laodan's favorite arts pages, page 1

Last login: 2 hours agoLaodan: laodan is a 56 year old guy from Wisconsin, USA.; Likes 1,590 pages, 24 videos, 8 photos • 217 fans • Received 65 reviews; Member since Aug 08, 2005

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If Martians curated an exhibition, what would it contain? Adrian Searle finds ou…: Mar 6, 8:30am 1 review arts, art, reality
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2262458,00.html?gusrc=rss&f...; If Martians put together an exhibition of Earth art, what would it contain? in The Guardian by Adrian Searle
... the Martian view of things is curiously narrow. Perhaps it is the humans doing their bidding who are having the problem. Many people, including critics and curators, have as much problem with art as your average alien. I, for one, am happy to admit that I do not know exactly what art is: I know what is called art, but that's not the same thing. Talking about what's good and bad art gets us into even more trouble. Art performs different functions, and not only at different times and in different places. We squabble and quibble and fight over it, beat each other over the head with it, and shove it in places it was never meant to go. Art appears to be central to our various human cultures, but to frequently masquerade as marginal, uncategorisable, and even useless. If Martians put together an exhibition of Earth art, what would it contain? The curse of the blockbuster Meteorite Lands on Buckingham Palace, 1998, by Cornelia Parker. 54 x 69 cm. Maple boxed frame map of London revealing burn mark left by a meteorite Photograph: British Council I don't believe one instant that aliens reaching earth could be so dumb as humans not to know the function that art exercises in societies. At least Adrian Searle is honest to recognize that ".... I do not know exactly what art is: I know what is called art, but that's not the same thing." But an alien specie that reaches earth could not be so ignorant, for, without art it could not have survived the negative consequences of the rational and mechanistic thought otherwise necessary to devise the tools and machinery to reach earth. If humanity is to survive the totalitarian destructiveness of modernity I believe that this can only occur by solving the question "what is art". This question reflects on who we are and how we are interrelated with all life and everything under the whole in which we are such tiny particles... If interested to read more about my take on "what is art" click here: Artsense

The Graying of Modernism - artnet Magazine: Feb 15, 10:07am 1 review arts, art, painters, modernity
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/kuspit2-12-08.asp; THE GRAYING OF MODERNISM in Artnet by DONALD KUSPIT about "Jasper Johns: Gray," NYC Metropolitan Museum of Art professor of art history and philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook and A.D. White professor at large at Cornell University.
From Impressionism onward modernism has moved steadily away from reality testing into the deceptive wonderland of hallucination.(3) It has moved away from the real thing and towards the perverse reality of the hallucinated thing -- into the bizarrely timeless and spaceless limbo of "vision" where things are real and unreal simultaneously. What began as an epistemophilic adventure ends in epistemophobic stalemate, which is what I think we have in Johnsu2019 engulfing grayness. ... Suspending the reality principle, it becomes a realm of dubious pleasure -- pseudo-esthetic pleasure. It also loses moral value, however indirectly; if white and black have moral significance, as Kandinsky and innumerable others have noted, then mixing them together to form neutral gray renders art morally indifferent. ... Modernism was re-playing itself like a broken record, squeezing every last bit of enigma and insinuation out of the medium. ... I thought I was looking at the suicide of art in process. THE GRAYING OF MODERNISM Jasper Johns. Map. 1962. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Jasper Johns. 0-9. 1959-62. collection of Martin Z. Margulies The search for a reality that the eye can't see was at the heart of the artistic adventure of the artists-thinkers of high modernity (1910-1930). They were unfortunately followed by artists who never understood the artistic quest of high modernity and who then all naturally concluded the experience of modernity in the one way street of "whatever is art" which unmistakably is a total failure or the "Death of art" as Kuspit posits in other works of his.

Iggi Art: Feb 6, 9:32am 2 reviews arts, visual-arts, artsense-digital-variations
http://www.iggiart.blogspot.com/; Iggi Art on iggiart.blogspot.com
Techniques and media: Basically this is black ink on white paper, which is then armed, mixed and digitally retouched. Each paint is 1 meter by 73 centimeters or so. My illustrations are based or inspired by artists such as HR Giger, Jean Michel Basquiat, Jackson Pollock, Akira art (of Katsuhiro Otomo), Moebiuos, and Roberto Matta. Visual art works by iggiart Great works. Iggi's approach is similar to my digital variations. For reference see Digital variations versus fractals.

Eliphante: Feb 5, 6:47pm 5 reviews architecture, arts
http://www.eliphante.org/; Eliphante art and architecture in Eliphante.org
Any fool can hire an architect to draw up a plan for a house, but it takes a truly inspired fool - which is to say, an artist - to start building and see where the earth and driftwood and shards of broken pottery take him. In 1979 Michael [Kahn] & Leda [Livant] moved themselves and their paintings from Provincetown MA to rural land in Cornville Arizona. There they began the first mixed media structure which they later called Eliphante. They continued building and sculpting on the 3 acre environment. Eliphante art and architecture A flickr photo set. Exploring Eliphante NYT slideshow All are David Kadlubowski photos for The New York Times Congratulations guys you made your dream come true and how beautiful it is indeed.

Gavin Turk ponders what it means to make art for a living | Art &Architecture |…: Sep 13, 2007 10:59am 1 review arts, art, society, reality, worldviews
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2166939,00.html?gusrc=rss&f...; Why be an artist?
in the Guardian-art by Gavin Turk
The cave walls became not windows to the outside world, but some form of testament to the inside one, in both senses of dwelling and mind. These pictures were made to last, made to remember something. The author was making something for the community to use as a thinking space ... As this philosophical space grew, so the community created what might be called gods: "special forces" that explained the presence of certain unfathomable phenomena. These gods needed to find some earthly stasis and certain characters in the community had the provision and vision to create forms that could represent these life-affirming powers. These people were simultaneously in contact with the gods while being servants of the social group - producing objects and images for people to use in the act of worship. ... Eventually powerful parties in societies started to employ the services of artists to represent not just the gods, but also themselves as some historic marker of their existence. The images of kings, queens and men of the cloth gave way to nobles, lords, barons and businessmen, in fact anyone who had the finances to employ artists to depict the subject of their desires. ... In the 1920s a collective group of artists formed and called themselves surrealists. Headed by Andre Breton, they wrote manifestos claiming that through art a radical shift in political reason could be achieved. Culture was the life-affirming glue between people and art was a major part of its political make up. ... Recently, art has become a kind of last bastion to the real. Its contemporary status has been cast by former challenges to "the perceived reality of things". Art is always a picture making, once an object is situated in an artistic context it is fated to be an artistic version of its former self, for instance, the cliched image of Fountain, the 1917 sculpture by Marcel Duchamp. Why be an artist? A brief history of art ... Gavin Turk with his 2000 work Death of Che. Photograph: Sean Smith In this article Gavin Turk follows exactly the same approach towards art as mine. In summary the artist produces visual signs of the knowledge of the day about reality for all to share. In other words art has a societal functionality. But it seems to me that Gavin Turk's presentation of late-modernity is flawed by weakness. I have to confess that it feels good, at last, to see one's ideas starting to enter the mainstream.

Crucial talk: What now in painting? Part 2: The visual form of meaning.: Sep 12, 2007 12:26pm 2 reviews arts, art
http://laodan.blogspot.com/2007/09/what-now-in-painting-part-2-form-to.html; What now in painting? Part 2: The visual form of meaning. in Crucial Talk by myself
It is in the nature of art to express beauty in the formal rendering of a work. Non-beauty, ugliness, in-harmony are the results of the artist's envy, greed and most importantly his will. The artist can overcome those by letting the content of his creations flow out of the material of his support and what he'll discover there unmistakably will reflect upon the conditions of his time. What now in painting? Part 2: The visual form of meaning.

The Trouble with Youth - artnet Magazine: Aug 30, 2007 12:17pm 1 review arts, art, worldviews
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/kuspit8-17-07.asp; THE TROUBLE WITH YOUTH IN ART in artnet by Donald Kuspit
I am arguing, along with theorists who view creativity in terms of evolution, that there is no significant creativity without a foundation in tradition, which symbolizes all that is memorable, mature, and of demonstrable value in a society, implying that tradition can never lose meaning and will always reward reflection; and iconoclasm that questions the finality and values of tradition and challenges traditional modes of understanding, but that remains valueless unless it achieves its own finality by becoming part of and holding its own in tradition, thus gaining lasting meaning and proving its continuing value to society. I am suggesting that New Old Masterism involves containing, storing, linking and finally unifying the variety of anxious sensations of narcissistic modernism in memorable representational modes to effect a sense of self that is neither traditional nor modern, but a stable compound of both. THE TROUBLE WITH YOUTH IN ART An excellent article. I should add that this is one the the greatest pieces on art that Kuspit ever wrote. The only trouble is that the style of his writing denotes that he perhaps spends too much time immersed in reading French theorists. The substance of Kuspit's thesis is that avant-garde art failed to give a sensical illustration of reality that could possibly have a lasting effect on the observer and for that matter on society as a whole. In other words it"... offers little to remember and reflect on, and thus has no transformative effect, suggesting that it is a kind of infatuating fool's gold." After rejecting Avant-garde art for being non-sensicality, non-mature and rejecting beauty, Kuspit then positions the Avant-garde as being the opposite of the "New Old Master Art". By "New Old Master Art" Kuspit means the real art of today that means "involving the restoration of beauty and maturity, and with that sanity, to art. - art that returns to tradition even as it assimilates modern insights into color and form, enriching sensation and complicating structure -- is a new adult art. That is, it is an art for reflective and self-possessed adults rather than anxious and impulsive youth, which means that it is an art that wants to consecrate life. " This is a far way from his anterior belief that "art is dead". Kuspit now posits that art has a function to fulfill today and tomorrow. The trouble is that his definition is too much circumscribed to adolescence versus adult while mostly ignoring the real function art fulfills in society: the transmission to all of visuals signs of the present knowledge about reality that is shaping the production of our future. (my definition)

YouTube - Chinese Painting and Calligraphy in 3D: Aug 14, 2007 9:33am 3 reviews arts, video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imxXfC0Isk0

Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics: Aug 2, 2007 1:52pm 2 reviews arts, society, worldviews
http://www.bu.edu/arion/Paglia.htm; Religion and the Arts in America in Arion (Spring / Summer 2007 issue) Boston University, by CAMILLE PAGLIA
For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center. Profaning the iconography of other people's faiths is boring and adolescent. The New Age movement, to which I belong, was a distillation of the 1960s' multicultural attraction to world religions, but it has failed thus far to produce important work in the visual arts. The search for spiritual meaning has been registering in popular culture instead through science fiction, as in George Lucas' six-film Star Wars saga, with its evocative master myth of the "Force". But technology for its own sake is never enough. It will always require supplementation through cultivation in the arts. To fully appreciate world art, one must learn how to respond to religious expression in all its forms. Art began as religion in prehistory. It does not require belief to be moved by a sacred shrine, icon, or scripture. Hence art lovers, even when as citizens they stoutly defend democratic institutions against religious intrusion, should always speak with respect of religion. Religion and the Arts in America Interesting article about the history of the arts in the US. Camille Paglia would have us believe that "Art began as religion in prehistory". But this is simply confusing apples for pears. - Religion views reality as a creation of god, or as Aristotle conceptualized, as "the first mover", for the first mover explains everything else.. - Animism was the worldview observed in all corners of the world before the emergence of religion. Animism was a knowledge based on tens of thousands of years of observation by "primitive men" of the rhythms and patterns at work around them. And this observation invariably produced the same knowledge anywhere around the world... - Modernity is the "worldview" that followed religion. The understanding of reality under modernity is that individualism and private property are the most rational form of behavior. Animism, religion and modernity are "worldviews", in other words, views of the world conceived by men as resulting from the particular conditions in a specific time-frame. The societal role of visual arts was to give visual signs for sharing the particular worldview of the time with all. But this understanding has been lost, in the West, along the unsuccessful trial by the modern avant-garde to supplant the "first degree image that our eyes are given to see" with a new, more "advanced", way to illustrate reality. For sure in our late modern times we all feel like a dire need for sharing a common worldview that is adapted to the present conditions of our knowledge production... so visual arts seem thus to have a bright future after the passing of late modernity and the emergence of the period that follows modernity (post modernity).

Crucial talk: My last 4 paintings: Jul 23, 2007 2:16pm 1 review arts, laodan
http://laodan.blogspot.com/2007/07/my-last-4-paintings.html; My last 4 paintings by myself in Crucial Talk
I write much about the meaning and societal sense of visual arts but how does my painting relate to my writings? Take a peak at my last 4 paintings they foreshadow the content of my next post. My last 4 paintings I'll be out of town for 2 weeks.