h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The thing I hate most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people in pursuit of the dollar, leaving us mainly with the slow, the retarded and self-obsessed to become our artists, writers and poets. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

Banksy

Jabs

I thought you were outing yourself as Banksy then

I was going to tease you remorsely for your contributions on the girls versus boys thread

Peanut

also rereads, isn't that quote quite mean?

Thanks P'Nut. Wish I could come out as Banksy...but I suppose I have my own, rather more modest, qualities (?)

I think he's right about the state of creative work in the UK though. Mean or not.



Jabs.

well I think you are quality

and I am not the person that is going to have any sort of standing of opinion when it comes to modern art,

it is out of context, I know, it just read as harsh, would question the use of language although personally not objecting to it, perhaps discouraging, I thought how Hiccup would read it given how she looks up to Bansky and the oportunities she has had to explore and express that side of herself

sorry, what do I know, I'll shut up now

I imagine he has the horrible dollar-sign kitsch of Damien Hirst and others in mind....

Although I can see what Tracey Emin's doing and I rather approve of her work.

What do you think, P'nut?

Sorry, simulpost. No need to shutup, though, I'd be very interested in your view.

Jabs.

I will get back to this, because,um put me on the spot, and I is cooking tea and suspect that Hiccup might peg it out before i have served it up, no probs, i can plate it up

Banksy, Tracy I rate, Hirst, no but really know nothing

I, um, notice street art, whatever you'd call it and go view it and tell people, you know along the river, past the chip shop, up the hill a bit, to the side of garages, there is good one there, sort of thing

Dali is good and I like fractals to put on veg and because I am out of my depth now

That's really sound, P'nut. I like your choices. Thanks again!

Jabs.

Jabs are you taking Banksey entirely seriously? I take him with a heavy dose of sodium chloride...I'm a bit tired of him to be honest...but each to their own where art is concerned.

Good question, Effers. No, I think he's overrated and in fact part of the celebrity culture - more a press phemomenon than anything else - but I agree fundamentally with his view as expressed here.

I am not exclusively keen on representative art, and I'm thinking very much of literature and music as well as visual media. And music of course - The Classic FM syndrome, or the Three Tenors, for example, as classics of bad taste.

But far better Banksy than the pretentious, phoney, meretricious Damien Hirst - or flagrantly bad poetry.

[Hope your treatment is going well ]

Jabs

[Thank you Jabs ]

I'll get back to you on the art thingy. Good thread.

Wasn't Thomas Kincaid better known than Banksy?

Just wondering.



In any event, the quote seems accurate, if not inclusive enough. The best and the brightest choose other career paths besides advertising. New York has a place called Wall Street, for instance. People with half a brain [or more] gravitate toward professions like law, but meanwhile the useful hands-on occupations get short shrift. Michelangelo did not look down on working with stone.

>>> "Michelangelo did not look down on working with stone."


...actually, i think you'll find that Michelangelo did not look down whilst working on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, either!

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/london/londons-latest-banksy-graffiti-artists-new-work-gets-protection-7763530.html


http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/banksys-parachuting-rat-accidentally-ruined-by-australian-builder-7763372.html

Still on the visual arts..

Oh god where to start? I'll just chuck in a small plea for Hirst. I've always rated him..and no I've never given a stuff about what I'm supposed to like or not..I go on my own estimation. A big experience for me was when I saw his 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.' and yes the title is as important as the sculpture..he's a poet as well IMO...or was..('he's grown old, he's grown old...he wears his trousers rolled..' (metaphorically speaking, a la T S Eliot). Kind of ironic as deals in Death and Love in his work so often.

Anyway I went and saw it at Sensations...and it affected me...that great big piece of a force of nature, those teeth...all the bulk being muscle...and yet its baleful eyes all turned to emptiness that you just couldn't physically see...mournful in its great rectangular, oh so clean, prison of formalin. I just stood and stood trying to see it...all alive but all dead...uncanny doesn't quite capture it.

So that put him up there for me personally. I also saw his 'Away from the flock' sheep pieces. I found them indescribably touching.

So I don't much care about the media circus and his money. The Rennaisance greats got thir money from Popes and clergy...later on aristocracy fed their self importance, commisioning work.

Hirst does *money* in his work. He's said the art world..ie the big art world is all about money...that diamond encrusted skull is to do with it...I wouldn't mind seeing it...but I'll take that or leave it.

I always enjoyed his interviews...but he was on recently..and for the first time I felt bored with what he was saying..I turned it off...but it doesn't take away my high regard for his earlier work.

Banksy will be raking it in as well...so what? It's the capitalist system. I take those words as irony.

Kincade's art has been adapted by Spode for a china pattern. Banksy's work has not yet been so honored. Maybe he hasn't been around as long?

>>> "Kincade's art has been adapted by Spode for a china pattern. Banksy's work has not yet been so honored."


apparently the problem is getting crockery tea sets to stay glued to the wall long enough for Banksy to paint them

I'm sure Spode and Wedgwood can come up with ways to make that happen. Too much money to be made, can't let the opportunity pass...

I will be careful what I print here ladies and gents as I’m not an art critic or wish to be one.
Also I’m wishing to be respectful to Jabs and his thread

I will give you my two pennies worth in the form of an analogy. This analogy has its roots (excuse the pun, given what your about to read) in the debate of weeds and flowers.
Are the flowers of the art world, works by Monet, Constable, Rubens, Picasso or Renoir to list just a few and the weeds the work of urban graffiti artists such as Banksy.
There work often found featured on streets, walls and bridges, often derived from some underground scene that use such work to support their deranged political and social commentary.
This is where the analogy comes in, a weed is a plant considered undesirable, unattractive, or troublesome, especially one growing where it is not wanted, as in a garden.
Is not the work of a Graffiti artist not the same, their opinion imposed upon others, we have too much visual pollution as it is in the form of advertisement without having to have such so called art thrust upon us as well.
If you go to an art gallery, one would suppose you have some form of appreciation or opinion on what is being exhibited.
That opinion varies and the phrase “"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" hold good measure to that, many have put their own angle on what is considered tasteful, Shakespeare expressed a similar sentiment in Love's Labours Lost, 1588:

Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean,
Needs not the painted flourish of your praise:
Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye,
Not utter'd by base sale of chapmen's tongues

and David Hume's writes "Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them."
Whether art is tasteful or beautiful will cause much debate, my slant on it is, if it’s in galleries all well and good.
Graffiti and such street art is likely to be met by resistance as we all don’t share the same opinions as those expressing it in this format and therefore it should not have an legitimate place on your streets and be allowed just because some call it art.