Contemporary art wears me out. This year is the Venice Biennale, the largest contemporary art show in the world. It was created to showcase avant garde artwork from around the world and to give those artists a chance to exhibit outside of the common conventional studios. It is, obviously, a huge deal in the art world. http://www.labiennale.org/it/Home.html
This week, we have had the privilege to explore it with our Art Theory & Criticism professor who is very well versed in contemporary art. With two huge exhibits which have each taken 8 hours to walk through and discuss, I am exhausted. My head hurts. Not from image or sensory overload. But from thinking too much, and taking my brain to places it has never been, and can't get to most of the time. Ha.
I enjoy seeing artwork that is original and new and fresh. However, a silver plastic lobster on a cardboard box on top of a painted pink box just doesnt express creativity and aesthetics in my opinion. For the most part, these exhibits were contrived and pushed too hard to be "out of the box". When studying each one, I got so tired from trying to figure out the intent of the artist that I didnt enjoy the piece. It's a different story if the piece is aesthetically pleasing and I dig deeper to figure out the meaning in the artmaking. But if it is a pile of junk that I have to dig through, then I think that it is a waste of time. Exhibit A, the top left picture. This exhibit was supposed to be a wooden kitchen. The only thing besides raw wood and cabinets was the "oracle cat" on top of the cabinets (and yes, it talked out loud). Even after the exhibit was explained to me, I still don't understand the point. Waste of natural resources.
Today, we went to the Arsenale which is a different part of the Biennale. I actually really enjoyed most of the installations and exhibits there. The concept didnt override the aesthetics. They worked together cohesively. We all are entitled to our own opinions. But, if the point of the artwork is so self-involved that it doesn't let anyone else in, then I think that is a problem that doesn't merit my attention. One i did enjoy is posted on the top right. It was a mixed media piece using many small stickers/images together to make the image. Creative, original, yet interesting. I'd love to hear your thoughts...
Couldn't agree more. There is more to art than just the fact that the artist has something to express. Everyone's got something to say. In fact most of us have a lot of things to say.
ReplyDeleteThe question is:
Is what we have to say truly valuable? And if so, how should it really be said?
We can speak it in a whisper or a shout, compose our words into verse and rhyme, blend our words with music, shriek them out, put them to paper with ink, spray them onto walls with paint, or scratch them into the nearest amiable surface.
...but which of these ways is truly best? This is the question that it seems that most contemporary art fails to answer well.
It is discordant to spray-paint a sonnet on your neighbor’s car, or scratch your words of love into the skin of your lover. Many would think it odd to encourage you peers with hammer blows, (regardless of how deserving that ‘encouragement’ might seem at times).