Now that's what I call art!
I have a very loose definition of art: anything that I think is cool and that I wouldn't be able to do without a buttload of training and work. This painting happens to be both: http://www.joslyn.org/permcol/images/1990_1.jpg
The painter is trying to trick your eye and thereby trick your mind. His tortuous technique is designed to not get in the way of the viewer's reception of the image and the story. The painting to so rich and lavish with detail that it almost makes you believe that Turkish pashas spent a significant amount of time mourning their recently croaked kitties. It almost makes you forget that it's the product of a fevered, 19th century, male, Western imagination. I'd be willing to bet that it merely played to the prejudices and expectations of its contemporary audience. Despite all this, it's cool!
This painting is the sort of thing Magritte was so good at deconstructing and lampooning. He applied the same tortuous technique to blatantly impossible stories (a giant green apple filling a room) or subverted the viewers perception of his technique with labels (Ceci nes pas une pipe.) But even though he's toying with you in his own annoyingly self-aware, almost condescending manner, his paintings are cool!
There's another whole class of art that is laboring under something I to call "the tyranny of the individual". I'm talking about what most folks consider modern art. Here the end result and the effect it has on the viewer is less important than the individual artist's act of creation. The solitary artist creates, either driven by fashionable demons or merely dibbling with equally fashionable nonchalance. If you are not on the artist's wavelength, if you don't "get it", then too bad. There's a strong possibility that there isn't anything to "get". Now, if these morons spent their time scribbling in notebooks and painting the walls of their home orange, it wouldn't be a problem. The problem lies in the people for whom such "art" has some resonance. Either it speaks to their insecurities as an anonymous products of post-industrial society or it is guaranteed to make them appear superior by baffling and impressing their cadre of associates. Assholes like Pollock and Picasso found a vein and either through psychotic compulsion or cunning machination managed to play their fans for all they were worth while producing shit. Too many modern art galleries are full of shit in the form of paintings entitled "Campbell's Soup I (Tomato)" or works of actual feces. One recent exhibition consisted of nothing, nada, blank walls with labels.
Now, in my opinion, shit does have the potential for art. I spent three months in Europe after college. While I was backpacking, I was alsostarving. By the time I reached Brussels, my body was reduced to producing small, hard pellets. On my last morning in that seat of the EU and armpit of Europe, I made a deposit. Now the toilets in Europe are a little strange, if for nothing but their variety. The type I used that morning is what a friend and I christened "Dutch flush" from our experiences in Amsterdam. The bowl is mostly a porcelain shelf that drops off abruptly near the front. Flushing releases a stream of water from the back of the bowl that is supposed to push anything off into the well in the front. For folks used to having an entire toilet-bowl-full of water to receive their logs, it's a little bit of a shock to see it just laying there. It's even more of a shock to flush multiple times without the log budging. But I digress. On that last day in accursed Brussels, I stood up and found a small dung ball surrounded by a floret of identically sized dung balls in perfect symmetry. I should of taken a picture. It could've been art. I understood that it was intensely nasty, but I also thought it was cool at the time. Now I liken this sort of accident to Pollock's drip paintings. A lot of work went into them (like my months of starvation), but they're still shit. Just because a person grunts and sweats and strains and has a life-altering experience, it doesn't mean it's art.
My wife and I came across a perfect example of this in the Scottish town of Stirling. Some 19th-century Scottish patriots with a packet of cash built a towering monument to William Wallace. It's one of those things that humans have the urge to build and tourists have the urge to climb. At the base of the hill it commands, outside the souvenir shop and car park, stands a rather comical sandstone depiction of Mel Gibson, face contorted into a scream, his kilt and his mane of hair flowing dramatically in some Hollywood-style breeze. As if this weren't enough, the base of the statue is emblazoned with the word "FREEDOM!" It turns out that, according to a display near the statue, some sculptor nearly lost his life. As he was recovering in hospital from open-heart surgery, he watched Braveheart. The movie rekindled his will to live. In thanks and celebration, he carved Mel and gave him to the Wallace monument's folks. Now, I can imagine the quandary of the poor monument officials. The thing is atrocious, but imagine the press if they'd refused such a gift from the heart-gimp. The best they could do is post an explanation and hope for the best.
Is inspiration drawn from such a silly movie valid? Of course! The person feels what they feel. Is the product of that inspiration art? No. It is shit.
I really don't want to end on such a negative note. As an antidote to any bile that might've splashed on you here, check out my favorite living artist, Michael Whelan, at www.glassonion.com. Enjoy!
Pakeha