Poster art.

Alphonse Mucha designed art nouveau posters, which remain compelling examples of graphic design. An online repository can be found here.

This Piece of Art Sucks pt. 3 [Published in The Quest]

This week starts with a thanks and an apology. An apology that I missed a column last week, and a thanks to everyone who emailed me with hideous pieces of art. You all have great taste for awful pictures.

This week’s piece is by Kenneth Noland, the poster child for High Modernism. In ‘Sarah’s Reach’ he paints three lines in slightly different colors on a blank background. Perhaps compensating for something, Noland made the painting nearly eight feet tall. There’s very little to separate ‘Sarah’s Reach’ from a typical wallpaper design, except wallpaper usually has more pizzazz.

It may be big, it may be boring, but never fear! Noland backed up his art with a mountainous heap of theory. It’s a wonder his canvases could still stand under the weight of the multisyllabic words critics heaped on them. According to the tenets of High Modernism, Noland’s piece is Good because it acknowledges it’s status as a picture (flat), as painted (colorful), and as a piece destined for a gallery (hence the white background).

To be fair, ‘Sarah’s Reach’ is like the airplane food of Noland’s oeuvre. It’s light on substance and heavy on convention, and over the years he’s painted far more interesting, moving, and aesthetically pleasing works that don’t rely on convoluted theories. Nevertheless, it deserves to be singled out as an example of Bad Art that gives Good Art a Bad Name. Art should be more than an illustrated intellectual argument; that, my friends, is a diagram.

In that spirit, go forth and submit RAW applications. Don’t let art that sucks overwhelm art that doesn’t.

This Piece of Art Sucks pt. 2 [Published in The Quest]

This column, here to help you navigate around the hype and hypocrisy of the art world, would simply be incomplete without an informed condemnation of Damien Hirst’s spot and spin paintings. These paintings look suspiciously like the artist invited a group of unsuspecting grade-schoolers to his studio, fed them all skittle-molly cocktails, and had them do their worst with paint and paper. And then did it again. And again. And several thousand identical paintings later he still sells them in droves to avid collectors.

He is the world’s second-most expensive living artist, who sued British Airways for painting spots on their adverts. The man apparently believes that he owns the artistic and commercial rights to round blobs of color, and makes no bones about the financial motive behind his artwork. Largely devoid of talent, Hirst has made a career out of actively demonstrating the power of money to determine art’s validity in the contemporary marketplace.

Paying other artists to paint spots, then re-selling them for a profit, is indeed an interesting concept. But Hirst has made a career out of it, reducing artistic practice to a business transaction. He is an investor, and a good one, but the lack of aesthetic complexity in his spot and spin paintings sets them apart from far more interesting conceptual artists like Sol LeWitt. They aren’t much more visually engaging than the faux-art digital canvases perpetually on sale (for reduced price) at Target and Urban Outfitters.

Put simply, Hirst’s spot and spin paintings are little more than business ventures that self-consciously defraud the art world. It is time to tell Damien Hirst that these travesties against vision do, indeed, suck.

This Piece of Art Sucks pt. 1 [Published in The Quest]

Here’s the premise: I have been expiring from heat, starvation, and general intellectual fatigue on a desert island for the last twenty years and am on the point of kicking the proverbial bucket when lo and behold! As the Good Lord comes to claim my soul, my last earthly vision is a piece of art that is so bad it actually devalues the canvas it’s painted on.

Some art is good. Some art is great. Banksy’s Luxury Loft sucks. Telling dead horses and camels that a ‘Luxury Loft Complex is Coming Soon’ is neither subtle nor witty, and probably clichéd enough that Metallica would consider it for an album cover. Sue Coe has already called attention to the hypocrisy of nationalist sloganeering, and Guernica is a far more visceral reminder of the raw tragedy of war. Banksy, your slickly ‘ironic’ art is part of the same culture of consumption and manipulation that you purport to criticize. If I Luxury Loft was my living sight I would probably stab out my eyes post-mortem.

Link

Interview with Nan Goldin.

Cool website...

I am in love with this oddly charming website. It collects polaroids from around the world of people with the one thing they want to do before they die.

Reclaiming the streets of New York.

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Joseph Beuys as a political pop star. Yes please.

Thomas Demand

Loving Thomas Demand right now. For those who don't know, Demand builds incredibly detailed sets from paper, photographs them, then destroys them.

John Brodie

Powerslice favorite John Brodie posts images from his new book on his website.