Monday, September 04, 2006

This is not a posting -just pixels!

Let me start, as usual, by claiming no understanding of art whatsoever...
"Who can today?" one wants to ask...


A visit to CoBrA Museum of Modern Art (Copenhagen-Brussels-Amsterdam) with Erkut and Eylem has been useful for a number of reasons:
1. I realised a few other reasons for not being able to like modern art (appreciation is a different matter):

- First of all, the art work is neither old enough nor new enough. It's almost old-fashioned.

- Second of all, I might appreciate but definitely not like the following:

- not to aim at perfection

- not to aim at clarity (as my ex-hero Dawkins suggests, "clarity would expose one's lack of content")

- to safeguard oneself from any criticism (through abstraction or relativism)

- hence in a circular fashion, to make artwork into something very common, so much so that the mere criterion remains as "the name of the artist", which logically boils down to marketing!!!

- Finally, I understand that the emancipation of artistic expression from whatever might be the fashionable/mainstream by then, must be valuable to the artist. Yet, I am not sure why these responsive currents of art should be treated differently than adolescent teenagers. If what we revolt against determines our work, what does it say about us? In particular the change from religious themes -which have historically been very contraversial and revolutionary in masterful hands and brains- to pagan themes in the CoBrA art made me think that it absolutely ignored how monotheistic religions were based on pagan traditions.

2. I also realised that there is a lot to appreciate and even enjoy re certain styles or schools. I have enjoyed the summer exhibition Play! The Art of the Game (t/m 24.09.2006).

It was very interactive, which made it fun. We spent half an hour playing flux table tennis (see the pic) and I spent at least a quarter talking back to a face-reflected pillow that was telling me about murder and blood. All nice and fun...

But the better part was the deconstruction of our childhood games. How chess made us normalise war and competition, and how monopoly made us applaud ruthless global corporatism etc.

The concept of the exhibition is "the marked parallels between the areas of art and play. Both are separate from everyday working life, are self-regulating, irrational and aimed at pleasure."

Well, it didn't work exactly like that with me, but I don't think anyone would mind... ;)

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