Lecture- 50 Years a Curator: Whatever Happened to the Art World We Knew?
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- Опубліковано 9 тра 2024
- Tuesday, May 22, 2018, Menschel Hall, Harvard Art Museums
Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., curator of American art, emeritus, at the Harvard Art Museums, and former curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Yale University Art Gallery, offers his views on some of the seismic changes he has observed in the art world since 1961. He describes such positive developments as the growing popularity of art and art museums and the ever-increasing quality of exhibitions, and less positive ones, including the decline of connoisseurship. Stebbins will discuss the work of Andrew Wyeth and Jeff Koons, among others.
Support for the lecture is provided by the Robert and Margaret Rothschild Lecture Fund at the Harvard Art Museums. In addition, modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.
You can confidently skip the first 15 minutes and all you will miss is academics self-congratulating. The speaker transitions smoothly from autobiography to actual content from ~15-17:00.
And huyup123456 keep up the good work
I appreciate his candor.
The economy and business of art is broken in 2019 - why has there not been a great art movement since the 1960s?
1. There is no serious art criticism. If 2-d and 3-d art were music, anyone who can pick up a violin and learn "three blind mice" would be applauded and considered a genius. Or more bluntly there is no one out there who can (or dares) point at the emperor and say "He has no clothes on!"
2. The internet - the internet revolution has ruined the Gallery business, forcing artists to take time to market and sell rather than think, design and create. There is nothing one can do to counter this, the internet is here to stay. And Art business, galleries, artists will be in flux for a bit longer.
3. Painting and fine art is seen as a commodity. Nothing wrong with this, but art is not being judged as fine art - but something that is lighter than gold, easy to store, easy to sell in an economic crunch, and will always have some value. So the average Joe in the street looks at a painting and thinks $$ - the middle class looks at a show and thinks $$ -
4. Galleries take from artists and do not sell - The "art fair" where the artist PAYS in order to hang the works, or the art festival where artists are pushed into tents like a flea market. The artist has to be both creator and salesman, and this will fail. They are two different occupations, you will be a part-time artist and a part-time salesman.
5. The connection between Universities-politics-gallery is elevating art and artists to a level which they have not achieved, and laud mediocre works of little real talent. The work of art is judge by the identity of the artist, irregardless of the quality, design, consequence of the work. I find this very very demeaning to artists. Artists of color and women are treated like special campers, and everyone gets a trophy. It must be the WORK that is produced. I do not listen to Beethoven because he was hearing-challenged, but because his work is extraordinary.
So the result of the above factors have broken the "art world". An artist who wishes to paint or a sculpture who desires to take their art to another level, to refine their work, and achieve finely crafted pieces of visual art.
Thank you for writing that out
point 5 is worth to quote.
Im currently a Canadian art college student, and that's frl.
No one in my class seem to understand the fundamentals.
And if someone is praise it's because they're part of the "MESSAGE".
This is the reality honestly brutal
i collect japanese woodblock prints which inspired the impressionists and are still so very affordable from 10 to 100 usd each for Hiroshige Hokusai Utamaro Kunisada and so many others
Talk starts at 8 minutes .30 sec.
I was with the speaker right up to his comments about Jeff Koons !
Here is Koons' own ArtSpeak explanation of his floating basketball 'concept' verbatim:
“ This is an ultimate state of being.
I wanted to play with people’s desires.
They desire this equilibrium.
They desire pre-birth.
I was giving a definition of life and death.
This is the eternal.
This is what life is like, also, after death.
Aspects of the eternal”
Rather lofty goals for 3 basketballs suspended in a fish tank!!
I cannot be convinced.
They're growing moss last time I looked.
His phoney bullshit was already tired in the 70's.
Many artists wax eloquent on their "inspiration", just words spewed out. I have a portrait artist friend who when asked how she captures her subject's soul and essence says "it's just paint on a canvas"
Koons is our Michelangelo
The art establishment seems to be exploitative of the artist. Most labor in obscurity and many in poverty. None receive royalties for themselves or their estates after the first sale ( unlike musicians ) in which they are generally lowballed. The very few who achieve critical acclaim get nothing after the first sale although their work may eventually fetch astronomical prices. I haven't heard of any museums objecting to this shameful situation or advocating for change. Am I wrong ?
Thank you Harvard for this.
If Modern Art is art, then everything is art. When we open our eyes in the morning everything we see is art. That $15 Walmart toaster is now valued at 50 million dollars.
Tou have no idea what you're talking about.
I like to think Koons is a master troll mocking the pompousness of so much of the art world. In which case, more power to him for making a fortune off them while no one gets the joke.
I mean, the comments on the vacuum cleaners are hilarious.
I actually found it to be very interesting and informative (once you get past all the unnecessary introductions.) Thank you for sharing
I like to twist my body up in kinds of ways so I can shit on my own face.
Un cours est très utile !
People change. Things change. The outside world is a reflection of what lives whitin.
It is too bad the audio is about 4 minutes ahead of the video! Give the tech support guy an F for the day.
I am a graduation for Hawarvad university
What’s with the sound?
Most of it is locked inside my rectum.
huyup123456 don’t worry i have the key
Real money is silent.
I am a political science major And history minor
Precisely because of the decline of skills and connoisseurship now anyone can call himself an artist. This is fine, but when the market coalesces around the idea of “whatever sells” and “fake it till you make it” it leads to the eventual degeneracy and cynical commercialism of Contemporary Art.
How can you say that an untrained artist is an artist? Is an untrained doctor a doctor? These galleries and museums are destroying art by calling art anything that does not require skill, talent and virtuosity . It is shameful that the public accepts these types of works as art and believes curators’ claims that if you don’t see beauty in these works is because you don’t know about art.
GENOCIDE OF BEAUTY
these college lecture auditoriums have F/U acoustics & incompetent audio engrs. Result,,,we can't hear you !!!!!!
Blame Duchamp. Just for his sexual athletics alone.
If I could go back in time and fiat fight one person it would be duchamp
I think that Conceptual art originated with people who could not and would not do the difficult work required to become a 'traditional' artist.
Can't master the necessary skills ?
No knowledge of perspective?
Can't draw?
Don't want to have to learn color theory?
Can't master composition?
No knowledge of human anatomy?
Can't render tonal values
Can’t be bothered ?
These are skills that you have to WORK to prefect.
It’s difficult.
It takes…..effort.
But maybe you want a fast track to the exalted position of "artist “.
Well then, here's what you do:
Belittle the importance of those skills and debase the notion that they are a prerequisite to creating art.
Instead, create an art genre that you CAN do.
A new genre.
And let's call it Conceptual art.
Conceptual artists claim that IDEAS and CONCEPTS are the main feature of their art.
They can slap anything together and call it ''conceptual art'' confident that viewers will find SOMETHING to think about it no matter how banal or trivial the artist's concept!
There is no way conceptual art pieces can be judged.
The promoters of this art have attacked the motives and credibility of authorities and critics who might disparage the work.
They have rejected museums and galleries as defining authorities.
They reject the idea that art can be judged or criticized .
All of this results in a decline in standards.
And when you jettison standards, quality suffers.
There really IS such a thing as BAD art !
We know this only because we have standards and criteria by which such things can be evaluated.
It seems that conceptual art comes down to a basic idea:
No one has the right or authority to make any judgements about art !
Art is anything you can get away with !
A whole new language has been created to give the work an air of legitimacy and gravitas.
Conceptual art is 'sold' to the unwary public with ....."ArtSpeak".
ArtSpeak is a unique assemblage of English words and phrases that the International Art world uses but which are devoid of meaning!
Have you ever found yourself confronted by an art gallery’s description of an exhibition which seems completely indecipherable?
Or an artist’s statement about their work which left you more confused than enlightened?
You’re not alone.
Here are examples of ArtSpeak:
'Works that probe the dialectic between innovations that seem to have been forgotten, the ruinous present state of projects once created amid great euphoria, and the present as an era of transitions and new beginnings.''
Or
''The exhibition reactivates his career-long investigation into the social mutations of desire and repression. But his earlier concerns with repression production--in the adolescent or in the family as a whole--give way to the vertiginous retrieval and wayward reinvention of mythical community and sub-cultural traditions.''
This language is meant to convince me that there is real substance to this drivel which is being passed off as art.
I don't buy it.
But plenty of other people DO buy it.
Not because they love the work.
They are laying out enormous sums in the belief that their investment will bring them high returns in the future.
One Jeff Koons conceptual piece is three basketballs suspended in a fish tank.
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Three_Ball_Total_Equilibrium_Tank_by_Jeff_Koons,_Tate_Liverpool.jpg
Here is Koons' own ArtSpeak explanation of his floating basketball 'concept' verbatim:
“ This is an ultimate state of being.
I wanted to play with people’s desires.
They desire this equilibrium.
They desire pre-birth.
I was giving a definition of life and death.
This is the eternal.
This is what life is like, also, after death.
Aspects of the eternal”
Rather lofty goals for 3 basketballs suspended in a fish tank!!
It sold for $350,000.
I wonder what it would have fetched without Koons' name attached to it.
Or take the case of Martin Creed's ball of crumpled white copy paper.
www.abebooks.com/signed/Work-sheet-paper-crumpled-ball-Creed/7404135374/bd
He made almost 700 of them!
Some sold for hundreds of dollars.
Martin Creed, when asked during an interview how he would respond to those who say the crumpled paper ball isn’t art said :
“ I wouldn’t call this art either. Who says, anyway, what’s good and what’s bad?”
Interviewer:
''When confronted with conceptual art, we shouldn’t worry whether it’s art or not because no one really knows what art is.''
Is this what art has come to??
_______________________________
Something radical has happened to the art scene in the past 50 years.
Cubism slid into non-representational art....what is often called Abstract.
Abstract or non-representational art is a legitimate and often profound genre.
But to many people, it appeared as if this new style had no structure, principles or standards of evaluation.
It’s markings seemed random and arbitrary.
Something that anyone could do.
Any composition of blotches or scribbles was “Abstract Art”.
This was the slippery slope that led to the abandonment of standards in art.
Art is what I say it is....and lots of people jumped on the art bandwagon.
Anyone can be an artist.
Anyone can mount a show.
And who is to say if it has value or not ?
A tacit agreement has formed among critics, galleries, publications and auction houses to promote and celebrate certain artists and styles.
Objects with no artistic merit are touted and praised .
Their value increases with every magazine article, every exhibition in a prestigious gallery.
And when they come up for auction, sometimes the auction houses will lend vast sums to a bidder so that it appears as if the work of the particular artist is increasing in value.
The upward spiral begins and fortunes are made.
And many are reluctant to declare that the Emperor is, in fact, naked lest they appear boorish unsophisticated Philistines !
This is what dominates the art market today.
The love of money is the root of all evil.
It has corrupted politics.
It has corrupted sport.
It has corrupted healthcare.
It has corrupted religion.
And now it has corrupted art.
But, there is reason to hope.
As much of the wisdom of the Greeks and Romans was kept alive through the Middle Ages in small pockets of learning and culture, ateliers have sprung up around the world that are devoted to preserving and handing down the traditional visual arts: drawing, painting and sculpting to each new generation.
And when this craze for conceptual art has burned itself out and when visual art is no longer looked on as mere decoration and when schools that have dissolved their art programs want to reestablish them again, the world will find these skills preserved through the atelier movement.
______________________________________
Good stuff.
Thank you for a very good thought provoking argument.
Uh you clearly don't know what you're talking about and have clearly never practiced fine arts at higher institutions before.
I didn't read through all of this in the case that you were just trolling but the fact is that most if not all the great conceptual artists out there started off with foundational skills, and moved onto more abstract forms of art after having mastered those.
Have you seen Picasso's drawings from when he was younger? They're amazing. To claim that abstract and conceptual art is for artists who can't succeed at traditional art is just a bogus claim. No artist directly jumps into abstract and conceptual art without an extremely strong foundation in traditional mediums and aesthetics, and this is something you'd know if you were actually involved in any kind of higher arts education.
All of you can say whatever you want about conceptual art but at the end of the day this is what the art world is. This is what's making history and defining what's to come in the field. You can mock institutions like UCLA and Yale about how ridiculous you might think the work they produce is but what you're saying right now is all just reactionary.
About Jeff Koon's basketball sculpture, pieces like this sell for the amount they do mostly because of the significance they represent in art history as a work made by Jeff Koons himself more than anything else. Yes, if he hadn't made it, it probably wouldn't have made this much. But context in the contemporary art world is important. An analogy is if you took a lesser known work from one of the old masters that isn't as famous as their other works, would it be as significant if it had been painted by a nobody as opposed to an old master? Half of the art world is about precedent, context, history, and how your work and legacy breaks tradition and what's already been seen countless times before.
I personally think that the best of abstract and conceptual art is beautiful and provocative, just as much as the work of the old masters. But if you don't, then maybe try to understand how that's a preference of yours rather than trying to dismiss all of it as garbage.
To reference another comment you made on this post, no one is trying to "convince" you that the piece is 'deep.' You read Koon's statement, see the piece, and make whatever connections you might have and appreciate it as a work of art. If you can't connect the statement to the piece in any way, then maybe it's not for you, but there are plenty of people out there who find connections between basketballs and the philosophy of life and death fascinating. Someone paid a third of a million dollars for the piece because they liked it, why else would they have bought it. And no one is forcing anyone to talk in art speak. Art speak is almost another form of art in itself, because though words you can shape perceptions of your piece and talk about the ideas you put into your work in a more nuanced way. Sure you can use vernacular to talk about your art. But it might be hard to use that to express all of the things you want to talk about or evoke.
There's way too many reactionary 'arguments' about how unsubstantial the art world and conceptual/abstract art is when they come from not understanding how it works, or just bigotry. I'm not saying the art world is perfect, but a lot of it makes more sense than you think it does.
You wrote:
"To claim that abstract and conceptual art is for artists who can't succeed at traditional art is just a bogus claim."
I never made that claim.
I said,
"Abstract or non-representational art is a legitimate and often profound genre."
-----------------------
You wrote:
"No artist directly jumps into abstract and conceptual art without an extremely strong foundation in traditional mediums and aesthetics, and this is something you'd know if you were actually involved in any kind of higher arts education."
Jackson Pollock studied at The Art Students League of New York for a time and did some realistic drawings.
Rothko, de Kooning and Kazimir Malevich all worked in a realistic style early on as did Mondrian and Kandinsky.
But you will find that the non-representational artists Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann and Joan Mitchell did not have a strong foundation in traditional styles.
What do you know about my involvement in arts education?
There is no such thing as bad art. If it’s bad, it’s not art. Even if the museum, gallery or person making it claims it to be.
ugh
Most modern art is junk.
I'm going to turn this video off before i quit being an artist! this the most boring thing I've ever heard god help me...
I'm sorry, i didn't even make it to Ted...
Dennis D'Alesandro ....good to hear it.
I’ve been having trouble getting to sleep.