IT IS QUITE BEYOND MY UNDERSTANDING

Filled with enthusiasm, she showed me ‘artworks’ of a Russian artist I had never heard of.  One of his ‘artworks’ was a blank white screen.  I couldn’t figure out where my friend was coming from.  It is called ‘White on White’ she explained.  She then showed me another: Yes, you guessed it. This was a black screen entitled ‘Black on Black’.
I showed her blank sheets of A4 paper I pulled from my copier. “There,” I told her. “Here is my day’s artwork.”  She just didn’t get it. 
Other stuff was just squares, oblongs, circles, various shapes that a shiftless pupil might doodle. She thought it art.
My friend is not stupid in the conventional sense; a university trained schoolteacher for 20 years, a successful career in retailing. 
I told her it was a nonsense, which of course displeased her. I will humour people up to a point but on this occasion the point was reached.  She got over it but her chin was on the floor at my lack of understanding. 

 

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I have a customer who is an travelling "Artist" for a few local schools, she even paints her pictures, thats what she calls them, over her cars, her house is done up inside and out with...For the want of a better word "Crap" she explains this "Crap" to her pupils as art, to look for the inner being, see something that others cant see...its "Crap". The schools pay her very well..To well in fact.  No wonder the kids brains are fuddled.

Perhaps Mike what you did to your friend was to undermine the price of her blank piece of white paper / canvas, you showed her a A4 sheet of white paper which costs about £2.99 per hundred while she is getting, something like £5.000 for her white paper, convincing her customers that if you look hard enough you can see the meaning of art...AKA "Crap". 

Look at these other artist's who put together a pile of rusty tin cans, dead sheep etc, get on TV, placed in gallerys,  sell this crap for millions....Don't knock it...We are both in the wrong game.

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I've got a mmall pub in wales and we put local art works up for tourists to purchase the artists are mainly made up of old dears who start art groups or classes when there spouse dies and it gives them a reason to get out and chat to others, the pictures sell for £30/£100 and go down well we dont charge commision as we have our walls full of pictures all the time. I could take you not a few miles from here to various "art galleries" where stuck up "artists" looking down there noses at the rif raff comming in there shop where they try to sell pictures for many hundreds if not thousands they dont turn many over except for a few to the same types from london way to brag to their friends what a snip they purchased in little old wales. Give me the old dears any day!

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Well you are talking about conceptual art, not traditional art, so it does what it sets out to do - gets you talking and thinking. (I don't like it either, and have no problem with the term crap being applied to it - but a lot of it is there just to horrify people, so if you ignore it - it might just go away) 

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If you show someone a blank piece of paper and call it art, then you are making yourself look foolish to the rest of the art world. In order to get away with this 'art', you need to be a recognised artist. Lots of these artists who splash a bit of paint on a canvas or place a rusty spanner on a piece of wood and call it art, are actually talented artists who have produced good paintings. The fact that they turn to churning out rubbish like this is because, as established artists, the art world allows them to. The art world is a very strange place.

If an artist shows you what you consider to be crap, don't make a fool of yourself by scoffing it and instead use this very handy link:  http://www.pixmaven.com/phrase_generator.html

 

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‘The ‘refined,’ the ‘rich, the professional do-nothing,’ the ‘distiller of quintessence’ desire only the peculiar, and sensational, the eccentric, the scandalous in today’s art. 

‘And I myself, since the advent of cubism, have fed these fellows what they wanted and satisfied these critics with all the ridiculous ideas that have passed through my head. 

‘The less they understood, the more they admired me! ... Today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich.  But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand meaning of the word. ... I am only a public clown, a mountebank. 

‘I have understood my time and exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries.  It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem.  But, at least, and at last, it does have the merit of being honest.’ - Pablo Picasso.

 

This message was last edited by mike_walsh on 06/05/2014.

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And yet he gave us Geurnica...................

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Provenance by Laney Salisbury tells of how the British conman John Drew and art faker John Myatt fooled hundreds of   arty-farties into parting with colossal sums of money selling their forged modern art 'Masterpieces'. Several art galleries globally and art experts verified hundreds of fakes as genuine.............. perhaps this is an indication of the shallow individuals involved in the higher echelons of  'art'. It is estimated that between 20% and 30% of all pictures and sculptures that go to auction are 'wrong' as they say.

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Obviously there is an absence of art lovers on EOS.

Before you can pass comment on any work of art it is imperative that you take time to study the piece in detail.

This is even more important with works like "White on White" and "Black on Black" as you want to ensure that they are not forgeries.

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Ace - I have just checked my art collection and I have 362 white pieces I keep in a 'conqueror' folder, so obviously 361 are fake, any idea how I can tell which one is the genuine article?

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Well Woodbug, I think that's taking a risk, you might just forget they're all works of art and load them in photo copier/printer by mistake.

I'm not an expert but t I've heard that you need to examine the brushwork very closely to distinguish the real from possible fakes.  The cost might also be indicative - if the price you paid was too cheap I would be a bit suspicious.

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Thank you Ace, I am indebted to you for your professional advice and upon discovery of my genuine masterpiece I will advise you of the ‘hammer’ price it achieves at Sotheby’s summer auction.

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