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

i agree with you completely edward. from a personal perspective i always engage the charitable explanation first.

and to paraphrase the old cliche:

i don't know much about artw@nk, but i know it when i hear it.

I've realised where I've seen Picasso's 'Massacre in Korea' before.

Compare and contrast:

http://www.abacus-gallery.com/paintings/Picasso_Massacre_in_Korea.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_of_May_1808
...and there's a Velazquez I'm thinking of, but I can't find it online because I don't know its name.

I told you he was quintessentially Spanish!



'Art as a put on'.

The unmade bed and pile of bricks are absolutely *not* put ons...and I could happily explain why, if you wish.

On the other hand...a put on can be the whole point. Some - but by no means all - of Damien Hirst's work illustrates this. On a separate thread I've mentioned the genius of Dylan. He's the ultimate master of put on. Oftentimes nobody has a clue where he's coming from - like...is he really a born again Christian or is he just taking the piss? Whether one finds this annoying or hilarious and subversive is a matter of perspective.

another thought, is all this art that is labelled as 'Emperor's new clothes' not actually art, but meta-Art? It's art about art rather than art itself?

And a third one (hope you haven't missed my last post on the previous page Ed!) -

Given the comparison above, what exactly do you get out of the Picasso that you don;t get from the Goya?
Or, perhaps better put, what do you get out of each and, if different, why is it different?

I realise I may well be being over analytical here, it's what I tend to do when I don't get something and am trying to work it out!

sorry to double post again but there was an intervening post.

ictoan. whether you realise it or not, your current appreciation of art (and the corresponding difficulty in appreciating things felt outside of those parameters) is not native but acquired. in fact 'realism' is seldom real. you have simply decided to ignore those elements that are not 'real'. krushchev once held court at a gallery, railing against non representational, non literal art. an artist asked K if he had a picture of his wife on him. K pulled a photo from his wallet.

'she's very tiny' said the painter.

the supposed realism in some paintings is in fact relatively recent and specific to western europe. millions upon millions of people have created and appreciated non representational art for perhaps 100s of 1000s of years. and by choice.

so yes, one can appreciate non representational art with no back story. however, and this is important when it comes to culturally specific, especially aboriginal or tribal art, your capacity to find meaning beyond surface structure will inevitably be diminished.

>>I can;t say I'm too keen on the idea of the artist painting what the viewer sees. That sounds a tad too arrogant of the artist to me. PLus it makes me feel like I am being manipulated. If that isn;t how I view the subject, then presumably that makes the painting meaningless to me?

I should rephrase. Picasso painted how *he* saw objects. But...if you think about it...he was commenting on how perception waorks in general.

can you still view such art in and of itself? Or do you need all the backstory and psychology to enjoy Picasso's work?

Gosh! I don't know. Certainly some of Picasso's ceramics are pretty. And this is quite appealing in its own right, surely, even without undertanding the cubism/ Relativity parts, or how it was a radical break fom the subject matter and composition of Classical art, or the influence from African art...etc.
http://z.about.com/d/painting/1/5/7/X/1/Flickr-PicassoDemoiselles.jpg

But is 'Guernica' a pretty picture? I'd have thought it would help to know about the Spanish Civil War at very least.
Do we know the famous Guernica story? The town was flattened by Nazi Stukas, sent to aid Franco and practice their Blitzkrieg tactics for the impending European war. Picasso painted it in his studio in Occupied Paris. He was visited by some refined SS officers with a taste for fine art and wanting to chack the credentials of this potentially subvesrsive, avant-garde stuff. One of the officers asked him,
'Did you do this?'
Picasso replied,
'No - you did.'

Over to you, I. Does that snippet enhance your appreciation? Is it possible to appreciate Guernica without it? (Surely? It's a 'kin *brilliant* painting!)



And why has nobody toled me if they know what Picasso had in common with Princess Di?

>>another thought, is all this art that is labelled as 'Emperor's new clothes' not actually art, but meta-Art? It's art about art rather than art itself?

That's a brilliant and insightful point! But then...some Picasso is 'about' Goya and Velazquez. Mondiaan is abour Renaissance art.
http://www.devalk.com/kunstenaars/mondriaan/mondriaan3.jpg

And Dylan is about African-American and Scots-Irish music.

>>i don't know much about artw@nk, but i know it when i hear it.

Yeah...but don't knock w@nking. It's a fulfilling and healthy passtime.

I think my first experience of seeing Picasso paintings was the analytical cubist ones that Ed linked to earlier. I think my first impression was that I liked their overall texture, the subtle almost grey tones, etc. Then as I looked at them more I was drawn into the mystery of them. It was like a puzzle to be solved. There was obviously some sort of structure to these paintings, some things jumped out here and there from what seemed to be a mess, but it wasn't at all obvious what the structure was. I love a mystery that you need to work to understand (it's also why I love films by people like David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky and Ingmar Bergman), so I was pretty motivated to go and read up about it and having done so, going back to the paintings I could get much, much more out of them.

Effers,

"I do remember as child though, drawing tractors from side on, and giving them 4 wheels somehow, ina very strange way, because I 'knew' they had 4 wheels, even though you couldn't see them side on. I told an artist about this, in later life. She said, 'Oh that's just Cubism, you were doing.'"

Sort of, but not quite. That sort of thing actually predates cubism by a long way, in fact it goes back before the Renaissance, and exists in lots of different cultures. Basically it seems to come down to the fact that by default (unless we've been trained otherwise) our goal in drawing objects is to create a sort of visual symbolic representation of them, rather than an attempt to create a picture of something that looks the same. This is part of Cubism, but it's not the whole part and it's not unique to it.

I've just remembered something somewhat related (sort of the opposite in some way) that you might like since I seem to remember you love the British Museum. Somewhere quite near the entrance (possibly near the Rosetta stone?) there are these huge animal sculptures (lions?) that were maybe part of a gate or something like that. You can't miss them. Well anyway - count the legs. There are 5 of them! From the front, you see two, and from the side you see 4, which is just as you'd expect. But only one of these legs is shared between the front and side. The idea is that from any particular point where you'd look at it from, it has the right number of legs, and it's only if you consider the whole thing you realise it has too many (possibly in its natural setting you would never have been able to see this).

Strangely strange,

"Could it be a case of the King's clothes?"

Not with Picasso, no. To get the most out of them you do need to know a bit about what's going on, and it can be quite hard. But, if just looking at the paintings doesn't excite anything in you then you're probably not going to be motivated to find out more about them.

"The problem is Roymondo is there is no skill in painting a canvas blue and anyone can do it, for someone to then pay a great deal of money for it is indeed the kings new clothes in action."

Well first of all, Picasso didn't do this sort of 'conceptual' art, his paintings are very highly skillful and there's no way that you or anyone else could have painted them. That said, I agree with the others that the degree of skill is not the point. Why should it be? I mean - suppose someone had the skill to paint something that was indistinguishable from a photograph. How would that be more interesting to look at than a photograph? It would be a pointless waste of an enormous amount of effort.

>>Given the comparison above, what exactly do you get out of the Picasso that you don;t get from the Goya?
Or, perhaps better put, what do you get out of each and, if different, why is it different?

In much the same way that Jimi Hendrix is different to Robert Johnson...yet somehow the same.

Another thing is that the enhancement and reinterpretation can work in both directions. In one of David Lodge's novels there's a character who's researching a PhD on 'The influence of TS Eliot on Shakespear.' If we know TS Eliot, we read Shakespear differently

just don't be doing it in an art gallery edward.

>>there are these huge animal sculptures (lions?)

Lord Melvyn of Buttermere mentioned those this morning on 'In Our Time' (on The Great Library of Nineveh)

Have you ever looked at Mickey Mouse's fingers?

Or, come to that, noticed that you can always see both his ears, full frontal? That's cubism.

Ed:
"Is it possible to appreciate Guernica without it? (Surely? It's a 'kin *brilliant* painting!) "
Depends what yoiu mean by brilliant. I mean, to me, looking at it, I'm not sure what it is telling us, or what we should get from it, that a photo-realistic type painting wouldn't do better? More graphic, more real as it would be. I mean, it is interesting, the use of shade, the background and characters contrast and so forth. But if you want to show how terrible flattening a place is, then I feel it falls quite some way short. The meaning is not obvious to a layman such as I.

"That's a brilliant and insightful point! "
Why, thankyou. Had to have 1 this year

"In much the same way that Jimi Hendrix is different to Robert Johnson...yet somehow the same."
Hmmm. Whilst I don;t think your comparison is exact, it does lead to the thought of considering Picasso's version as a cover-version.
Or a re-imagining as hollywood likes to call it
Or is it a comment on Goya?
Or is it just there to make the likes of me ask all these questions and talk about it and the subjects in it - it having no real message of its own but designed as a spur to further thought?

Dunno - can;t make my mind up.

OTOH I do now have some further information/views to bring next time I am looking at such art. May not make a big difference, then again it may!

>>it does lead to the thought of considering Picasso's version as a cover-version.

Sampling? A mashup?

Or...like The Beatles, a blatsnt rip-off from African-American R&B?

And this is a bad thing how? The point is that Picasso didn't *copy*...he extended.

(Paul Morley on The Smiths:
'They took absolutely everything that had come before...and made something completely different out of it.')

As for Guernica:
No - you'll never get that from a photograph. A photo is a frozen moment. *A* moment. 'Guernica' is the full and multiple horror. The Spanish/ Basque elements are essential (eg the bull), as is the juxtaposition between the rural, timeless stable and the lightbulb of modernity. (And the oil lamp? Hmm.) And just look at the composition - that big triangle. And the flatness is important.

Tell you what...it must be one of the most documented paintings in history. Check out wat folk have to say about it on teh interwebs and see if they give any insight. Some of it may be [email protected] c'est la vie. Start here?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(painting)

Plus...I'm wiling to be open. Can you point me at a photo - of anything - quite as impressive as Guerenica? (Not dissing photography. I love photos, too.)

http://www.nandotimes.com/nt/images/century/photos/century0256.jpeg

Oddly enough...I kinda had that one in mind.

now to me, that photo Christopher has linked to is not just *A* moment in time, it has a full narrative, a story to tell. Youy get the before and the after from the composition, the horror of the moment but also the horror of the narrative.

And not a stylised bull's head to be seen

But I shall give the link (or at least the version of it which works ) and the study you suggest a go and see what I make of it!

p.s. "And this is a bad thing how? "
I wasn't trying to say it was good or bad, merely trying out another way of looking at it to see if it helped shine any light. I told you I get one good idea a year

It's an interesting one, when you think about it. To 'appreciate' it ('like' is hardly the word), don't you have to know that the girl is crying because of the napalm? Is it the same of different if you asume that the soldiers haev just raped her? Or if she's simply lost her mum and dad?

Does it make any difference of you know the photographer's (what was his name? Utz?) story about how he'd become detached and kept snapping away? Or that the US put out black propaganda saying that it was set up? Or to know about the wider role of the media inn that war?

>>p.s. "And this is a bad thing how? "
I wasn't trying to say it was good or bad, merely trying out another way of looking at it to see if it helped shine any light. I told you I get one good idea a year

Just because I question or disagree with an opinion, that doesn't imply that I think it was a bad one. . 'Interesting' is what we're aiming for.

Maybe the way to judge a painting (or photo, or whatever) is 'How long can we talk about it without exhausting everything worth saying?' That, to me, still probably gives Guernica the edge.

Mind you...a friend who was at the Cortauld told me that one of the exercises they did was to have to comment on paintings as they were pulled out. There was an informal competition to come up with the most inane comment. As an old master was pulled out, one guy pondered for a while and said:
'It's quite pretty.'
The lecturer said,
'Yes - and big!'

Here's another thought:

How much skill was required to take that particular snap? Wasn't Ut (as it turns out) simply in the right place at the right (for him - not for the poor girl) time?

Some photos require *great* skill. But that one?

Does the skill level make a difference?