My own private disco

[emily_strange84]

I do so love being ID'd a week before my 22nd birthday. It's always good to know that in spite of all scary adult type stresses that may occur, I've managed to retain my babyfaced looks. Well, I shall be most thankful when I'm 30, even if being refused admission to a club night I'd been looking forward to for ages isn't so funny at the time

Comments

Re: Modern art makes me want to rock out

[emily_strange84]

No, there is nothing at all wrong with producing art in the knowledge that only a very select group of individuals will appreciate it. No producers of any form of culture should feel they have to censor themselves in order to appeal to a particular demographic. On this note, though, no producer should be under the impression that to cobble together a series of, at best, tenuously related images and adding an explanation as an afterthought is in any way groundbreaking or challenging. It does seem wilfully obscure, but only obscure because in today's current art climate the very nature of trendiness lies with inaccessibility. It's a sad thing, because of course there is a huge amount of genuinely inventive art being produced that is simply not recognised due the artist's failure to jump onto the "conceptual" bandwagon.

Of course accessibility does not equate to greatness, far from it. But to create something so devoid of meaning that the observer needs to be constantly reassured that it was created for a purpose in the first place-no. It's lazy and attention-grabbing.

Re: Modern art makes me want to rock out

[emily_strange84]

All right, so I'll freely admit that "esoteric" doesn't always has to be applied in a critical sense at all. It is enjoyable, the feeling of belonging to some sort of cliquey subculture. Nonetheless, in this instance I simply felt as though the majority of works in the exhibition were merely aiming for a specifically elite audience in order to gain brownie points, rather than to express any deeper meaning. There is a very definite distinction between creating a piece which naturally happens to appeal to a particular group, and creating a piece with the express aim of pandering to the that group.

I probably just phrased myself badly, as I'll admit that my opinions on the subject are still developing. I'm trying not to be so ruthlessly dismissive of contemporary art as I have been, and my attempts at broadening my viewpoint are naturally going to involve my perspectives on what is meaningful and what isn't shifting and becoming altogether less stable.

It was exactly the way in which the so-called meaning behind each exhibit was so painfully spelt out that really put me off the entire thing. I'm a firm believer that, once entered into the public domain, art no longer becomes the specific property of the artist. The artist is still allowed to retain their original vision of the piece, yes, but that doesn't mean the observer shouldn't be allowed to infer what they choose from that piece. I just found the constant spoon-feeding a little patronising.