Custodians of Culture - Schoolyard Art: Playing Fair Without the Referee

This speech by Dave Hickey has a very interesting take on the way the modern art world has been running lately. He first starts his speech talking about Dr. J the famous basketball player, and how he used to call fouls on himself and how he always played by the rules because he always wanted to play in the pros. He applies this to the art world in a very simple matter, artists should be in it for the art not for the money that the art will make. He is very witty in his speech which probably comes from his background as a professor at the University of Nevada. He says that art can be a lucrative business but it should not be just for profitable gain. He talks about how non-commerical art can be very beneficial for art shows and it makes them money.  HE says how art has changed since the 1970's and now it is much more post-modernism. His speech drags on a little bit and is hard to understand the whole thing but the I think the gist of it talks about how art has changed and it is all about money now. 

Shibboleth

Shibboleth by Doris Salcedo in the middle of Turbine Hall, the main entrance lobby of Tate Modern in London. Salcedo's installation took the form of a 548-foot long crack in the floor of the Turbine Hall, initially a very small crack and eventually widening to a few inches and around two feet deep. The crack was made by opening up the floor and then by inserting a cast from a Colombian rock face. The piece is supposed to represent immigration and segregation. The piece is quite interesting and every time I see it reminds me of an earthquake. It is quite remarkable how people can look at one thing and get so many different symbolic meanings from it.

Public in Art

Using public places and turning architecture into art is very inspiring. Place like the hills and valleys look great in someone house or at a place of buisness. Using people as art is another thing. This turns just regular art that can be seen in homes into art that can be found in museums. Damien Hirst's twin art is an example of using the people for art. He uses a set of twins wearing and doing the same thing under a similar pattern of dots. Using people as art brings an image to a more personal level. The expression of the people help portray what the artist is also trying to say in terms of emotion. This helps the veiwer become closer to the artwork and helps the artist depict the feelings in teh artwork much easier.

John Baldesseri

John Baldesarri is a renown conceptual artist. I believe that this is called Fissures and ribbons. Much of Baldessari's work involves pointing, in which he tells the viewer not only what to look at but how to make selections and comparisons, often simply for the sake of doing so. This is exactly what he is doing in this picture. He adds to images to paintings, I presume to emphasize what he wants you to be looking at. Or maybe he just wants you to block those people out, so he changes the color of their faces. It is very intriguing to look at it, just because the colors pop out at you. 

The Mona Lisa Curse

The Mona Lisa Curse was a documentary film by Robert Hughes and it brought up some very interesting questions. It proposes the idea that contemporary art is now worth way too much money. Hughes' says how the art is now valued more about the amount of money it is sold for rather than the comments of an art critic. So technically if an art piece is to sell for millions of dollars that is just supposed to be classified as a great painting, whereas Hughes completely disagrees with that idea. Hughes talks about how some art collectors would buy pieces for a very minimum amount and hold on to the paintings and then eventually sell them for great sums of money. Hughes strongly dislikes such contemporary artists as Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol because their pieces are made with one intention and that is to make money. It is kind of funny because he has bashed a lot of the artists that we have covered throughout the course but these are the leading contemporary artists. Now this piece was probably the most intriguing thing to me that we have gone over, for the simple fact that it had a lot to do with money and art and I happen to be a prospective finance major. In one manor I can see how a renown art critic would be agitated, but from a business standpoint you are seeing some incredible feats. These art collectors have found a way to make tons of money off of this art that they didn't even happen to create. I admire their intuition to be entrepreneurs in the art world even though much of what they did seemed to be unethical. The whole movie I couldn't stop wondering how amazing it was that these so called “artists" were making millions of dollars off of things that took no art skill at all such as the shark in the shark tank.


        

Marina Abramović

Rhythm 0, 1974

 Marina Abramovic is a very famous performance artist. For one of her pieces she tested the limits of the relationship between performer and audience, Abramović developed one of her most challenging and well known performances. She assigned a passive role to herself, with the public being the force which would act on her. They could basically do anything they wanted to her. Abramović had placed upon a table 72 objects that people were allowed to use. Most people reacted cautiously but after a while they got aggressive and into the performance. One man even pointed a gun to her head before someone took it away from him. This piece is really scary as a viewer because it shows people's aggressive nature although I think that what she did was very stupid. Performance art is definitely a different type of art than many people think of but is definitely interesting to say the least.