You know that scene in Atlas Shrugged, at Rearden’s anniversary party, where Frisco mocks Balph about the commercial value of art? I’ll repeat it for you:
"Balph Eubank had joined the group around Dr. Pritchett, and was saying sullenly, “. . . no, you cannot expect people to understand the higher reaches of philosophy. Culture should be taken out of the hands of the dollar-chasers. We need a national subsidy for literature. It is disgraceful that artists are treated like peddlers and that art works have to be sold like soap.”
“You mean, your complaint is that they don’t sell like soap?” asked Francisco d’Anconia. "
Now roll forward to today. At the Tate Modern, the local asylum in London, where all the productions of men who could barely be called artists are towered away and observed, there is currently an exhibtion by an ‘artist’ called ‘Miroslaw Balka’. He has an installation there, I suppose you could call it an installation. You walk into it and observe.
Guess what one part of it entails?
Let me quote the introduction for you:
“Like his father Balka recycles soap: the two rectangular rooms in ‘Dawn’ are lined with it. This is not the luxurious and indulgent product of the perfumery but the pungent, odorous substance that speaks of cleansing and purging.”
My point was not the reasoning behind my dislike of the art-piece, but that this guy is, ironically, producing a piece or artwork which is just soap, and it sells, like soap.
Will you elaborate further on why you dislike this particular piece?
What’s there to like in that piece? It takes no skill of any type to produce crap like that. It might qualify as a poor school-project where students have been told to simply walk through their house, take any object and build some theme around it.
What’s there to like in that piece? It takes no skill of any type to produce crap like that. It might qualify as a poor school-project where students have been told to simply walk through their house, take any object and build some theme around it.
Could it be that the decline in skill is directly related to the fall of art form popular culture? Artists used to be as popular as movie stars well into the 20th century. But as the envelope of what is considered art began to expand, the galleries became filled with ready mades, crafts, and other crap that is deemed art just because the person who made the “work” has some emotional / intellectual / metaphysical explanation for it. I am a formalist by no means, but at the same time, art should be able to stand by itself without any explanation in order for it to be appreciated as beautiful.