It's hip to be square

[luna-tic]

How can a painter command huge sums of money for exibiting a coloured square or squares on a canvas and call themselves talented when a child of five could do the same or a local decorator with no previous painting ability?

[jake-the-peg]

Are you talking about Mondrain or Rothko or somebody else?

[jake-the-peg]

Try this

http://reverent.org/an_artist_or_an_ape.html

[luna-tic]

Thanks Jake for the little quiz, I got 50% correct. Rothko's paintings I find more easier on the eyeballs but some of Pieter Mondrian's are quite laughable.I think there's a more modern(as in date) artist that I saw a documentary about a while ago and he was literally putting up canvases with one block colour across the whole thing.Can't remember his name but he had the cheek to put these up in a gallery.
I could of got some card from my local art supplies store and blu-tacked it on the wall with exactly the same outcome. Well I suppose art is whatever you want it to be.

[gizmo1]

Try to get hold of Simon Schama's programme or book 'The Power of Art'. The chapter/programme on Mark Rothko was fascinating and deeply moving. I'm fairly wary of modernist art (prefer 14th century stuff meself) but Rothko was the real thing. You could also try going into the Rothko room at the Tate and see what happens.

[jake-the-peg]

You have to see modern art in the context of it's history.

At the time Mondrian was painting, Van Gough had been pushing the boundries - everyone thought those swirling colours put on with a trowel were laughable at the time, and then Picasso started abstracting even more. Mondrian was pushing cubism further and further until he had just lines and colours - could he reduce it that far and still move, affect an audience?

How modern art affects you, whether it appeals to you at all can be very personal - I have never really got Rothko but I think Pollock was a genius.

He doesn't always get it to work but when he does it's fabulous. In the Tate modern there's a couple of his pictures, the first I've tried to like, I really have but I just don't think it works.

The second is fabulous

http://homepage.mac.com/mag16/UniversityWebPag e/vacantPositions/ImagesVacant/summertime.jpg

Look at it and tell me you can't see the dancers!

[luna-tic]

Yes I can see forms that suggest dancing stick people within all the other various brush work. Don't get me wrong,I am not denouncing modern or any other form of art in general.There is beauty and wonder to be seen in anyone's work but I get the feeling sometimes that certain what are now called famous painters life stories precede their actual ability. To give a ridiculous example; Someone could be walking along the street and a decorator painting a window so many storeys up could accidentally knock his tin of paint off his platform and kill the person below.Now aside from the accident, the paint from the can has made an awful mess on the pavement but then someone could say that looks wonderful let's leave it there not only as a piece of art but in memory of the person killed by the can.But who is the artist? The decorator? The dead person? I think the answer is no-one but the person who saw the splurge on the ground and thought it looked wonderful or you could say they all contributed.

[jake-the-peg]

That's a particularly interesting analogy because you are linking the history of the event into the image.

That does seem to be rather key in a number of people's art (Tracey Emmin especially). It kind of crosses over in an antique roadshow kind of way. How much is a piece of the Berlin wall worth? this 2'x2' piece with an anti-nuclear symbol scrawled on it is up for $50,000

http://www.berlin-wall.net/orderform.htm

History? art? both?

[luna-tic]

I guess every stone has a story behind it.