DuracellEnergizer said:
Ryan McAvoy said:
btw I've seen that ^ Lichenstein paiting close-up and it's stunning. Every dot that makes up the colour you see from a distance has been carefully arranged, and painted onto the canvas with millimetre precision. There is nothing "crude" about it.
I consider it crude compared to the original image. Of course, that's just my own subjective opinion.
There is art (essentially any work though usually the term is used in the creation of 'artifacts' things which are not intended to be disposable) and there is gallery art.
Gallery art is an off shoot of salon art. It's an 18th century convention which is just a means by which certain artists can display their work to prove it's value to collectors.
Lichenstein created renderings of enlarged panels from comic strips. That isn't the 'art' in a gallery context. The art is convincing a jury of collectors and 'experts' that the audacity in shifting an image from it's original context to a gallery context makes it worth the dollar value it commands, which is considerable.
I have had an art education. It's one of the reasons why I had such a fractious time doing my degree course, Even before my father got sick and I had my breakdown I couldn't stand the obsession with biography, self expression and selling of the author aspects of the business of image making. I was more concerned with the craft of making things the techniques. Most gallery artists hire someone else to do that. Roy Lichenstein at least had the courtesy to do that himself.
Duchamp didn't even employ anyone to make the urinals which are dubbed his fountain pieces. He did sign them and put them in a gallery at a time when it was outrageously daring to do so.
He may well have just been taking the piss out of the sort of civilisation that could churn out The Great War and later the Holocaust and the atomic bomb but a verifiable Duchamp ready-made is worth a tonne of cash. Not because the author hammered or scratched or daubed his soul into the piece but because of what it represents historically.
Russian religious icons were very collectable during the Soviet era and now there are oligarchs shoveling cash around trying to re-obtain them.
Similarly during the Maoist era Chinese artifacts were escaping destruction and are now being purchased by the newly rich and shipped back home.
These objects are historic touchstones.
People will pay for one of Lichenstein's canvasses not necessarily because they like comic strips but because 50's gallery art paved the way for the 60's culture that rich baby-boomers remember as their peak.
People collect Op-art for similar reasons. Without Bridget Riley you'd have no Mary Quant and by extension no Vivienne Westwood.
I couldn't give a monkey's about any those three ladies but I'm not part of the most pampered generation in the history of the mankind.
