Why Art Sucks
There is a display of art in a gallery up the road from where we are eating our lunch and supper meals this week that we were encouraged to attend, if not on our own time then Thursday evening at a special reception. A couple of us decided to take a walk after we had eaten today, to find this gallery and enjoy the art on our own. I'm not going to be around Thursday evening, so I thought that this was a good idea. After all, part of the display is a copy of the King James Version of the Bible that was printed in 1613, which has GOT to be considered "neat" no matter what!
The gallery has two rooms, one on the right and one on the left of a central foyer. We went into the small room first, and spun around in awe as we saw six or seven canvases that featured...
circles.
Big circles.
Circles that looked like pictures of the sun taken with different camera filters.
But circles nonetheless.
Thinking that the pictures in the main room MUST be better, we entered there and, sure enough, found the KJV from 1613, wonderfully preserved considering its age, sitting under glass and open to the frontplate of the New Testament. Above it was a delightful picture painted in 1945 entitled "Mary and Martha" that featured what appears to be a kitchen party from that period, done in watercolours, with a Jesus figure in the foreground (despite the black leather jacket, he is haloed and very prominent) with a woman behind him, and behind her are nine other men gathered around a kitchen table with angels floating above them, and in the very background, obviously in the kitchen, a pot in her hand, is the Martha figure. The picture is really only notable for being visually interesting; it doesn't tell the story of "Jesus On the Breadlines" but has its own power.
The rest of the pictures, in a word, sucked. Senseless. Visually offensive or obnoxious. Of dubious creativity. Ew.
I hate art for art's sake. Creative doodling is, to me, unimpressive, and yet that seems to be what was on the walls. Artists cry out that they are being stifled because the government won't subsidize them, but if what they're producing is crap, what they're doing is of no use and little aesthetic value, and the "art" is little more than experimentation with colour and media, the world can live without it! Experiment, yes; fool with colour, yes; play with techniques, yes; but to charge for it? Rrrgh.
I like impressionist art, to an extent, and I much prefer paintings where can actually "see" something. I can even see the value in some abstract art (Jackson Pollock is vomit on canvas, no matter what), but not this stuff. The self-portraits and other items on the walls of the faculty of Education where we are meeting are wonderful. But this?
"I may not know much about art, but I know what I like." And I Don't. Like. This.
The gallery has two rooms, one on the right and one on the left of a central foyer. We went into the small room first, and spun around in awe as we saw six or seven canvases that featured...
circles.
Big circles.
Circles that looked like pictures of the sun taken with different camera filters.
But circles nonetheless.
Thinking that the pictures in the main room MUST be better, we entered there and, sure enough, found the KJV from 1613, wonderfully preserved considering its age, sitting under glass and open to the frontplate of the New Testament. Above it was a delightful picture painted in 1945 entitled "Mary and Martha" that featured what appears to be a kitchen party from that period, done in watercolours, with a Jesus figure in the foreground (despite the black leather jacket, he is haloed and very prominent) with a woman behind him, and behind her are nine other men gathered around a kitchen table with angels floating above them, and in the very background, obviously in the kitchen, a pot in her hand, is the Martha figure. The picture is really only notable for being visually interesting; it doesn't tell the story of "Jesus On the Breadlines" but has its own power.
The rest of the pictures, in a word, sucked. Senseless. Visually offensive or obnoxious. Of dubious creativity. Ew.
I hate art for art's sake. Creative doodling is, to me, unimpressive, and yet that seems to be what was on the walls. Artists cry out that they are being stifled because the government won't subsidize them, but if what they're producing is crap, what they're doing is of no use and little aesthetic value, and the "art" is little more than experimentation with colour and media, the world can live without it! Experiment, yes; fool with colour, yes; play with techniques, yes; but to charge for it? Rrrgh.
I like impressionist art, to an extent, and I much prefer paintings where can actually "see" something. I can even see the value in some abstract art (Jackson Pollock is vomit on canvas, no matter what), but not this stuff. The self-portraits and other items on the walls of the faculty of Education where we are meeting are wonderful. But this?
"I may not know much about art, but I know what I like." And I Don't. Like. This.