Explaining the scare quotes: Not sure what it is but I never really feel comfortable with the notion of conceptual art, as if there’s such a thing as un-conceptual art, it always seems like a bit of a dis i.e. there’s nothing to this art but the concept, no craftsmanship or skill beyond coming up with a concept. I mean maybe that was the idea of Duchamp was aiming for, I always got the impression that the famous urinal was kind of dissing the art establishment, maybe this is the accepted reading I don’t know, most writing about art makes me want to vomit my own pelvis. It seems to me that it’s mostly about making the reader/viewer feel like their opinion isn’t valid at all. Sometimes you get a BBC 2 documentary where some tiresome posho tries to make art ‘accessible’ and to “empower” the proles with an understanding of proper art (the exception here is a documentary I saw aaaages ago where an artist made a patio for a football fan and it had all his teams hand prints and foot prints in it, that was cool) but it amounts to the same thing, if all goes to plan then members of the public end up being all like “actually this thing I though was crap is actually good because someone told me why I’m supposed to think its good”. blah blah blah. I’ll shut up now.
My old flatmate Jenny (Fine Art BA) once explained the whole idea of conceptual art one drunken evening so it made sense. Obviously I had forgotten everything by the morning, but couldn’t admit this so I am none the wiser.
And then tom said:
Explaining the scare quotes: Not sure what it is but I never really feel comfortable with the notion of conceptual art, as if there’s such a thing as un-conceptual art, it always seems like a bit of a dis i.e. there’s nothing to this art but the concept, no craftsmanship or skill beyond coming up with a concept. I mean maybe that was the idea of Duchamp was aiming for, I always got the impression that the famous urinal was kind of dissing the art establishment, maybe this is the accepted reading I don’t know, most writing about art makes me want to vomit my own pelvis. It seems to me that it’s mostly about making the reader/viewer feel like their opinion isn’t valid at all. Sometimes you get a BBC 2 documentary where some tiresome posho tries to make art ‘accessible’ and to “empower” the proles with an understanding of proper art (the exception here is a documentary I saw aaaages ago where an artist made a patio for a football fan and it had all his teams hand prints and foot prints in it, that was cool) but it amounts to the same thing, if all goes to plan then members of the public end up being all like “actually this thing I though was crap is actually good because someone told me why I’m supposed to think its good”. blah blah blah. I’ll shut up now.
And then KateG said:My old flatmate Jenny (Fine Art BA) once explained the whole idea of conceptual art one drunken evening so it made sense. Obviously I had forgotten everything by the morning, but couldn’t admit this so I am none the wiser.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Login [ « ] [ » ]