Message 41/51
Date: 07-Jun-00 @ 05:46 PM -
RE: Why do people DJ live?
That's a very tough question regarding the Duchamp->Warhol->Koons evolution of conceptual art versus..."artisan art"(?), and my thoughts on it. I'm not too familiar with Duchamp, in fact not at all, but as for Warhol, and Koons, I don't really have much respect for the pieces they've created, but I can appreciate the pisstakes they've pulled on the art world. I have a lot more respect for someone like Michelangelo, cut and polished his stone BY HAND, and did't get apprentices to color in his frescos, or hire someone else to do it with cash, drugs, or sexual favors. When you see a piece by a certain artist in a gallery, you may compliment the owner on his fine collection, or arranger's taste in display, but you don't offer to blow him onstage for it. You recognize that an artist made the piece itself, and that artist matters as a creative individual.
Okay, let's say you take a little sculpture by one artist, and another from another artist, perhaps, laying one on top of another. It would be very hard to say simply 'installation by _(arranger's name)_' without acknowledging who the two 'arranged'pieces were in fact made by without being a considdered a completely egocentric fuckhead posing as some sort of artist wannabe. Now if hundreds of pieces were arranged in a way that all togther form a complete piece, with each piece contributing to the whole, each being a significant contibutor to the identity of a piece as a whole,that might be seen as a different case. I suppose it depends where you draw the line of contributing elements as individual pieces in their own rites. I would have a bit of a hard time worrying about the guy at the paint factory who mixed William Alexander's Prussian Blue while looking at it in another mundane still life of trees in front of mountains with ochre cliffs and pink sunset skies, painted by another bored nursing home patient, you know what I mean?
Now, if the piece consisted of a piece of hand beaten papyrus, splashed with some psychedelic insanity of a single colour of paint, that came completely textured with dust of mother of pearl, and obsidian slivers, I might be interested in the name of the guy that made the paint.
Did they cross the art line? Sounds like an argument of somantics.
Ape