secret message and taught it to his followers...young impressionable young folks....and they killed for him....)

it is healthy, to ask questions ESPECIALLY...when it comes from so called "Authority" on the subject...

I was taught to NOT question doctors and law makers...but the older I get, the more I question these authority on the subjects...while they have more knowledge than I do in their fields....do they really hold my best interest in their hearts??

using common sense, and asking questions...we can grow and learn...we can be open to it, but if we feel that it doesn't make sense...then, it DOESN'T make sense...to OURSELVES while it may make sense to others....

I might as well digest a little bit here (for those that ask why I "digest" I really digress and it's explained here in case you're wondering. LOL http://digressingnonsequitur.blogspot.com/2009/08/speaking-of-square-pegs.html)

years ago. I was in one of my argumentative stages. Or eristic stages as some would call it. We were talking about economics and I questioned that we were following Alan Greenspan's plan down to the "T"....

I questioned that one man has such power that the economy flowed with his thoughts and how he cut the rates or how he dictated them. My nemesis argued that Greenspan is invaluable and that his words are the bible to our economy...

I called him a lemming underneath my breath and loudly called Greenspan the piped piper that ate too much pickled pepper....

Economy is the backbone of what shapes or breaks a country and its government(s)....

to have ONE person to have such power, it's scary and overwhelming.

My problem with Greenspan at the time was that when he's pessimistic, the country became pessimistic and the economy would drag.

The feds was created to unify money. Because banks were all printing their own money and there was no sense of unity. That's all...who ended up giving the feds so much power that they started to get to say how we should grow???

btw, nobody has ever been able to fully resolve the "money" issue...

what IS money? What does MONEY worth?

We all started by bartering. That's how economy was in the OLD days... (Flint Stone?)

somehow, the darned cursed Phoenicians invented metal money about 1500 BC and then the Chinese invented "paper" money and now we have this "money" that is representing our hardworks and sweats.

But think about this for a second. Even for those that don't work nor sweat, if they can get their hands on MONEY....they still have the power to purchase (barter/trade) for goods....

if I garden for 10 hours today and made 100 dollars. And somebody stole the 100 dollars from me, they have now the power to buy something with my hard earned sweat while I have nothing to show for.

Where as before money was invented, I could've gardened for 3 different people that I might be able to exchange my sweat for.

I can't change how our world has shaped to be. We are being lead by this "money" that is backed by useless gold and silver and diamonds (although diamonds are quite useful in drilling and other things, though)...

It bothers me that people are willing to die for "money"....it bothers me that "money" dictates economy....

they really are just units that is used to represent what we sweated and worked for....

but do these units justify the means??

Should Bill Gates really be worth billions when his Windows are really junk while Linux and other more superior systems are not worth as much as his crappy windows?

I dunno....I am not an economist but I think I know what true value and worth is...

I guess in a way, we can also blame pirates and looters and pillagers and bandits....that went around villages plundering the "goods"...which are usually gold and silver and jewelries...

they sit on mountains of gold in their hideouts....what is it worth?

(maybe one day, I will write about "Old Man Of The Mountain" and of the Vizier/caliph that didn't share his mountain worth of gold and silver with his people and ended up being locked up to starve to death with it...)

did that made any sense?? I hope NOT.....LOL

excelsior.......