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I ask this not to be, like, condescending or anti-intellectual or populist or geeshucksy or anything like that, I'm actually curious. I listen to a little bit of pretty avant-garde music that most people would find distasteful, and I like it because it tickles an analytical part of my brain that MOST of the music I listen to doesn't. Which isn't to say that the majority of music I prefer to listen to isn't poppier stuff, just, yknow, it takes all sorts. But I've never been a big visual art appreciator at all, and I just read from somewhere that Number 5 is currently worth ~$300m USD, and it made me genuinely wonder why he's so popular. Again, not from a judgemental place, but in a critical way. What themes does Pollock show in his work that made him take off, was it a zeitgeist thing, had people not splattered canvasses with paint before, etc etc. Do  serious art people even like him in the first place, or is he just Expressionism 101 translated to a mass audience? Like I have some ideas from listening to Expressionist music how and why that whole movement took off at the time that it did, I just wonder what's unique about Pollock that made him so notable.Basically give me an art history course TIA
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Jul 25, 2014 16:09
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No art history lesson, but I've seen a number of his pieces in person, in rooms full of other great art - they stand out in the room every time, I always end up looking at and thinking about them for a while, and I enjoy looking at them just as much as I enjoy looking at other art I like. I don't know very much about him, but that's why I like Jackson Pollock. E: That isn't meant to be an "I like it because I like it" - I meant more that I think he actually has compositional elements that are still extremely distinctive in a room full of modern art. I'm not trying to be anti-intellectual either.
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Jul 25, 2014 16:31
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The CIA in the 50's and 60's decided to fund abstract expressionism as an alternative to the stuffy and outdated soviet social realism. This art was meant to properly show the true freedom of artistic expression in the capitalist system and establish the US as the world cultural leader besides being the preeminent military and economic superpower. Edit: linko
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Jul 25, 2014 19:17
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His pieces are also incredibly deceptive in how 'easy' or whatever else they may look– there's a nuanced balance and energy to the compositions that's incredible if you pay attention to it. Seeing them in person is really a requirement though– the larger canvases are absolutely electric.
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Jul 25, 2014 20:16
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killerllamaman posted:No art history lesson, but I've seen a number of his pieces in person, in rooms full of other great art - they stand out in the room every time, I always end up looking at and thinking about them for a while, and I enjoy looking at them just as much as I enjoy looking at other art I like. I don't know very much about him, but that's why I like Jackson Pollock. Is it possible that this may be partly due to how they're arranged in the museum in which you saw them (this is kind of half a rhetorical question, since I'm sure it played at least *some* part)? When I saw some of his work at the MoMA it was obvious that they arranged things such that his work would be a centerpiece.
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Jul 25, 2014 21:44
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The paintings are pretty.
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Jul 26, 2014 03:48
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Yeah, I didn't really get why people liked him until I saw his stuff in person, for the same reasons others have said. Looking at his paintings on your computer screen gives you a completely different impression and makes them look really flat and boring.
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Jul 26, 2014 04:51
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Pollock's paintings are very impressive in person. They're gigantic and eye-catching in a way that a computer screen can't replicate. At a conceptual level, he involved himself so heavily into the process of creation, it was hard to separate his end-product from his creation process. He would allow reporters to observe as he painted, in a media circus he would drench the enormous canvas in paint as he worked non-stop for an hour or more. His patterns aren't exactly random either, he didn't just throw paint around like a child, but I think you need to see them to appreciate that.
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Jul 26, 2014 05:25
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quadrophrenic posted:Basically give me an art history course TIA You're basically asking why the art world is what it is, and I'm not sure many people can give you a straight answer. Why a Rothko, which some could say is simplistic enough to be reproduced by anyone, goes for millions of dollars but a photorealistic portrait done by an unknown can't even sell. Well, there's a few reasons: 1. Fame begets more fame. People want a Rothko or a Pollock or a Kandinsky in their homes because they want to show their friends how cultured they are. The art world (the buying end) is compromised by very wealthy liberal elites who want to keep up with the Joneses. So they spend a cool million on an original to hang in their mansion. This raises the price and demand of all of the art more and more. Some people even think of art as investable commodities like gold or coins. The value of a Picasso isn't going to plummet. 2. Lots of these things may seem like a child could do it, or that it's easily reproduceable, but you're seeing it from hindsight. Before Jackson Pollock painted what he did, no one had ever done that before, and he did it well. He has a completely unique style. When you say that you've seen a Pollock, someone can visualize exactly what you're talking about. 3. And a lot of the success of art is just like other creative mediums like music or writing, some of it is just dumb loving luck. Some people can be amazing and what they do but never get discovered, but some guy in Manhattan can glue tampons to toilets or something and get featured in MOMA. That's life.
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Jul 26, 2014 05:57
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the posted:
Until very, very recently art was loving hard to counterfeit is a large part of this. It happened sure, but that's what knowledgeable appraisers exist for.
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Jul 26, 2014 07:31
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One of the things that you have to remember when having this conversation is that the amount a work of art goes to auction is not connected to its subjective aesthetic quality, or the nature of its creation for the most part. So we can't say "500 mill? But it's just a splatter of paint on the canvas! My 8 year old niece could have done that!", because its price is simply a reflection of the desire people have to own it. This can be for a number of unconnected reasons, such as a display of wealth, an investment, or that the work has historical or cultural value independent of the subject matter. You can probably reconcile people paying a lot of money for a limited edition rare NES cartridge for similar reasons - it is a desirable object. But in reality it is a crude circuit board encased in cheap plastic that cost very little to make. Now consider the impact and history of art over even just the past 1000 years (compared to say, the relatively short cultural phenomenon of video games) and you can see why the prices for one-of-a-kind, hand-made art objects are vastly higher, even if the sum total of the cost of the materials that comprise it are less by many orders of magnitude. If you're having problems understanding why many people value Pollock's art, perhaps read up on postwar Abstract Expressionism and try and get an understanding of where it sits in the bigger picture. These paintings have cultural capital. There is, secondary to this, the most obvious answer which is that his canvases, especially viewed in person form a wonderfully intricate and dynamic web of forms and return to the viewer something that cannot ever be extracted from traditional representational art. The irony is that all paintings are an illusion of some kind, and even looking at a Rembrandt close enough can look like a Barnett Newman or a Rothko. I think many people feel that they're being "tricked" somehow because they are not given everything right away.
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Jul 26, 2014 13:30
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Ytlaya posted:Is it possible that this may be partly due to how they're arranged in the museum in which you saw them (this is kind of half a rhetorical question, since I'm sure it played at least *some* part)? When I saw some of his work at the MoMA it was obvious that they arranged things such that his work would be a centerpiece. I think this is an inescapable (but not necessarily bad) part of all art - you can't view art without some sort of context, and as much as some artists and curators want to believe that what they create is all physical/visible (and as much as I like to look at it that way, sometimes), I think things like critical reputation and "value" are very difficult to eliminate from the process of displaying a Jackson Pollock painting. We will probably never get to see one buried in a stack of flea-market paintings in a late relative's attic, though that would probably be quite an experience too. This is a pretty interesting thread because everybody's right!
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Jul 26, 2014 16:46
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People who like him are essentially just replacing the parents he never had that didn't appreciate his "art" of randomly splattering paint onto a canvas with no thought at all. He was basically a huge goon/manchild/'troll' who got the douche art community to fork over 500 mils for a canvas at which a babyman chucked paint at randomly. There is no compositional element at all. Some splatters of paint he would chuck with his hands, others with his bare rear end in a top hat. Sometimes he would wet a paintbrush in paint and splatter the canvas by shaking his arms randomly with a wet paintbrush. If the paint marks were arranged in some way by sheer random chance that they appealed to some haughty urbanite's conception of "compositional balance," he was able to suck out an inflated artistic 'impression/opinion' and managed to somehow support his gallery's traditional technique of splattering paint onto a canvas like a baby. Notice that he does not draw cars, or shapes, or airplanes, or people, but simply splatters paint on a canvas like a babby. It is incredibly important, in understanding pollock's "contribution" to "art," to objectively view his paintings as a baby's poo poo garbage, because that is what they are, and featuring him as an inspirational artist is kind of like an "inside joke" or "troll" or "we have so much money that we will spend 300 million on a baby's poo poo" by the art community.
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Jul 27, 2014 06:07
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^^^ Pretty much this. He gave himself a paint enema then shat it out on a canvas and the pretentious art community gobbled it up.
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Jul 27, 2014 06:57
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Is that really that different from Michelangelo using an anus-mounted brush to paint portraits of wealthy patrons?
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Jul 27, 2014 09:46
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killaer posted:People who like him are essentially just replacing the parents he never had that didn't appreciate his "art" of randomly splattering paint onto a canvas with no thought at all. He was basically a huge goon/manchild/'troll' who got the douche art community to fork over 500 mils for a canvas at which a babyman chucked paint at randomly. There is no compositional element at all. Some splatters of paint he would chuck with his hands, others with his bare rear end in a top hat. Sometimes he would wet a paintbrush in paint and splatter the canvas by shaking his arms randomly with a wet paintbrush. If the paint marks were arranged in some way by sheer random chance that they appealed to some haughty urbanite's conception of "compositional balance," he was able to suck out an inflated artistic 'impression/opinion' and managed to somehow support his gallery's traditional technique of splattering paint onto a canvas like a baby. Notice that he does not draw cars, or shapes, or airplanes, or people, but simply splatters paint on a canvas like a babby. It is incredibly important, in understanding pollock's "contribution" to "art," to objectively view his paintings as a baby's poo poo garbage, because that is what they are, and featuring him as an inspirational artist is kind of like an "inside joke" or "troll" or "we have so much money that we will spend 300 million on a baby's poo poo" by the art community. I think this is probably a much more common opinion than any other in this thread. I don't entirely agree with you, but I don't think you're entirely wrong either. I do tend to at least attempt to view the product separately from the process, so it doesn't much matter to me whether a work was difficult or easy to create, or whether the artist was in complete control or had no control at all over the work while they were creating it, that's all background I think about once I've figured out if the work itself makes an impression on me (this is, of course, not the only way to interpret art). Sometimes the stuff people do on purpose is way less interesting than carefully-selected examples of things they do (at least partly) by accident. I also have a lot of respect for people who manage to both make aesthetically interesting (to me) art AND successfully "troll" the art world.
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Jul 27, 2014 16:22
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ITT: The layman's misunderstanding of modern art https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y685hA65x1E the fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Jul 27, 2014 |
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Jul 27, 2014 16:38
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Painting is a thousand year old conversation and Jackson Pollock had a lot of interesting things to say.
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Jul 27, 2014 16:55
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Pollock paintings are actually fun to look at though, which redeems them as "fart." I always hated Matisse paintings, that poo poo I can never swallow down for some reason. I don't understand his fame or the appeal. I appreciate a masterpeice landscape or even a mediocre portrait but drat I just don't get his place in art can someone explain.
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Jul 27, 2014 17:01
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Jackson Pollock more like Jackson Pillock.
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Jul 27, 2014 18:20
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There are many things not being understood in some of the arguments I'm seeing here, including the ones pushing for him. I'm going to focus on the ability for art to be easily reproduced, what some people frame as "my child could do that" or "anyone can throw paint at a canvas", and the value of the technical skill of an artist and its role in art, specifically in America because we are discussing Pollock and it is a reasonable place to start. There was once a time when people made paintings like this:  These people were known as limners. These were American limners, not to be confused with the European ones who made cool books. These limners were, more or less, Jackson Pollock. They had no formal training in painting but they did it anyway and they made money doing it. The market at the time was such that moderately wealthy merchants wanted pictures of their children, but they couldn't afford a really great artist, so they hired one of these dudes to do a quick painting of a loved one or themselves. These people were replaced by mechanical reproduction. If you want a picture of someone, you get a photographer and that photographer is faster and better than some lovely limner. Around the time photography started hitting the mainstream, we also begin to see a more thoroughly civilized America, and some schools (both literal art schools, and just groups of talented painters) begin to appear. This is when we start to see American impressionism and the other great landscape painters (Hudson River etc.) pop up. Photography was taking care of the bulk of portraits (certainly some were still being painted, Sargent wasn't struggling to find work), and there was now room for decorative painting to really take off as the market begins to shift a bit toward NY from Paris near the beginning of the 20th century. Then the Great War happens and most of the European art movements just straight up die, notably the Futurists. Then WWII happens and the Europeans are all like "Aight gently caress this, I saw the futurists die I'm loving outta here." Enter NY, full swing. (By which I mean there is now a ridiculously large art market that still hasn't died in NY, enabling the sale of some poo poo from American artists that wouldn't ever have seen the light of day otherwise.) The world has changed really rapidly, seen two world wars, photography is astonishingly accessible and starting to see a role outside of portraiture, and a lot of sensitive artist types have realized that not only does photography exist to easily reproduce reality, but you can also now (~mid 50s) just straight up copy basically any work of art mechanically without any problem. This puts into real question the value of the artists ability to truly create whatever you want to term it, I'll go with "reproductions" by which I mean photorealistic paintings or sculpture. These things have significant historic weight, but only because nothing but an astonishingly skilled craftsman could reproduce reality. Now, any idiot with a photocopier or a camera can do it instantly. And, what's worse, they can also photograph or copy your exact copy of reality. So, with that in mind, most of the art world decided it was probably a-ok to start exploring things in the abstract and Jackson Pollock is now the modern day limner, an untrained painter making money from painting. The only difference is that now the individual limner can be propped up by the market to the status of godhood, rather than having more or less the status of your senior prom photographer. So, when debating the value of modern or contemporary art, it is usually best to realize that the entire world stopped caring about technical execution about a hundred years ago, so it isn't even really a talking point. Because art doesn't look like this anymore:  vs  It looks like this:  vs  And there is much, much more to it now. So much more that some people don't even bother actually making the artwork, they just write about it. The March Hare fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Jul 27, 2014 |
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Jul 27, 2014 19:50
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quadrophrenic posted:But I've never been a big visual art appreciator at all, and I just read from somewhere that Number 5 is currently worth ~$300m USD Art valuation is so high because it's one of the last unregulated ways for organized crime to launder money internationally. For a while it was million-dollar wine bottles, now it's paintings.
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Jul 27, 2014 20:00
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Luigi Thirty posted:Art valuation is so high because it's one of the last unregulated ways for organized crime to launder money internationally. For a while it was million-dollar wine bottles, now it's paintings. Links/sources, plz. Sounds interesting.
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Jul 27, 2014 20:52
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"I'm gonna paint him a dadaist cubist self-portrait he can't refuse."
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Jul 27, 2014 21:23
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The March Hare posted:And there is much, much more to it now. So much more that some people don't even bother actually making the artwork, they just write about it. Art has transcended the physical medium and now exists in the headspace of the cultural elite, taking on a new life of its own, an organic creation born of the gestalt knowledge of art critics and aficionados. Truly, art has no bounds.
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Jul 27, 2014 22:36
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It's due to people's subliminal enjoyment of a name that contains both 'Jacks' and 'Poll'.
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Jul 27, 2014 23:00
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Control Volume posted:Art has transcended the physical medium and now exists in the headspace of the cultural elite, taking on a new life of its own, an organic creation born of the gestalt knowledge of art critics and aficionados. Truly, art has no bounds. This but unironically.
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Jul 27, 2014 23:46
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I can understand Pollock's fame to some degree, but can somebody explain the insane hype surrounding Ai Weiwei to me? It's not a simple as being an outspoken Chinese dissident, isn't it?
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Jul 28, 2014 01:45
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fspades posted:I can understand Pollock's fame to some degree, but can somebody explain the insane hype surrounding Ai Weiwei to me? It's not a simple as being an outspoken Chinese dissident, isn't it? His art is good, it's very political, and he has personally caused grand political reactions because of his work. I just saw his show at the Brooklyn Museum, and it's an incredible spectacle. Now, I lived in China for a while and know the context a bit better, but a friend of mine who speaks no Chinese and has barely heard of him went with me, and still was pretty impressed. Why was Guernica a big deal? it's just a bunch of horses and poo poo.
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Jul 28, 2014 02:16
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Last Buffalo posted:His art is good, it's very political, and he has personally caused grand political reactions because of his work. I just saw his show at the Brooklyn Museum, and it's an incredible spectacle. Now, I lived in China for a while and know the context a bit better, but a friend of mine who speaks no Chinese and has barely heard of him went with me, and still was pretty impressed. In what way was it good? That's what I asked.
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Jul 28, 2014 02:36
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You wanna get into "how can you explain ____", try Franz Kline.
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Jul 28, 2014 02:36
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Last Buffalo posted:Why was Guernica a big deal? it's just a bunch of horses and poo poo. I'm fairly sure you're being sarcastic here, but I have to say I feel about Guernica similarly to how people feel about Pollock paintings in this thread so far. It's interesting when you see it on a computer, but when you see it in person, it's loving amazing. The Reina Sofia museum, where it's on display, is full of some really awesome poo poo, but it obviously stands out above the rest. Now, can someone explain the appeal of Van Gogh to me? I went to the museum in Amsterdam, and it was the complete opposite of going to the wicked museums in Madrid: none of the paintings seemed that impressive. Was I missing something? Should I have hit the coffeeshops beforehand or something?
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Jul 28, 2014 03:16
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PT6A posted:I'm fairly sure you're being sarcastic here, but I have to say I feel about Guernica similarly to how people feel about Pollock paintings in this thread so far. It's interesting when you see it on a computer, but when you see it in person, it's loving amazing. The Reina Sofia museum, where it's on display, is full of some really awesome poo poo, but it obviously stands out above the rest. The Van Gogh exhibit just hasn't been as fun since they quit selling mushrooms to be honest.
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Jul 28, 2014 05:12
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the posted:You wanna get into "how can you explain ____", try Franz Kline. Kline is pretty basic, was buds with all the dudes in the scene and rode the wave. Being friends w/ the dudes already making tons of cash and then having them all pimp you out to gallerists is a good way to become famous. That, and also his work is super impressive in person and of all the expressionists I'm pretty sure he was the best at actually executing a painting. They're super controlled in their execution if you really get a good look at them, and most of them were done from life.
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Jul 28, 2014 05:15
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The March Hare posted:It looks like this: That fuckin rules
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Jul 29, 2014 02:19
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I like Pollock, but I don't really know why. His work is just kind of satisfying to look at, and same with a lot of other modern artists. There's never a clear indication of a) what I'm looking at and b) what exactly I'm meant to feel, so it sort of becomes a personal thing. I wish I could say more about it other than that I like what I like, but that seems like a legitimate thing to say anyways. I'd like to see a Pollock in person some day, or a Rothko or a Turrell, just to get the full experience.
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Jul 29, 2014 07:54
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Abstract expressionism encapsulated the idealism of post-war society and the victory of freedom in depressed world. Then it was savagely critiqued by Pop-art, as it turned out to be the movement of intellectually devoid commercialism. Basically they look nice and can produce profound experiences if viewed in person.
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Jul 29, 2014 08:45
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Yes but why couldn't he just paint a picture of a badass Mecha robot
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Jul 29, 2014 11:21
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I'm nthing that Pollock paintings look like nothing much on a computer screen or in a book. Up close they are fantastic. Lots of textures and things that doesn't come through in a photo. There's a reason it was called 'Action painting'.
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Jul 29, 2014 16:30
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Can't find a link right now but I do remember reading something about genuine Jackson Pollock paintings being rated higher than art student imitations in blind tests, so there really is something going on there beyond paint splatter.
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Jul 29, 2014 16:48
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