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Emperor's new clothes

I enjoy modern art. I went to Tate Modern many years ago, and liked a lot of the stuff. One of the exhibits caught my attention, I think it was a bath tap on a pedestal, or something. I stood there looking at it for a moment, thinking "someone is taking the absolute pl55"
Just then , an old lady who was standing next to me, asked "Are you thinking what I'm thinking ?"

"Very much so", i answered and we walked off our separate ways.
 
I once accidentally trod on a Carl Andre sculpture when backing off to look at a painting. The 'sculpture' was a grid of thin tiles laying on the floor - was told off by the galley attendant. They had to reposition a dislodged tile - not sure whether my intervention improved the work or not.
 
Forest Hillbilly said:
I enjoy modern art. I went to Tate Modern many years ago, and liked a lot of the stuff. One of the exhibits caught my attention, I think it was a bath tap on a pedestal, or something. I stood there looking at it for a moment, thinking "someone is taking the absolute pl55"
Just then , an old lady who was standing next to me, asked "Are you thinking what I'm thinking ?"

"Very much so", i answered and we walked off our separate ways.
Click to expand...
Tate Modern is mostly filled with junk with devotees voicing meaningless nonsense praising said junk. Tate Britain is so much better, but even there they have started to remove some works for political reasons, replacing them with inferior items that fit their agendas.
 
The money swilling around the art world is a complete mystery. Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst have a combined worth of about a billion. The conceptual aspects of a stuffed shark might be vaguely interesting but production line dot paintings and balloon animals?
My personal bugbear is Basquiat. Horrible, talentless daubings which most folk wouldn't put on the fridge if their kid brought them home and some collector paid over $100 m for one of them and apart from some unconvincing waffling about his supposed merit no one can say why.
Money laundering would be my guess.
 
There have been a number of 'exhibitions' in empty galleries. That's right, absolutely nothing is exhibited. people wander around and presumably that creates some sort of artistic experience. As I said, there have been more than one such exhibition - if I were the first 'artist' to do this I would sue the others for plagiarism.
 
Tate Modern is a place where phoney artists exhibit phoney works of art to be lauded by phoney critics and ignorant, so called, experts. I can accept unusual or modern art if I know the artist can really paint, like Picasso. Some of his early work was excellent before he started painting one eyed blokes with legs where their arms should be.

Give me a Canaletto, Michelangelo, Rembrandt or Constable any day over modern stuff. Boy, there have been some fabulous painters who must be spinning in their tombs.
 
When I was at Brighton Poly it was around this time of year that strange things started turning up around the campus which I soon learned was the work of the Fine Arts students and their finals projects.

One of these displays was one student's commentary on modern consumerism which consisted of various packages such as empty Fairy Snow boxes, used tins of spaghetti hoops and crushed Tango cans being left in the quadrangle around the pond.

Sadly, no one told old Harry the janitor that this was the culmination of three years hard study because he picked the lot up and threw it in the bin, apparently muttering "Bloody students" as he did so.
 
We get to the tricky question of what is art? For me it's not simply something original - like a banana taped to a wall or a lavatory sitting on a Reliant Robin. These may both be making a statement but that ain't art for me.

For me it's something someone has created which I find pleasure in looking at. For me that can be ceramics, sculpture but mainly painting. The works of J M Turner are I think exceptional:

j m turner paintings at DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo. Privacy, Simplified.
duckduckgo.com duckduckgo.com

The pre raphaelite stuff appeals too. The less sugary impressionists. I'm not interested in painting which attempts photographic accuracy.
 
For those who take a casual interest in modern art, I'd recommend the Guggenheim in Bilbao. It is an experience, even if you don't particularly like what is being exhibited. The building alone is impressive enough.
While you are at it, and if you have a good vehicle, you can also drive out and see the specially created graveyard where they filmed the end scene of The Good The Bad and the Ugly near Burgos. It is a challenging drive at times, but all good fun if you like that kind of stuff.
 
The Art Institute of Chicago has an exhibit which is a pile of sweets on the floor, every night one of the security guards throws another handful on top to replace the ones people have eaten. All quite fun except someone has valued this artwork at $7,600,000. It's quite a big pile of sweets but you'd expect quite a bit of change out of that after buying them.
 
Forest Hillbilly said:
I enjoy modern art. I went to Tate Modern many years ago, and liked a lot of the stuff. One of the exhibits caught my attention, I think it was a bath tap on a pedestal, or something. I stood there looking at it for a moment, thinking "someone is taking the absolute pl55"
Just then , an old lady who was standing next to me, asked "Are you thinking what I'm thinking ?"

"Very much so", i answered and we walked off our separate ways.
Click to expand...
I would be thinking that’s 2 quid frag 😂
 
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