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What happens when art becomes purely a means of social critique detached from aesthetic values?
The Royal Academy of Arts is hosting a tribute to Marina Abramovic, most famous for her ‘piece’, The Artist is Present, in which she sat looking at people, and in Denmark, one artist took the money and ran. Literally.
In autumn 2021, a Danish museum opened two large crates to inspect two works it had commissioned from the artist Jens Haaning.
But when museum staff pulled out the canvases — a new work the artist had informed the museum was titled Take the Money and Run — the canvases were completely blank.
The museum, the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, had given Haaning a loan of 532,549 Danish krone, the equivalent of about $76,400. The money was to be used to recreate two earlier works by Haaning that depicted — in actual cold, hard cash affixed to canvas in a frame — the average annual income of a Dane and an Austrian, and the sizable gap between them, reflecting wage differences within the European Union.
The intended work of art was idiotic and so was the final product. If there were aesthetic standards, the museum might have some grounds for complaint, but they don’t exist, and the best evidence of that is that the museum turned around and exhibited the blank canvasses as a commentary on capitalism.
The museum nonetheless exhibited the blank canvases in its “Work It Out” show…
“Haaning’s new work Take the Money and Run is also a recognition that works of art, despite intentions to the contrary, are part of a capitalist system that values a work based on some arbitrary conditions,” the museum says in its exhibition guide. “Even the missing money in the work has a monetary value when it is called art and thus shows how the value of money is an abstract quantity.”
Do you know what is a commentary on capitalism? Every single thing in the world.
If attaching an abstract value to objects is capitalism, then everything is capitalism and you could just as easily stick a pile of sugar packets in the museum and call it social commentary (of course it’s been done already) or a banana (done also) or a golden toilet (done and stolen).
When art consists of using everyday objects to make sophomoric statements about life pitched to an idiot leftist audience, then everything is art and nothing is art.
That’s what happened to modern art which abandoned aesthetics and now consists of social justice lectures embodied in everyday objects, random scrawls or even less accessible and more pointless exhibitions.
Art without aesthetics which is then reduced to politics is nonsense.
Is a blank canvas art? Sure. It’s making a statement, isn’t it. And if all art is, is the act of making statements, then all of politics is art, and art is politics, and we don’t need art, we just need politics.
That is what the Left has done to literature, movies, (and most forms of entertainment), religion, art, and anything it gets its hands on. It eats out the substance and leaves nothing.
All true. The left eats away at everything. They’re like butt worms that way.
Whoever down voted me eats butt worms.
I down vote you routinely. Your banal comments are at the level of a pre-adolescent 13-year old derelict who just found a new 4-letter word in the dictionary. Your comments lack intelligence, wisdom, wit, and any sense of decency. You seem to spend a significant amount of time attempting show how tough you are. The only one who seems to be fooled by it is yourself. A confident person doesn’t need to try and prove anything; only those that lack it do. As therapist Michael Hurd would say, grow up.
Everything you wrote is the opposite of the truth.Go read a book, you retard.
I would tell you to suck a dick and take it up the ass but we all know you’re going to do that anyway.
Bitch.
Another down vote? You gaylord.
What bothers me about the phrase “capitalist system” is that it seems to imply some kind of system imposed from top down. Rather, I would say, it is the evolution of money, to its current state, with some rules imposed by the political system. In East Africa, for example, before the Colonial Period, beads were used as currency. We were all taught that the Dutch swindled the Indians out of New York with a handful of beads, but beads were the currency of the time. Etc.
Yeah, what’s wrong with beads? They must’ve seemed pretty to the primitives.
And did you notice what an ugly butt that chick in the photo above has? She should cover that thing up.
Whoever down voted me must dig ugly butts.
Go to it buddy. I know I never will. I have that minimum of pride.
One could say that the blank work has already been done… There’s is, at least, one in the modern wing of the St. Louis Art Museum, and (I think) covered with primer – and that’s it. So, the ‘niche’ of blank as work should be considered fully covered, and the next artist had better talk an fast one to make up for the this rather used nothingness better pushed as meaningful.
I was never popular with the art professor on-board for modern art (and naturally – non-Western). Thank G’d as I would never want to be popular with such ‘wise’ persons. I did, however, entered work at the local art salon/store, and was one of two from the school accepted. Further – I sold work.
So yes – having an working understanding of aesthetics matters, and will always will when the trash in-thing of the moment ends. Modern Art, now on its third century, has come to being only the latest left ‘thing’, and you get this nonsense.
Commentary not so cleverly disguised as art isn’t a new liberal phenomena. Andres Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ’; a photo taken by the “artist” of a plastic crucifix floating in a jar of his own urine, was introduced in 1987 and won awards sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, a US governmental agency, with your tax dollars. Michelangelo was unavailable for comment.
Just as they are with critical thinking, liberals aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer when it comes to…well…anything, so their “art” is about as nuanced as a paper bag and as subtle as a brick. As far as Mr Serrano is concerned, judging by a recent photo, he won’t have long to wait for the ultimate critic to pass His judgment on the work.
Did you see this Serrano being greeted by the Poop in the vanticant recently? I think i saw the photo here a few weeks ago. Yes, his garbage has the seal of approval of the paedo in chief.
I notice none of the AGW freaks vandalizing art ever mess with any of this modern statement crap. Even though it’s bought for ridiculous prices (often from taxpayer money-welfare for bad artists), who would care? One of my favorite telling events regarding modern ‘art,’ was when a cleaning crew at a big museum tossed a famous and very expensive modern ‘masterpiece’ because they thought it was a painter’s drop cloth.
You don’t need an art appreciation class to spot good classic art. Those are so you can kid yourself that most modern art isn’t crap.
I like Monet’s work. That weird blurry effect he used is cool. It’s soothing.
Oh, yeah, Monet is great! My grandmother and I actually visited his garden once when I was a kid. Very soothing, as you said.
That must have been cool. Monet’s garden. I can only imagine.
“Is a blank canvas art? Sure. It’s making a statement, isn’t it.” Yeah, the statement the artist is making is that he’s talentless and lazy.
That, and his patrons are stupid.
MAGA – Make Art Great Again.
We need beauty. It is essential to civilization.
Cancel culture is the mortal enemy of beauty. Doubt me? Take one look at any of our “woke” and hyperventilating comrade Karens.
It’s not just the left. There is never a shortage of people who want more than anything to be recognized as artists. The great majority are absolutely without talent, a fact that seems to encourage them. to inflict their dreck on the public. Have you ever had the misfortune to listen to Patti Smith sing, or seen an Agnes Varda movie, or found yourself recently in a Chelsea (Manhattan) art gallery?
The only reason I’d set foot in a Chelsea gallery is for the air conditioning on a hot day
or if Hunter’s having a show
Thank you for posting this! As a practising artist, the key phrase is “aesthetic values”. To me and many like me it is. when I started I wanted to be a figure painter, went to art school and got stuck in the sclerotic tunnel known as conceptual art. But like many from the 1970s, sickened that stuff we did back then has been resurrected for millions in cash. But there is an alternate market for real aesthetically pleasing works of art that don’t demand you swallow indigestible word salads in order to “understand” what you are looking at.
I have only recently connected the rise of garbage known as the art world to the disgusting Frankfurt School of perversion and paedophilia.
Good. Normal people do want aesthetics, but an artificial market has been created on a bubble, partly by art dealers and collectors, in which art is detached from value. Like crypto, you can understand why this approach serves various interested parties.