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.

@guilty

Not wishing to out anyone, but waves at doc.

Otherwise what distinguishes Mr. Hirst's concept from one I might come up with, other than the white cube / his social and artistic capital?

Well, um...nothing? I mean, if you can create an art work which expresses your concept in a way that inducts us into and through your way of thinking, then...let's be having it. There's room in the art world for more than just the posturings of the well connected.

I have no particular ambition to be an artist. I am absolutely fascinated by art brut though, art by artists with no artistic or social capital. There's some amazing stuff out there, like Henry Darger.

Wasn't familiar with Henry Darger...interesting. You may enjoy this Caviar:
hyperallergic.com/274054/quiet-drawings-from-a-life-lost-in-mental-institutions/
Outsider art has become so de rigueur in recent years as to be very much in, actually.

Yes it's an interesting paradox, can you have a canon of outsider art?

thecatfromjapan sorry, life got in the way of MNing and hasn’t stopped.
Grime art: www.sketchbook.com/blog/what-the-heck-is-grime-art-and-why-are-people-making-it/
there was a moment when it sounded like it might develop some actual depth, and Faux Fauvism is a term pretty much ‘owned’ on the internet, by Josh Byer, but there’s some combined spin off/ development/similar appearing in some street scenes. Mixing it all up with thermo chromic paints and similar is currently mainly passing superficial fads, but there’s actually a great deal of deeper potential with where many heat reactive paints could go if only the materials were affordable to experiment with.
You mentioned non temperature controlled environments, for me a lot of the interest is in being able to heat and cool different parts of a work and the very varied ways and materials that can be used to achieve that, as well as interaction, breaking fourth wall and all that. (problem’s unlimited imagination, vs opposite budget.)
Thanks for Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Reproduction'. Another one for the reading list.
For me the internet is a really big game changer. It’s made access to so much, possible and simpler. (including this conversation and it’s vocabulary.) Be interesting to see what the future holds with AI.

I always wondered how Barbara Cartland could write all her novels. Thanks to this thread I now have a pretty good idea.

Weren't they just all the same novel though? Change names, profession, location and time period et voila, another m&b paperback.

Thank you Wheeliebin. Those pictures are kind of unnerving!

Van Gogh painted all his own stuff, definitely.
I saw it on Doctor Who.

Really interesting link WheelieBin. Maybe it was just on my mind, but it made me think of some work by Maurizio Anzeri that I saw at saatchi this weekend: www.saatchigallery.com/artists/maurizio_anzeri.htm. He uses stitching to deface vintage photographs, which has the effect of concealing or removing identity, and which in turn caught my eye because it reminded me of something by someone I've worked with. It reminded my companion of Francis Bacon. It's grotesque, like the grime art, though beautiful too, in its precision. There is a certain care, even love, in the way he handles these found photographs. What struck us both is that Anzeri's work is a kind of inversion of the process of using image manipulation software - low tech, manual, individualised, painstaking - but in many ways has the same effect, of stretching, disfiguring and ultimately disguising. I can't say I care for the grime art - it feels like it lacks process and thus depth, but maybe I should stick with it a while before judging.

Lots of prolific writers have used ghosts gallico. Not sure about BC specifically but I wouldn't be surprised.

Barbara Cartlandused to recline of on her sofa and dictate her books to her secretary who wrote the stories down in shorthand then typed them up. There were documentaries showing her doing this. I've never read any of her books, but I gather she had a winning formula and stuck to it. As a pp has stated, changing details, etc to give a different story. Writing is slightly different I think as aren't there only something like 10 stories and everything is basically one of them, possibly with some variation?

Sorry for the semi-revival but his thread has been playing on my mind. It seems so obviously wrong to me and now I think I've worked out why I feel that way, you obviously all need to know :o

In ym head, I paint lovely pictures and can draw and design and everything looks amazing. I have a good imagination. However, l cannot translate what's in my head into a piece of art. I can't paint, I can't draw, I don't have the patience for crafts. What I admire when I see pieces of artwork is the craftsmanship: how a person's eyes look alive in a portrait, or the perfect proportions of a sculpture, the way an impressionist painting perfectly conveys the atnosphere of a landscapel or the sheer patience of painting thousands of dots to create something beautiful.

If an 'artist' just gets to tell a bunch of assistants what's in his or her head and they use their own skill to transform those ideas into art, well that's something I could do. It's a bit like me telling an architect what I fancy for a loft conversion and then taking all the credit for the fact that it works and my house hasn't fallen down.

It's not the same as a designer who plans something and then gets craftsmen to turn it into a product, e.g. a fashion designer, jewellery designer, architect etc. They have to design something that works structurally, which takes a great deal of skill. Art doesn't have a particular purpose and it's entirely subjective: you either like it or you don't. The skill in art is taking something in your head and making it into a piece that conveys the same impression to other people. If it's assistants doing that, it's their art.

Sorry for the zillion typos!

Your argument depends on this
The skill in art is taking something in your head and making it into a piece that conveys the same impression to other people.
being true.

Indeed.