BS: Artsy or Fartsy?

Subject: RE: BS: Artsy or Fartsy?
From: Georgiansilver
Date: 22 May 04 - 09:19 AM

ART as with any other kind of beauty..is in the eye of the beholder.
Be Blessed.

Subject: RE: BS: Artsy or Fartsy?
From: Sam L
Date: 23 May 04 - 01:18 AM

For some people telling them you're an artist seems to mean something like you're spending all your income on lottery tickets.

    Personally, I think good mediocre artists are often better in many ways than lots of great ones. Shakespeare isn't really very funny--one tries to find it funny--and his early stuff was tortured and gross, striving for effect. Cezanne is clumsy beyond all reason. Gogol can't even begin to describe a young woman, as if he's blinded by headlights. Michelangelo's women look like he hated to stick breasts on those awesome dudes, and hoped they'd fall off later (and bounce). Mattisse is pretty much the only convincing fake-outsider probably because he sneaks in a real folk-art weird clunkyness disguised as a put-on folk-art weird clunkyness. Clever ploy. A lot of great art utterly sucks in the things it isn't focused on, the stuff it has to skip to get to somewhere else.

Nabokov used the Russian word poshlost to refer to a sense of the fartsy. I think some of the stink of ego in poor art isn't even real ego, it's just that people can't give themselves permission to make art, but feel they have to put something "important" and "serious" in it. So the ego-junk is thrown in to justify doing it at all, as an excuse, a note from mom. I once saw a local artist try to explain his paintings of a tree in fall, winter, summer, and spring, in terms of chaos theory and strange attractors and so on. "My mom says I can paint a tree this way, because of the new physics." People can't possibly really be as gassy as all that, they'd explode.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but art involves more eyes than one's own. It's the sharing of experience, with the sensibility of the artist, with others, it's sitting around the fire and hanging out together that makes it good. It's camping.

Subject: RE: BS: Artsy or Fartsy?
From: dianavan
Date: 23 May 04 - 02:28 AM

You're right. Although I could never handle fame, I am getting to the point where I would enjoy a little recognition. I have no hope of fortune.

One of my favorite paintings by a friend is just what you describe, Fred. Its a painting of an early 60's 'formal' hanging on a coat hangar. It is so lush and beautiful and yet strangely detatched. Reminded us girls of ourselves when we were 16. Somehow she captured it with that dress. We all 'got it' the moment we saw it. That lonely elegance of a young girl.

She tried to sell it for years but no buyers. Then one day when she really needed some money, she painted fairy wings on the shoulders. Well, she was laughing all the way to the bank.   

I often wonder if she will achieve fame and if I will be tempted to tell the story of what was now just another piece of high-priced trash.

Subject: RE: BS: Artsy or Fartsy?
From: Ellenpoly
Date: 23 May 04 - 06:54 AM

The single piece of art that moved me more than anything else I can remember was when I was teaching drama up in Juneau Alaska one summer. I decided to base the summer workshop around the Exxon Valdez spill which had happened earlier that year, and we had all sorts of projects based on how the enviornment affects us both as a community and individually.

One girl, aged 12, created on her little portable Casio Piano, a piece of music, called "The forest". She was extremely shy at first to play it for us, but when she did, I found my eyes welling up in tears within the first four notes. It was inexpressably beautiful, and I snuck a peek at the rest of the class who were all as mesmerized as I was by this girl's magical music. It lasted 7 minutes.

The thing about art is that it's everywhere, just waiting to burst out. It knows no age nor culture nor anything but the moment it "becomes".

I keep wondering if that particular piece would have come into being if this child hadn't been moved towards it by our class and the thought process it may have engendered. I like to think it would have, but you never know, and it certainly reminded me of how we are all part of the instigation process...xx..e

Subject: RE: BS: Artsy or Fartsy?
From: GUEST,Richard
Date: 23 May 04 - 05:56 PM

Hello. I love art in any form.

Subject: RE: BS: Artsy or Fartsy?
From: GUEST
Date: 25 May 04 - 05:23 AM

Refresh

Subject: RE: BS: Artsy or Fartsy?
From: Sam L
Date: 26 May 04 - 03:09 PM

There's a vein here now--oddly effective pieces we've come across.

There's a local painter who used to do thickly painted impressionist things, and for awhile she was using the sort of trendy device of painting a picture across several different panels, that you hang together to make the picture. One of these really struck me. It was three vertical panels the same size showing a view of eastern parkway, a divided road here with lots of trees. But each panel had a tree in the left front and one in the right rear of the panel. So although together they looked like a single image, they also suggested three repetitions of the same scene--the loose impressionist technique roughed them in as sort of the same. The center panel had a little tree growing between the two big ones--growing there, and then gone again, if viewed as a sequence. I found it really odd and interesting, a kind of conceptual maybe-narrative/ironic impressionism. None of her other stuff followed that track though.

This and other odd pieces remind me of Gogol's comment that he "respects" flowers that grow by themselves on graves.