Amusing incident proves that modern perception of "Art" is crap

[Sirotnikov]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060615/...e_dc&printer=1;_ylt=Ai2xzxK1NeqToW1.InSHcF4Z.3QA;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MX N1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE-

Art gallery loses its head, displays plinth

Thu Jun 15, 9:11 AM ET

One of Britain's most prestigious art galleries put a block of slate on display, topped by a small piece of wood, in the mistaken belief it was a work of art.

The Royal Academy included the chunk of stone and the small bone-shaped wooden stick in its summer exhibition in London.

But the slate was actually a plinth -- a slab on which a pedestal is placed -- and the stick was designed to prop up a sculpture. The sculpture itself -- of a human head -- was nowhere to be seen.

"I think the things got separated in the selection process and the selectors presented the plinth as a complete sculpture," the work's artist David Hensel told BBC radio.

The academy explained the error by saying the plinth and the head were sent to the exhibitors separately.

"Given their separate submission, the two parts were judged independently," it said in a statement. "The head was rejected. The base was thought to have merit and accepted.

"The head has been safely stored ready to be collected by the artist," it added. "It is accepted that works may not be displayed in the way that the artist might have intended."

[Jon Miller]

awesome

but this shows the truth, art is in the minds of the beholder..

Jon Miller

[Q Classic]

The head was rather grotesque. I don't blame them for not displaying it.

[Arrian]

[Dis]

I always thought art was kind of pretentious.

[General Ludd]

This is great.


However, if it proves anything, it's that some people look for any excuse to denounce art.

[Dis]

that's alway fun as well.

perhaps I'm just not artistic enough to appreciate art. That's probably it.

I like stuff that is real, and drawn to be real. I love paintings of old naval ships. I like paintings that are real things. Not a bunch of weird geometric shapes.

and yes, I also like naked women as art.

[Provost Harrison]

"Given their separate submission, the two parts were judged independently," it said in a statement. "The head was rejected. The base was thought to have merit and accepted.

I think that sums up a lot of this sort of stuff, really...

[Traianvs]

Modern art is teh suck

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by General Ludd
This is great.


However, if it proves anything, it's that some people look for any excuse to denounce art.

Uhh...no

[Odin]

A five year old could make some of the abstact "art" out there.

[Bkeela]

There is no denying the artistic merit of the classics, but modern art proves that relativism is feeble.

[General Ludd]

Originally posted by Odin
A five year old could make some of the abstact "art" out there.

A five year old is unlikely to have the experience and understanding of the medium to make a succesful composition, but anyways, you say that as though it'd be a bad thing.

I thought the critisism was that art is pretentious.

[Elok]

Well yeah, you can't get much more pretentious than taking something ludicrously simple and acting like it's better than "The School of Athens," based on the poststructuralist paradigms of exploded dichotomies of spatial perception or what-have-you.

For similar fun, look up "The Sokal Affair" in Wikipedia, in which a frustrated physicist submits complete gibberish to a respected PoMo journal, gets it published, and then draws attention to the ludicrousness of what he said...

[General Ludd]

Originally posted by Elok
Well yeah, you can't get much more pretentious than taking something ludicrously simple and acting like it's better than "The School of Athens," based on the poststructuralist paradigms of exploded dichotomies of spatial perception or what-have-you.

I missed the part where people where compairing the pieces in this exhibit to the "school of athens"?

Pretention is to demand arbitrarily applied standards of the work in order to exclude those who don't fit into a narrowly defined category... and yet, when the standards are shown to be quite open and inclusive, the subject matter relative, and the work open to interpretation and criticism, it's called pretentious.

What's pretentious is to single out a particular work, such as the school of athens, and delcare it an example of what 'proper art ought to be'.

I don't know what could possibly be more pretentious than someone who ranks a piece of art work based on its adherance to the golden mean.