Famous artist didn't do his own painting?

[wowfudge]

Just heard the new children's laureate being interviewed on the radio and she used to work for Damien Hurst. She said she mixed colours and had to paint lots of little circles. If that's the Hirst work I'm thinking of, does that mean he comes up with ideas but doesn't execute them himself? A bit like a couture designer I suppose. I always thought artists did their own art.

*piece

So is being an assistant a recognised rite of passage/apprenticeship for an artist?

Why would it be? people can be artists in many and varied ways. They don't all do the same thing. How boring would that be?

Do all do it and then some go on to individual success or is it a sign of throwing the towel in?

Oh wow, so being successful at a later stage is the definition of an artist? If you don't see success (what counts as success?) you were never an artist?

I didn't realise there was a step between not having a job in the art world and being a successful artist.

Are you deliberately misunderstanding me or do you genuinely think I am saying all artists must serve their time as an artists assistant?

Unless you start doing it a lot and developing a skill and a talent for it and curating how to do it, you are not a builder.

And yet, you would still be building other people's (architects) designs. So what makes the builder? Is it that they build lots? How does their status as a builder relate to the architect? This was not my example, this was triptraps comparison to artists. I'm trying to understand.

Backie you have a very aggressive posting style.

👍

Its really hard to define art and the relationship between how art works and how other industries work. With the shed example presumably someone is merely building it out of necessity rather than a passion for building. Art needs passion and a concept that it all relies on. The concept and idea is what makes the art the artists work. I disagree with the exploitation comments about artists assistants. Its a sought after role and quiet hard to get. They know why they are there and they get paid an ok wage to do it. They aren't poor starving artists who are given scraps to survive. Damien Hurst needs to have assistants as his work would take the rest of his life if he didnt have multiple assistants. He used to have a live stream on his website showing how everyone worked.

Hirst has always been a joke. Utter Shit. Designed to make money

The fact that his badly scrawled butterfly crap, was hanging next to the brilliant Turner is an insult to art.

Art needs passion and a concept that it all relies on

Where does a very nice painting of a bowl of fruit fit in here? I've seen plenty in art galleries.

AFAIK, for artists who create large sculptures or installation type art it is fairly normal for them to have assistants, David Hockney for example has always had assistants
It would also be the norm for artists who print to have experts to assist with the actual printing process and machinery

For traditional drawing and painting on a normal scale I don't think it would be the norm for someone other than the artist to actually apply the paint/ink/whatever to the canvas but maybe I'm wrong?

People are very passionate about their 5 a day noble 😁

MrsLupo: "In many ways there are two sorts of art, bluntly, ‘pictures’ - and conceptual art or the art of ideas. (When I say ‘pictures’, I’m not excluding sculpture and other 3D art, so much as alluding to the idea of art that gives immediate aesthetic pleasure.)"

I enjoyed your post, but isn't it also the case that the first sort of art also has ideas embodied in it? If you look at a Manet or a Vermeer or a Leonardo, all of those paintings seem to me to be at least partly about ideas, even if more subtly expressed than in (for example), Damien Hirst's shark.

In my experience, only a rare architect ever gives credit to other professionals and various advisors. Especially when they give a speech after getting an award. Not all of them but very often so.

Mrs Lupo, I enjoyed your post. Thanks!

I enjoyed your post, but isn't it also the case that the first sort of art also has ideas embodied in it? If you look at a Manet or a Vermeer or a Leonardo, all of those paintings seem to me to be at least partly about ideas, even if more subtly expressed than in (for example), Damien Hirst's shark.

Yes, for sure. But the cultural context in which they were created is different from the context in which one would paint a similar picture now. To get hung up on the techniques and aesthetics of, say, renaissance art is definitely to miss the codified and, as you say, subtly expressed ideas they convey. Which is why arguments about whether Hirst or Duchamp have the talent of da Vinci or Degas privilege pre-C20 art for all the wrong reasons imo. Nevertheless, there’s a whole school of thought that does privilege them, and which in turn gives rise to ideas about what sort of images are ‘really’ art or even are ‘good’ art, and this in turn drives the continued production of what giraffe calls ‘nice paintings of a bowl of fruit’. If we can agree that it’s the ideas that are important, then it follows that nice bowls of fruit, however technically accomplished, and however pretty they look above your fireplace, have diminishing value as art as we move into and through a different cultural era (probably! it depends, of course!). The apparent paradox between these two positions (the privileging of technically accomplished representational art versus the relegation of it to a position of irrelevance) imo drives the intellectual conflict between those who are well versed in contemporary art practice and those who ‘know what they like’ (cf. snobbery, elitism, philistinism, etc).

Hack mum, there's always overlaps and exceptions. Some work that looks simply aesthetic has much conceptual depth and vice Verda. Worth remembering too that art that looks very iconic and beautiful and skilful to us now was once considered contraversial rubbish . For example, the impressionists are called the impressionists from a bad review, with a critic saying their work was a mere impression, unfinished, slapdash and unrefined. It was very much the conceptual process based work of it's time, built on the concept of capturing time and movement through painting in the moment. It's become a canonised part of art now, but at the time it was hated.

Never been a fan. Creatures in formaldehyde? Go to any science museum to see that!

I've seen some of his sketches - and he isnt great at drawing either! I think he is a good businessman.

Can you wow us with some contemporary trends, MrsLupo?

One of my friends told me that an exciting concept a while back was the place of decomposing materials in art (eg. pictures made from paints and papers that aren't going to last).

I also saw a really great picture that was made with fluorescent (?) paint - I know that there is a thing about new paint technologies and the (old, early C20) avant-garde, and I wondered if it was 'street' but referencing that?

(I'm throwing those 2 out there to try and make your fingers tingle with an urge to respond. )

:-)

Apology accepted Mary, thank you . What's wrong with photoshop? Photoshop is brilliant. Really creative tool!

All this talk about ideas, passions and yes your 5 year old could have done it but wouldn't have thought to has reminded me of Picasso's plate period. Undoubtedly a fabulous artist, but can we agree that actually a 5 year old could have done this plate? And that just because it was done by an Artist doesn't make it art?

Or is there some grand concept of faces on plates that I'm missing?

It's just a different skill and a different way of taking photos, with more emphasis on the edit.

I know Anthony Gormley has lackeys art students who do a lot of legwork for him. In my limited knowledge of the art world its been going on since the dawn of time.