Yours, for $43.8m...

[flint33]

[wub]

yeah, i dont get why he did it

Artistic interpretation? The problem with abstract expressionism is that it's whatever the person who paints it wants it to be. Newman's other well known collection is on similar lines;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who%27s_Af ... w_and_Blue

Barnett Newman started the first painting in the series without a preconceived notion of the subject or end result; he only wanted it to be different from what he had done until then, and to be asymmetrical.

why his sold for that much

Exactly. How does art get a price tag...

[wilson]

I'm with Hugh on this. It's bullshit.

Give me a Dulux colour chart, about 5ltrs of emulsion, some undercoat and 2-3 days and I could knock that out no problem. In fact, I have done similar and it only cost the client and extra £100.

There is zero artistic merit to this.

It's difficult to see how that can ever be more than just your opinion. It's kind of futile imo to try and impress what you think on others when it comes to art as there is so little objective basis to form an argument around.
Maybe. I dunno.

[hugh]

People are buying that shit cos they think other people hold real value on in, when in reality those very people almost certainly just have the exact same stance as the original person.
It's a stand alone complex.

[Laszlo]

My rule of thumb - if you need to read the little white card next to the piece of art in order to get any feeling then the piece of 'art' is shite.

[ezza]

Exactly. How does art get a price tag...

i dunno, i guess you have to get some sort of status in the art world

chat shit to rich people, right place - right time

i dunno

i just agree that its art, and that the price tag is all relative

its not really 'worth' 43 mil, it just was to the person who bought it

[flint33]

My rule of thumb - if you need to read the little white card next to the piece of art in order to get any feeling then the piece of 'art' is shite.

But what appeals to you as art or as beautiful may appeal to me as shite and vice versa... I'm not saying you need to have a card explaining the meaning of the piece of art, I agree with you on this one, but sometimes anti-art can be an expression of art, may appeal to us all but art and beauty don't...

Dada is an example of an artistic movement that was on this tip.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada

Many Dadaists believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality. For example, George Grosz later recalled that his Dadaist art was intended as a protest "against this world of mutual destruction."[6]

According to Hans Richter, Dada was not art, it was "anti-art."[5] Everything for which art stood, Dada represented the opposite. Where art was concerned with traditional aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend.

As Hugo Ball expressed it, "For us, art is not an end in itself ... but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in."[7]

[wolf89]

My rule of thumb - if you need to read the little white card next to the piece of art in order to get any feeling then the piece of 'art' is shite.

This is half true for me. Something can be dependent on an explanation of concept and be good. Just when the concept is literally the only thing of interest is when it falls apart as a piece of art overall.

also I think you misunderstood my point earlier. Just because a piece of art could be technically painted by someone else easily wouldn't immediately mean it was shit. The creativity in the first place is the impressive bit. In a musical content look at something like Steve Reich's Pendulum music. Not difficult to set up a load of swinging mics like that but that's not why it's a cool piece.

[Laszlo]

Yeah, obviously i'm not saying my view is right and the next man's is wrong - anyone can see beauty in anything for any number of reasons or combination thereof - I just find it mildly offensive (to intelligence, not my line of work) that because some blue and whit paint is on a canvas in a gallery and not on someone's wall in their home someone can look at it and think "Yes. I get it". Bare retarded.

The creativity in the first place is the impressive bit.

I understand that and i'm not anti-abstract art but I fail to see the 'creativity' in a bit of blue and white on canvas.
Obviously this is my failing as an unsophisticated blue-collar worker but it's where I stand.

[magma]

Yeah, obviously i'm not saying my view is right and the next man's is wrong

I think you've misunderstood how we do things around here.

[SCope13]

...the CIA financed and organized the promotion of American abstract expressionists as part of cultural imperialism via the Congress for Cultural Freedom from 1950 to 1967.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_e ... e_Cold_War

[flint33]

...the CIA financed and organized the promotion of American abstract expressionists as part of cultural imperialism via the Congress for Cultural Freedom from 1950 to 1967.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_e ... e_Cold_War

And Fascists were the originators of electronic music... or is it the other way?

Many Italian Futurists supported Fascism in the hope of modernizing a country divided between the industrialising north and the rural, archaic South. Like the Fascists, the Futurists were Italian nationalists, radicals, admirers of violence, and were opposed to parliamentary democracy. Marinetti founded the Futurist Political Party (Partito Politico Futurista) in early 1918, which was absorbed into Benito Mussolini's Fasci di combattimento in 1919, making Marinetti one of the first members of the National Fascist Party.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism

[wolf89]

Yeah, obviously i'm not saying my view is right and the next man's is wrong - anyone can see beauty in anything for any number of reasons or combination thereof - I just find it mildly offensive (to intelligence, not my line of work) that because some blue and whit paint is on a canvas in a gallery and not on someone's wall in their home someone can look at it and think "Yes. I get it". Bare retarded.

The creativity in the first place is the impressive bit.

I understand that and i'm not anti-abstract art but I fail to see the 'creativity' in a bit of blue and white on canvas.
Obviously this is my failing as an unsophisticated blue-collar worker but it's where I stand.

I think I need to clear up something. I still don't know if this piece is that good. It doesn't look like much from the photo here but could in person be a lot more impressive. My point was more about how your approach of "I could do it therefore it's no good" overall isn't really a very good argument to dismiss a piece especially when it's just a small photo on a forum vs being able to examine it up close anyway.

[hugh]

I actually like a lot of abstract art. Heck, even if I just google-image search "abstract art" the first 6 pictures are more interesting and thought provoking than this blue thing with a white line

[hugh]

Yeah, obviously i'm not saying my view is right and the next man's is wrong - anyone can see beauty in anything for any number of reasons or combination thereof - I just find it mildly offensive (to intelligence, not my line of work) that because some blue and whit paint is on a canvas in a gallery and not on someone's wall in their home someone can look at it and think "Yes. I get it". Bare retarded.

The creativity in the first place is the impressive bit.

I understand that and i'm not anti-abstract art but I fail to see the 'creativity' in a bit of blue and white on canvas.
Obviously this is my failing as an unsophisticated blue-collar worker but it's where I stand.

I think I need to clear up something. I still don't know if this piece is that good. It doesn't look like much from the photo here but could in person be a lot more impressive. My point was more about how your approach of "I could do it therefore it's no good" overall isn't really a very good argument to dismiss a piece especially when it's just a small photo on a forum vs being able to examine it up close anyway.

I think from my own stand point, in terms of "I could do that", I wasn't talking in terms of the skill required to paint it, just the pure lack of imagination. On a really bad, non creative off day I could still come up with something that "interesting".
I have a friend who does a lot of weird cartoony-stylised art and he also does these huge canvas scenese from movies. His art style is really unique and he always adds little things here and there that show that his imaginative side is really "switched on".
I don't get that feeling at all from art such as this though.

[wolf89]

That's because it's a completely different type of art.

like comparing Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy for Lilith to a Pantera record and expecting to get the same thing out of it

[hugh]

plenty of abstract art inspires me, like I said. This doesn't.

[Laszlo]

Yeah, obviously i'm not saying my view is right and the next man's is wrong - anyone can see beauty in anything for any number of reasons or combination thereof - I just find it mildly offensive (to intelligence, not my line of work) that because some blue and whit paint is on a canvas in a gallery and not on someone's wall in their home someone can look at it and think "Yes. I get it". Bare retarded.

The creativity in the first place is the impressive bit.

I understand that and i'm not anti-abstract art but I fail to see the 'creativity' in a bit of blue and white on canvas.
Obviously this is my failing as an unsophisticated blue-collar worker but it's where I stand.

I think I need to clear up something. I still don't know if this piece is that good. It doesn't look like much from the photo here but could in person be a lot more impressive. My point was more about how your approach of "I could do it therefore it's no good" overall isn't really a very good argument to dismiss a piece especially when it's just a small photo on a forum vs being able to examine it up close anyway.

My point was more "I could do it therefore it's not worth 43.8 million dollars"

[wolf89]

Well if the cash value was judged based on its artistic value my point would still be exactly the same (regarldess of the fact I don't believe this painting would be worth that much, I just mean as a general way of viewing this). However why it's worth that much is not likely to be that simple. Again I would say that the problem would lie in the commercial side of the art world not with the piece itself. Regardless a copy of something isn't going to be the same. Just because I can play a song on the guitar doesn't mean I won't buy the cd of the original

[deadly_habit]

ORIGINAL ARTWORK DO NOT STEAL
I'm gonna be rich!