(October 4, 2019 at 12:51 pm)Brian37 Wrote: As an aside, to open this up to painting in general.
Why are people into Picasso or Jackson Pollock?
And does anyone else besides me like Seurat?
One way think about this is that since about the mid-20th century, there have been two kinds of art.
One kind is the old kind: it's meant to give pleasure by our looking at it. The quality is in the object, and how it's made.
The new kind is Warhol's kind. The object itself is not that interesting. There's not much to see. The reason people want them is because they act as a kind of place-holder or token, that says "I'm cool," or just "I'm rich." And they give this message not due to anything in the object (they're cheap to make) but because of the associations they have. Warhol was a cool guy, and Warhol painted this, therefore it's cool.
Koons and Banksy and most of the other famous modern guys all make stuff that you don't have to look at. Seeing a photograph is good enough, or just hearing about it. These are considered successful if people talk about them, and they sell for high prices at auction. But they're pretty much like a poorly-made designer handbag -- the desirability is in the hype and the associations, not in the object itself.
Sad to say, we live in an age when publicity is more successful than artistic skill. The old fashioned guys are dying off: Balthus died, Lucian Freud died. David Hockney is a little old man and deaf as a post, and still making good work, but not for long.
