Tag Archives: Art

Art gallery in shock: peepshow art attracts aging roués

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All of which goes to show that modern art, modern artists and the galleries that display modern art are all encased in their own curious little effete bubbles, isolated from the real world and those who inhabit it.

To add to the farce, the alleged artist declared the Titian painting on which his exhibit was loosely – extremely loosely – based the “ultimate fable about voyeurism”. So why complain when he reaches his intended audience?

From here:

It was supposed to be a tribute to a Renaissance master.

But the National Gallery’s latest exhibition – which features women recreating nude scenes from Titian’s paintings – is attracting a type of visitor not normally found in the capital’s cultural landmark.

Curators are disturbed at the plethora of ‘dirty old men’ who come to look through peepholes at the naked models, ignoring the masterpieces on the wall.

The Diana installation, part Metamorphosis: Titian 2012, was conceived by Turner Prize winner Mark Wallinger, whose previous work includes a video of himself dressed as a bear wandering aimlessly around a gallery.

[….]

‘We really have sunk to new lows with this idea. These visitors have no interest in art at all.’

Modern Art is all bosh, isn't it?

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In Brideshead Revisted, one of my favourite novels, the following exchange takes place:

‘Charles,’ said Cordelia, ‘Modern Art is all bosh, isn’t it?’

“‘Great bosh.’

“‘Oh, I’m so glad. I had an argument with one of our nuns and she said we shouldn’t try and criticize what we didn’t understand. Now I shall tell her I have had it straight from a real artist, and snubs to her.'”

Evelyn Waugh, himself an artist, probably would not have predicted the level of bosh to which modern art would eventually sink. Here is an exhibition of invisible art currently on display in London:

It looks like the aftermath of a museum robbery.

But this empty sculpture stand is in fact the main attraction at a leading British gallery – and punters will be charged £8 a head to see it.

The ‘work’ was created as a stunt by Andy Warhol and will form part of an exhibition of ‘invisible art’ at London’s Hayward Gallery.

Visitors will be asked to look beyond ‘material objects’ and ‘set their imaginations on fire’ by looking at the empty gallery spaces.

Also included in the 50 ‘invisible works’ will be an empty piece of paper, an empty canvas and an empty space.

Asinine as it is, it may be preferable to this less than appetising portrait of Stephen Harper:

 

All in the name of Art

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Andres Serrano is the artist responsible for the notorious Piss Christ, a photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist’s urine.

Christians aren’t entirely happy about this and the rotten spoilsports will keep trying to destroy it. The latest attempt occurred on Palm Sunday with a bunch of intolerant Christians attacking the exhibit with a hammer.

I’m all for free speech, so in a spirit of tolerance, artistic licence and love of orange, rather than spoil the fun by being a philistine, I have my own contribution to offer.

I call it Piss Serrano – the artist and his girlfriend submerged in the same fluid. Still his fluid.

Reasonably priced prints can be ordered by emailing me from the Contact Page.

Enjoy.

A Toronto artist compares the Pope to Hitler

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Godwin’s law states that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

This observation, while not infallibly accurate, has its roots in the tendency for discussion group addicts to increasingly invoke ludicrous comparisons as they gradually exhaust their – usually very limited – capacity for rational thought.

A Toronto artist, Peter Alexander Por, has concocted an artistic expression of Godwin’s law in which he has dispensed with trifling intermediate appeals to rationality and leapt straight to the Hitler comparison – with, of course, the Pope and George Bush. To allay any lingering suspicion that there may, notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary, be a spark of originality concealed somewhere in his desiccated imagination, Por has thrown in a depiction of a crucified Obama, victim of special and distorted interests.

From here:

TORONTO, Ontario, January 24, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Toronto art gallery is scheduled to exhibit an array of inflammatory works that include a picture of a seated Pope Benedict XVI riddled with bullet holes, alongside portraits of other “evildoers” such as President George Bush and Hitler.

The exhibit, entitled “Persona Non Grata – The Veil of History,” by Toronto-based artist Peter Alexander Por, is due to open at the Bezpala Brown Gallery on February 5, 2011.

Por’s exhibit, 30 canvases and four sculptures, also includes depictions of Pope Innocent III, Stalin, Mussolini, Kim II Sung, Pol Pot, and others.

In a press release the gallery said that the “bullet-ridden” depiction of the pope is “a less than subtle expression of the hurt and anger directed at a pontiff and an institution that has abandoned its flock, choosing to focus on dogma while its subjects suffer and, in many instances, die from its archaic policies.”

On the other hand, the exhibition also includes a depiction of the “crucifixion of Obama,” casting the current U.S. president as “a victim, crucified in the wake of special and distorted interests,” according to the gallery.

Western art has lost its way

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I know that isn’t news, but here are the latest examples of grotesqueness for its own sake masquerading as art:

The ant covered Jesus on display at the Smithsonian:

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and the 7/7 London bombing with four angels, one for each of the bombers:

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Both works are intended to shock. Sadly, that seems to be all Western art has left to offer: no meaning, no beauty no transcendence, just shock – each shock more shocking than the last.

Bankrupt art for a bankrupt civilisation

Pornographic Jesus art attacked with crowbar

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From here:

A Montana woman is alleged to have driven 1,500 kilometres from Montana to a museum in Loveland, Colo., so she could rip up a controversial piece of art featuring Jesus.

Kathleen Folden, a 56-year-old truck driver, is charged with criminal mischief in the case.

The collage by Enrique Chagoila has been denounced by church members as obscene as it includes a head of Jesus and a woman’s body engaged in a sex act.

In my opinion, it’s rather sad taking away people’s freedom to see the art,” Corey said.

Chagoya, a Stanford University professor who created the work, titled The Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals, denied the work suggests Jesus having sex.

His 12-panel lithograph is a collage that includes comic book characters, Mexican pornography, Mayan symbols and a skeleton with a pope’s hat.

“What I’m trying to express is the corruption of the spiritual by the church,” Chagoya said.

He said the decision not to display the work again amounts to suppression of art.

In his eagerness to “express the corruption of the spiritual by the church”, what Chagoya has missed is the fact that Folden drove all the way from Montana to express the spiritualisation of corruption by artists, an expression that is, itself, art and, by Chagoya’s own lights, not only permissible, but virtuous.

It’s disappointing to see Chagoya trying to suppress the work of a fellow artist.

Defacing the Bible as Art

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It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before the bankrupt wreckage that passes for art in today’s culture came up with a newly minted piece of drivel like this:Add an Image

An art exhibition where people are encouraged to write in a Bible has seen visitors daub abuse and obscenities across its pages.

Part of Made in God’s Image, the exhibit also includes a video of a woman ripping pages from the Bible and stuffing them into her bra, knickers and mouth.

Next to the copy of the Bible at the Gallery of Modern Art (Goma) in Glasgow is a container of pens and a notice, which says: ‘If you feel you have been excluded from the Bible, please write your way back into it.’

The taxpayer subsidised Goma Gallery also features a gay pornography exhibit intended to combat homophobia; the theory appears to be that a display of the grotesque is the path to social acceptance.

Undoubtedly the organisers of this nonsense see it as a courageous statement. It isn’t of, course: if they wanted to do something courageous they would deface a Koran.

Body Language

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When my parents died – my mother about 8 years after my father – looking on their lifeless bodies reminded me of a derelict house that had once been filled with a family:  furniture, toys, decorations may still be present as a reminder of happier times, but the living occupants have vacated the premises. So it is with a corpse; the person has gone. I appreciated the respect the funeral directors showed to my parents’ earthly remains since I saw it as a token of respect for the people that they once were; but I felt no particular need for indulging the contemporary obsession of prettifying the corpses for later inspection by all and sundry in an open coffin – as if to give the appearance of cheating death.

My father’s grave is in the UK and my mother’s ashes were scattered on lake Ontario where she used to live in Canada, so I can’t make occasional pilgrimages to their graves. Even if I could, I wouldn’t, since nothing of the real people I knew remains; I hope to meet them again in the resurrection when they will have new bodies.

So although I don’t think there is anything intrinsically sacred about a corpse, I am, nevertheless, all for burying or burning the dead and not doing this:

A controversial German anatomy artist is facing protests over his latest plastination exhibition after unveiling a work showing two corpses having sexual intercourse. Gunther von Hagens, whose latest exhibition, Cycle of Life, opens in Berlin tomorrow, has defended the exhibit saying that it combines the two greatest taboos of sex and death and is a lesson in biology, but is “not meant to be sexually stimulating”.

I think there are a number of things wrong with von Hagens’ contorted cadavers: it mocks the people who were once a part of the body; there is no conceivable reason for doing it other than to shock; it degrades the prurient spectator; as art, it is pretentious rubbish.

I am against censorship, but if someone burned or buried these abominations as an act of free artistic expression, I would have no regrets.

It may be rubbish, but is it art?

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A record album is being covered up in UK supermarkets. The author of this Guardian article is at pains to point out that the painting could be interpreted in many ways; perish the thought of the painter intending to convey anything specific by it.

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The impact the Manic Street Preachers album cover has made raises the interesting possibility that hand-made, painterly images now have more power to shock than conceptual artworks.

It’s hard to imagine the chain of decisions that led to Jenny Saville’s painting of a boy’s face in colours that vary from olive green to reddish brown, blue and black, being judged too offensive to go on public view. The painting can apparently be interpreted to show blood on the boy’s face – although as the band rightly point out, this is a subjective view. He might have crimson scars and battered lips; or these might just be the colours Saville has used to evoke the appearance of flesh. The whites and creams, the blues of his eyes, are just as shocking.

The author of the article goes on to explain what it means to him; one would expect no less than an interpretation that includes psychic hurt. After all, most modern art induces psychic hurt.

For me this is a painting of psychic hurt, a portrait of pain. In that sense it is truly troubling – but to see it crudely as an image of a child who has been hit (which must be the supermarkets’ view) is to impose your own subjective interpretation. Paint creates uncertainty. It is genuinely impossible to know if those red marks are bloody scars or expressive smears. In the end, what has caused offence is the intrusion of emotion and artistic depth into the temples of commercial banality.

We are left with the predictable jibe at what has supposedly caused offence. The problem is, the writer of this article blames the supermarkets for having a subjective opinion which has been “imposed” on the art, while at the same time having his own subjective opinion, also, one assumes, “imposed” on the art.

If art is to be valued entirely subjectively, an art critic can scarcely complain if people find it subjectively offensive and respond by covering it up.