What's at Stake for Abstract Painting Today - and Where Do We Go from Here?
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- Опубліковано 12 вер 2024
- Thursday, October 23 at the Jewish Museum, New York
Why, at a time when there is greater interest in abstraction, is so much art seemingly unconcerned with evolving the visual landscape? And why is so much of it embraced by collectors, and not by critics and curators? Perhaps one question answers the other. This panel considers: What's at stake for abstract painting today.
When much of what we see today is not actually painted, claims to be conceptual, borders on design, lends itself eagerly to branding, and provides an inoffensive backdrop to an endless succession of art fairs and auctions - self-satisfied in its being “emptied” of meaning - we can be certain that there is nothing in any way abstract about this recent turn of events.
Moderated by critic and curator Bob Nickas, and featuring artists Joanne Greenbaum, Philip Taaffe, and Stanley Whitney.
Learn more: ow.ly/EdzXO
It was disappointing to see the off-handedness with which the questions were answered (or ignored?) but overall an interesting and relevant panel discussion.
This video lead me to get to the work of Joanne Greenbaum, so inspiring!
Renato Sáenz Ah! That was her name! Thanks. I thought her paintings were really interesting.
Thank God I paint from the heart and could care less what others think...Art like beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
nobody cares
Art is a changing thing. We should never want it to please all, just those who ant to.I love doing abstract , but my family dont get it. So I also try spray painting & ilike it 2.I think for me going to all the utube videos i learn about the real passion of art.
I love to look at painting - different techniques, styles, themes, abstract and figurative - and I compare the experience of paintings to poetry - the words might be “ the figurative” and “ the conceptual” and the rhythms, the sounds of the words might be like the tone, the feeling .... and the opposite every word has both rhe abstract and all the other dimensions - and the same can be in experienced in every painting ( obviously some more make a deeper impression than others) its all about experience- expression- awareness- the unique and the limitless .... for me its a multidimensional language than you can feel opening into the lived experience giving yourself open and nonjudgmental and experience happens 🎵🧡🎶
Todays art is NOT art. Natural, untaught, unconditioned, non programmed, non influenced, artists are the true artists. The art world is now full of Selfies. If you have noticed the art world has to market the "so called" artist of today the primary focus, you need a brand, it is not about the art they produce, that is because the art is not real art so you gotta market the person who claims to be an "artist". The borders and the essential criteria of determining who is a real artist are completely gone.
+angie royall When and where did those borders exist?
Thank you to the remark about the uneven playing field. I would also like to thank the commenter early on, about the artist visiting a studio, watching another artist work, then going home and 'stealing' their ideas, by putting it into their own work. Find your own path! Who are you that you can't find your own way? Overall an interesting discussion.
It baffles me how people who have been entrenched in the art world so long can be so close-minded and bitter towards other artists. These same stale, envious arguments have happened every time art has changed throughout history. This panel is no different than those who cringed at the first electric guitars, or those who proclaimed that rap wasn't music. The world evolves... and art evolves, with or without you and your elitist opinions.
The irony: a large part of abstract art's early momentum was that it was a thumb in the eye of traditional art rules - yet here we have three abstract artists and a curator decrying anything that doesn't align with their rules of what abstract art is, how it should be unveiled to the world, or how old the creator should be before they're taken seriously. You brought up sexism and racism, but are apparently fine with age discrimination in the name of "earning one's stripes" before being taken seriously as an artist. I guess by those standards Mozart wasn't really an artist until he turned what... 45?
Let them be old-farts. They have some valid points
@ Ph L... a long time ago I was "just a young fart" as time marches on we all... well not all... become old farts... it happens... one day you turn around and you realize it's now your turn to be an old fart.
One thing I've learned over the years is that there are some old farts that have learned much during their days and are willing to disperse their wisdom... and then there are old farts who never bothered to learn a fucking thing and you think... what a waste, how sad... and it is sad.
Morale -- acquire knowledge... don't become a dumb old fart
I think that Mr Nickas, picked out artists, who are really just doing something totally different from these artists. It articulates with a difference in values, which I like to hear, but I do agree with you also, and everyone still can do their own thing.
One of the artists began his talk: I think art is visuel investigation - yes that one way of thinking of what art is .... but for me it is more than visuel - it is embodied meaning tactile, kinaesthetic, visuel and even sound, smell and taste is part of a totally involved human experience - art is an investigation and a communication of human experience - and the whole mystery of experience and the mystery of subject-object-world. And the mystery of the experience of human body. What it is to be an embodied human ?
Where does our experience come from? How come that we experience and express our experiences in so many ways ? So I would at least stretch my phrase "art is an experience analysis of life" and to express an experience through colour and line - and a fluid investigation of abstract-figurative-musical-poetic......its about experience of significance - what really matters in life - and in this way art is a kind of Cosmic letters from one heart to another drawing vibrating lines as webs of possible meanings
that last comment put a smile on my face!
Great! I love all of he artists here :)
Thank you to Kenneth Lewis's comment!
Without further definition of 'ART', to give context to these complaints, this all doesn't move beyond just that, complaining. For example, a canvas that is painted with the intent of creating a design element for a space, like the initial painting brought up that uses the football field device, bringing that into comparison with something like a metaphorical painting telling a story etc. is pretty silly. And If a buyer wants to pay ten times the price of a Rembrandt for a cleverly designed wall decoration... who cares? It doesn't say anything. This argument is just worn out and it smacks of envy, though deeply disguised and unknown to those complaining. Paint what you want to paint, and if you want to paint on a production line and create interesting objects for design, more power to you! Our spaces need beautification anyway, get more colorful quickies on the production line and get them into pubic spaces!
A wonderful dialogue. Thanks for posting this video! As an abstract painter and maybe a bit older than these people, I too am depressed when I see what passes for "art" these days. The very idea that an "artist" has never seen anything that is moving or inspiring.... Oh my...!. This seems somehow a direct result of the Richard Dawkins cult of intellect that lives merely digitally inside the same computers where the students mentioned parse out their "work" and perhaps lives too.
+A FreshLife I agree. I cancelled my subscription to Modern Painters Magazine as the so called 'art' was becoming more and more simply lazy intellectually and emotionally bereft 'art de jour'. This curator's correct in that opening speech about the 'production line' of predominantly young talentless people who deem themselves artists as they've just been picked up by some dealer trying to turn a quick profit with his her cheap trick. Many of the comments here depressingly reflect the view one needn't have given even a cursory glance to an established artist, let alone be familiar with the tools/process. It seems to be just too much hard work to actually hone one's craft. That football liner 'painting' is a case in point.
+A FreshLife The material reductionism of Dawkins, et. al, certainly lends itself to an artistically impoverished world view, but the sort of anti-artistic intellectual strain you and the artists on the panel are talking about comes pretty directly from the rampantly anti-spiritual Cultural Marxism of the 1960's which has at this point completely destroyed the humanities and art in American higher education. The Marxist hostility towards spirituality, the Marxist "Post-modern" rejection of so called "essentialism", the so called normative "relativism" (actually just the denial that there are such things as objective values, right, wrong, good, bad, etc.) that goes along with that rejection, and finally the idiotic, insincere, put-on, effete attitude in these intellectual circles that simply enjoying the sensuous aspect of art is somehow shallow and "naive", leads naturally to an art in which the only dimension of any depth left available to the artist is the "conceptual".
Therefore you end up with this kind of shit art, and shit art culture being promoted by academia, where in the artist's role is now to think up some "concept" (an infantile, trite, parroting of some social norm accepted by this group of Marxists, i.e. "white people and western culture are bad", "black people done had it real hard don't ya know? Black people really are the best... did I mention how much I LOVE African culture?", "ugly women are actually the most beautiful women", "my hideous greasy hipster friends have 'their own beauty'", "Vaginas are a deep artistic message so I will now reference them in crude obvious ways over and over and over and over again...", etc.) and express it through a crude visual allegory in the ugliest most anti-skill, most "democratic" way possible.
stethoscanomaly
Agree. For anyone interested in a serious re-consideration of the modern era and modern art - from something less marxist/materialist than Greemberg's edicts - check out Charlene Spretnak's THE SPIRITUAL DYNAMIC IN ART as well as her other works. It turns out that the actual interests of most of the modern/abstract artists themselves were hardly how Greenberg promoted them.
This was dreadful. A panel convened for the sake of one man’s complaints about contemporary painting in New York. If only they had addressed the issue raised in the subject line of the video.
It's puzzling to see people with grey hair and glasses worrying about the state of painting, while the images behind them, supposedly exemplary, shift between sheer vulgarity and bland amateurishness... As usual, the crap is somewhere else...
I have a new art but being untaught, unconditioned, non programmed, non influenced it is difficult to explain to even the most knowledgeable what is going on between the viewer and the image. If it is truly new then there is not a person qualified to comment on what is all involved even though my medium of choice is oil paint. My work is at best too subtle but that should not dismiss the potential for someone else or other soon to be artists. Of course artists would have to pick up their skill levels because it does not come easy but by no means is the process insurmountable. Obviously with the world so saturated with self proclaimed "New and Innovative" art my comments seem to be echoes of many sales people of art before me.
This is why art is in decline; 3 years ago I typed up above that I had "New and Innovative" way of creating art. Did anyone bother to inquire about my art? No. At best a few might have looked me up on line and found my art two dimensional when I clearly stated that my art is beyond three dimensional and could actually start a new wave of painting that would make all prior "oil painting" art obsolete.
I create never seen colors in my art. My art is never the same from one minuet to the next. I have seen the Mona Lisa painting, Picasso's work even Van Gogh's art work and mine is equal to these artists work in every way.
Today's art is like I have a friend named Bill and if I showed someone a photo of him they would say "now I know him and what he is all about." But my art today's art the viewer has to not sit and stare at the painting trying to pick up some hidden meaning but my painting changes from where you are in the room, what type of light, what direction the light is coming from and where is the viewer in the room... on and on My art must be experienced like like meeting a person that you have to spend days with, months to even begin to understand all the art is capable of.
Art is now something the viewer must get to know, to try to understand just some of the art's possibilities; it is a friend that keeps on giving every time it coaxes a glance.
Is that James Kalm asking a question!!!
I think it is! I recognize his voice from his gallery videos. Also, he got Nickas on that one. The title of the talk does focus on abstraction.
Good lord. This comment thread is dismal. Half of these people sound like they've been weaned on conservative ideological bullshit, the other half proudly declare that their opinion was formed by NOT watching or listening. I don't know what the Jewish Museum was thinking, trying to generate discussion by posting this, when the only people who want to weigh in a proud of their ignorance and closedness.
Abstract painting has become contrived and artists are just copying each other and it might be abstract but it,has no meaning or much skill. It has become a con for a lot of painters that have no talent. And it follows a format, a dash of black other colours and a few marks and its supposed to be profound. All of the mind and not of the spirit. A lot of talk that sounds intelligent with a lot of big words. And the Americans love to talk and over analyse everything.
Couldn't even finish watching this. It's sort of embarrasing , and hilarious, with the critic especially. These people seem to have forgotten that the things they are complaining about have always happened. It's always been the same, every 'generation', and will always be, naturally, or at least as long as our culture generally still functions the way it does. I think they should just shut up and do what they do better, which by the way isn't talking. MHO.
Maybe if you'd finished watching it you would have noticed that that exact truth is explicitly recognized several times. I guess you heard what you wanted to instead of listening to what was actually being said.
None of these artists have the quality of work to back up what they are outputting . Look at their work ? It's poor . Maybe Whitney is ahead of the rest but a lot of his work is unruly , unkempt and without gravity.
zzzzzzz
All of you need to go back and learn simple English, instead of using big words that sounds like gobbly gook. They are simply making product to sell and they are interested in the money. The rest is narcissist bullshit.