Art and Literature

[ryos]

aquaMat wrote: However I strongly oppose to ryos's view that art has to either

look nice

or

put some stimulating trick...

!!
Where would that leave masters like Jackson Pollock  or most of the expressionists, who made paintings that were definitely NOT nice and no

optical gimmick

either.....but are fantastic masterpieces, real high art.....??

Quite the contrary... I think.... the not-nice paintings are far more interesting than the nice ones (most of the time).

*googles Jackson Pollock*

I found this page, and from what I've seen there, he's kind of a mixed bag.

For example, I like his

She Wolf

. If you look at the scaled-down thumbnail on the page (akin to standing back from the painting), the distorted figure of a she-wolf appears, complete with overused teats. Click the thumbnail (walk up to the painting), and the figure dissolves completely into a chaotic mishmash of shapes. It then becomes like finding figures in the clouds as you try to see how many forms you can recognize in the mess. That's a cool visual trick!

Or take

Male and Female

. It is surreally beautiful to me, and has the added bonus of symbolism in its many hidden figures. Nice.

But then consider

Eyes in the Heat

, which looks like a microscopic photo of heart tissue, or

Full Fathom Five

, which looks like what it is (paint dribbled on the floor). If that's art, then I know a few house painters who feel seriously underpaid. I've seen more interesting paint dribbles on the floors of unfinished houses.

So...where does that leave Jackson Pollock? Mostly out of work! [smiley=evil.gif]

But...as I said, I have no use for

higher art

. Maybe I'm a commoner. Or maybe I'm an engineering student, so I apply that same mindset to art (

That doesn't look like anything, and it's ugly! Why did he bother?

). You decide.

But...also as I said, there's room for all of us in the world of art. There's no reason for me to be offended that some people think

Full Fathom Five

is a masterpiece of expression while all I see are dribbles on the floor. What does offend and embitter me is that the art world lends so much credence to the current vogue to the exclusion of all other styles of merit. For a while, that was abstract and expressionism; I don't know what's

in

now because I haven't kept up.