to think a lot of "art" is in fact self indulgent tat?

[HattiFattner]

I went to an exhibit of students work this weekend.

Some of it was extraordinary and showed amazing talent.

Most of it was a load of tat. Not just that, but over thought, pretentious and had a royal element of intellectual self gratification about it....

I came away thinking that the "artists" were suffering from a bad case of the Emperors New Clothes - "Oh i took a neoclassical genre and use it to create an installation about teenaged angst in the 21st century and really you must be an intellectual to understand the use of light and space and ...."

• no love, you made a bowl. With a bunny in it.

And of course if you said that to their face "She just doesnt understand it..."

I would like a really Simon Cowell moment with some of them and to be able to call them out. But their argument is "Its "art" because I say it is."

Hey, on that basis I live in an "installation" called "Domestic Chaos"

Or maybe "Untitled IV" which makes it sound alltogether more worthy.

And infact in my experience, the way art is taught as being reliant on drawing skills puts many people off art and sets the tone for a lifetime of misunderstanding it and their own creativity.

I tend to agree with Mapley, I know some people who couldn't draw a stick man to save their lives, but can create masterpieces through digital art.

And New media is only a fraction of the story in ways that a person's creativity can flow. Personally I think that everyone is an artist, that everyone has some way of seeing the world that is peculiar to them, and that if they find their appropriate medium for showing that then they create art. A good art teacher is someone who inspires a person to come to this realisation and gives them the confidence and context to create their vision. Where that be with a pencil, computer, painting on a mountain, arranging groups of objects, moving earth around.

You get much overlap between the visual arts and other arts ( ie artists working with film, image, word, performance) because they are a similar process. It's all creativity, and everyone can do it. Insisting that onmy people who are good with a pencil can be artists is ridiculous and stunting.

Exactly. I don't think art should be this elitist area, I think it's how there is so much resentment against artists. If it was acknowledged that everyone has creative potential, just in a myriad of ways, maybe people wouldn't feel art was so pretentious and out of reach.

There are people out there who claim to "not get art". Which I just don't understand, how can you not get it? People may not get different types of art, but not getting art at all? It's just strange that is seen as so inaccessible.

Do\Did Kandinsky, Klimt and Rothko paint their own paintings, or did they too have a staff to do the boring bits for them ?

I'm still going to like the finished product because my attachment is to the painting not the artist, but I have a hard time seeing something as solely the work of a specific artist if it is a group effort. The process of passing an idea from one head to another head through words means another filter, another imagination, another vision has become involved and has inevitably shaped the art.

Hasn't it ?

Saying something is an X work, when in fact there was a team working on it, feels a bit like a film being a X work, with no mention of the names of the actors or public recognition of their essential contribution to the whole in both practical and artistic terms.

:-) nice one empusa, I agree!

One of the nicest things about going to art college is that everyone around you has an artistic practise, and you get to know them by seeing how the see the world and what they make from that vision. One of my favourite fantasies is that everyone you know makes art and exhibits it, so from your loud hard drinking uncle, to the strange chatty lady in your corner shop, to
your mum with her slightly racist views. I'd live to see what they'd all make!

But then perhaps they do all make art and exhibit it! Your mum presses her clothes and keeps her garden manicured so that appears impeccable and untouchable by chaos and the passing if time. The lady in the corner shop collects figurines of owls because they remind het of her childhood and displays them between her net curtains and windowpanes. Your uncle performs nightly in the pub.

Maybe sone of the reason people "don't get art" is because it's predominately made by people who called themselves artists. Andvartusts tend to be interested in art and make alot of art about it! As an artist, I like and understand the jokes, discussions and contexts in art about art, but I know that most people don't!

I suggest a revoluation. If you don't like art, then find the artist in yourself and start making it yourself. And don't worry if you can't draw! Not everyone can.

Kandisky, klimt and Rothko to my knowledge (without doing any research, so I may be wrong) painted all their own paintings. They all worked within the time frame ( more or less) of modernism when the overusing belief is of the artist as a lone genius, and the hand if the artist being the important thing. Picasso being a fine example of this.

The old masters ( titian, Rembrandt etc) you see in the national galleries are more akin to Hollywood blockbusters, it's a production under the vision if a director to make huge money! Funny that these old masters then in some ways are responsible for the myth of the artist genius creator that creates the attitude that if an artist gets someone else to create their work, it isn't art. They only created this myths around themselves to help their reputatins and make money. History makes them pure though!

And since this is mumsnet, are you aware that alot of commonly held beliefs about art are a result of a largely patriachal art world created by the church? Ask yourself where are the women artists in art history? Why us the pervasive mental image is of a male genius ? Where are the women? Looking after the geniuses children?

Thinking about it, I know 3 successful professional artists but none of them seem the arty type and i would never have guessed their profession if i hadn't known beforehand.

Not sure fastweb, but the team creation thing is part of why I dislike Warhol. Though it then gets complicated because a lot of the "Masters" had apprentices do bits of their paintings, fopr example in this painting by Verrocchio, his apprentice Da Vinci is meant to have painted the angel on the left.

To me this also opens up the whole new debate of the difference between art and design. Some argue that the two are seperate, so for example, the chair you are sitting on has been designed by someone but is not art. The definition being that something which serves a function cannot be art, which can be extended to mean packaging or advertising is not art. But then that means work like this isn't art. The reason Verrochio's painting fits this category is because bakc then creating work like that wasn't about creating art, it was seen as a trade (like design).

Um.. I may be a little off topic, but this is my favourite subject to talk about. Though the relevance really is, there is no agreement on what art actually is, let alone what constitutes good or bad art.

"Where are the women?"
Two of the artists I mentioned above are women.

One makes lifesize bronzes and the other makes stained glass windows.

"Why us the pervasive mental image is of a male genius ? Where are the women? Looking after the geniuses children?"

I think it's actually due to the Master Painters. Back when art was a trade rather than art (which sounds nonsensical now), from that point of view at the time women couldn't work, therefore women couldn't have a trade, therefore they couldn't produce art. Entirely logical back then.

Interestingly art from this time is still considered by many to be "true" art, despite it not being intended as such at the time. Whereas, IMO, the truly creative art came later on and had it's fair share of female artists. Producing art has been seen as an entirely valid, and encouraged, pursuit for women for a long long time now.

I do think it's patriachy which has influenced this to a degree, as largely patriachal groups (eg. the church) benefit from this early art having greater value than the later art.

Also, if you look up portraits of artists, there are a huge amount of portraits done of the Masters, due to that being one of the ways the apprentices were trained. Hence why we are more likely to see (quite literally) men as artists.

Beyond the work of the Masters there are relatively few portraits of artists.

re female artists here hope it comes out-fb settings might prevent...

Thank you empusa for putting it better than I did!

If you believe traditional values ( that art is skill based, that art should be created by "the master") you're actually unthinkingly still just following a patriachal system .

Btw I meant historically there is a lack of females. Recently there ate more women. Still not enough though.

I think art is one of the more equal areas, especially as most artwork is judged independently of it's creator. I think art history is another matter though.

Interestingly, in terms of art education, it's less than 150 years since women were allowed to study at an art school.

However women, I have just been reading, were actually encouraged to produce art back in Medieval times.

Which links back nicely to the OP, why is it that we are encouraged to think art produced by someone from an art school is worth more than art produced by someone who never went to art school? IMO this adds to the perceived inaccessiblity of art, and the idea that art is pretentious, "self indulgent tat".

think it's how there is so much resentment against artists.

I was thinking about this last night while trying to sleep. It's not resentment against the artists, it's a resentment against the talking heads who shape the fashions that dictate who succeeds and who sinks without a trace in the art world. It's about the lionizing of how misunderstood or hard to understand an artist is, over their talent for its own sake. (From my perspective, I appreciate it might look very different for people with a profound and knowledgeable view of the art world)

And I suppose a resentment against their ideas taking such a tight hold that the trickle down effect is art students who feel they have to write some quickly thought up pretentious twaddle in order to fulfill the requirements of their teacher, when the truth is they made something because they wanted to, or couldn't not make it because one way or another it was going to fight its way out of their head and into the physical world. Which to me looks like the process and the product playing second fiddle to the unwritten rules of the people who judge rather than create.

For me personally resentment is the prefect word. My mother entered collage in her fifties as a woman who made original, beautiful things that were very much the product of her own, unique process and talent. The net result of the course was us getting permanently lumbered with somebody who reinvented herself as "a misunderstood artist", leapt all over the shortcuts offered by hurling stuff together in a patently non genuine manner with equally non genuine pretentious twaddle to justify it, because her "performance art" as "misunderstood artist" became her Oeuvre, rather than the stunning textile pieces she used to produce.

I can live with the loss of the pieces. I have enough of them still in a box under my bed to be satisfied aesthetically, emotionally in the regard. I find it far harder to live with the encumbrance, humiliation and constant irritation that the decade long (so far) "performance art" brought into my life. A on going art form that even estrangement can't shield me from.

I don't hold the "art world's talking heads trickle down" entirely, solely responsible. My mum's personality (disorder?) played the majority role in the transformation. But I guess at the heart of the matter the above is why I react so badly to some contemporary art. It sort of represents a mindset, a perspective, a vision of art and artists, that colluded by way of being catalyst in creating the effective loss of my mother.

"the trickle down effect is art students who feel they have to write some quickly thought up pretentious twaddle in order to fulfill the requirements of their teacher"

Definitely, in my Art course it was actually part of the syllabus that we had to explain the meaning behind our art. (I got told off for writing "I tohught it was pretty" ) And you could fail a unit for not producing work to support your reasoning.

It was a shame really, as some of my best work was produced during life drawing lessons, but that module counted for less than the others due to it not having a deeper meaning.

I am all for art having a deeper meaning, but only where applicable. Some things should exist just to be pleasing to the eye.

I should point out, I got marked down for the sentiment, not my atrocious typo.

Empusa - i did Illustration and i do wonder how i would have got on had i chosen Fine Art instead...it was really off the back of one painting on Foundation the tutors steered me toward Illustration. I still make more money selling paintings than published work and i'm really still not sure where i fit in....that's why your commercial and 'illustrative' example was of interest to me

I'm trying not to pigeon hole myself....

I suppose since my work is at the more traditional end of art - that's why they thought i'd be better off...

....apologies for self indulgent musings

I actually started a course on Illustration and Advertising as I thought that would be an interesting combination, especially coming from a Fine Art background. Unfortunately all the Illustration lecturers quit! So I'm jealous of you!

Illustration is actually closer to what artists like Da Vinci produced, though he's always seen more (now anyway) as a fine artist. So the overlap between the two is interesting.

Kandisky, klimt and Rothko to my knowledge (without doing any research, so I may be wrong) painted all their own paintings

So I tend to like stuff that is painted by a single artist and dislike stuff that is more group effort. That is actually quite interesting considering that I didn't actually know that the group effort thing existed and in ignorance gravitated towards stuff that was non group. I wonder if it is connected to my loathing and detesting "creating" as part of a group effort, even when leading, or if it is pure coincidence. Can the non informed tell instinctively that something is a lone effort, or do you need expertise to be able to work out how many hands and heads played a part in the process and production ?