huntmich
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Dec 19, 2003
- Messages
- 3,077
HisNameIsFrank said:Every time I read one of your posts,I luv you a little more,lacey k.![]()
+1.
HisNameIsFrank said:Every time I read one of your posts,I luv you a little more,lacey k.![]()
In my opinion his art is both conceptual and experiental. His work is a conceptual translation of an otherwise unquantifiable experiences. The fact that the work also has an experiental component says that he did a good job.atlas said:this post is called What I say to my friends who love Alex Grey/visionary art
We all agree that art is a really wide field, so lets narrow it can say Fine Art is what we're talking about. Fine Art, we should agree, is defined by its role in society, rather than its visual beauty, or how it conforms to beauty. Fine art concerns itself with more than representation; fine art is about something: teaching it, revealing, provoking discussion. Fine art is a kind of material philosophy. That's how people like Warhol made it into what we will call the canon. That is how I intend to dismiss Alex Grey's work. It is, in my opinion, bad aesthetics, bad philosophy (of art). Therefore, any discussions of skill, or technique, are immaterial to the discussion (as I have defined it, anyway). Though, I will say, in my opinion, his skills and technique do not make him a particularly compelling craftsman.
The spiritual has been the first role of artistic depiction for as long as art has existed. Anything predating spiritual art, is better described as visual history, or simple communication (cave paintings retelling an event). Grey is participating in a tradition with quite a legacy. My first observation is that visionary art is willfully anachronistic. It, like the new age movement that gave birth to it, is xenophilic, primitavist, and experiential (rather than conceptual).
You're going to have to explain more here. I think you're just pigeonholing.Visionary art's pedigree is a philosophy, but that philosophy is uncritical, dogmatic, and limited. The result is art that is actually less spiritual and more political than say, Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson.
What one religion is Alex Grey portraying? I thought the whole beauty of Alex Grey's work is that it speaks to people of all belief systems religious and non-religious.Its been a while, but I used to moderate Psychedelic Drug Discussion. You're going to have to take on faith that I value cognitive liberty, endorse the validity of altered states of consciousness, and accept a spirituality that has a great deal in common with Grey's own. Grey is the one, however, who is operating within the vocabulary and the structure of everything that is ostensibly opposed to his worldview. Firstly, depiction effectively closes any debate about the nature of the visionary experience. Accepting the validity of Alex Grey's art is a great way to give Alex Grey undue influence over your own mind during a visionary experience. His ideas are really just another culture's religious art, and while I'm not dismissive of religious art, it detracts from spirituality, and predetermines your experience the way it has to Christianity. Orthodoxy is a plague, it perpetuates bad ideas, allows the powerful to control people, and homogenizes thought. If you primarily identify yourself as a devotional eastern religion follower, then Grey is someone who enunciates your teachings, the same as the Sistine Chapel does for renaissance Italian Catholics.
I hope you realize the hypocrisy in that statement.If you think psychedelics are some kind of magic that reveals the one actual world, congrats, you have effectively turned the best shot humanity has for multiplicity of ideas, mutual respect, and real humanism (without wedding it explicitly to a preexisting value system) into a new church's wine and crackers.
Psychedelics are a boon to mankind because they foster chaos, dissonance, freedom, and heterodoxy. What the world needs is more of that, not some alternative hegemony of hierarchical power structures telling me how things are. That's what makes Grey's work bad.
atlas said:8)
If you don't take the time to explain yourself, then you effectively say nothing at all.
lacey k said:Alot of good and alot of bad.....What I meant by my post is that while maybe goin to school to hear someone drill their own personal beliefs about art into your skull for 4 years might give you more information to make your decisions about a piece of art, alot of that information is opinion, and also makes it alot harder for you to just look at somethin and just say "I like that." you allowed to think whatever you want about shit, but seriously , when you say shit like a giant red block is better, deeper, more complex, and more significant to humanity than a image showing the energy of 2 souls joining together thru sex and the love radiating out of that it just gets silly, cuz as much as you are tryna make a point, youre basically comparing something that says NOTHING at all to something that says ALOT. and then saying the first one is better because it says nothing, and somehow that means so much deep intellectual shit. "Ooh, but it says something by saying nothing, dont you get it? Its all the interpretation....Its COMPLEX, you wouldnt understand..."
Lacey K said:If you wanna compare them on the same type of guidelines, if youre lookin at a alex gray painting, without knowing what it means or assuming that theres any meaning to it, you can tell at very least that the artist got alot of technical skill and is capable of creating somethin recognizable. while by judging at face value, you dont get shit from a block. when you look at it you see that the giant block could be made by someone with no skills at all, and not intending to mean anything at all, but you really dont know cuz its just a big block. Ooooh. interesting, intriguing. what does it mean? and people all act like its super fuckin great and shows some kind of intelligent mysterious thought provoking craftmanship. sometimes shit like that does, but there is plenty of worthless cons out there makin money thru complete shit, but hey somebody bought it, so i guess its worth something to them. i just draw the line at lookin down on something that may be simple in ways, but still shows great skills and a very obvious intent.
Lacey K said:as a artist i cant stand to see the type of crap that people come out with, cuz when you act like a comepletely abstract, conceptual NOTHING of a wannabe artists brain-vomit, means more to art than well-executed images of different metaphysical types of things, thats when i cant even take it seriously no more.
The same way that people who cant sing think anyone who can carry a tune got a great voice, or someone who cant skate thinks anyone who can pop a olly is pretty skilled, thats what alot of pretentious-ass snooty art related people act like about art. they think they know so much becuz they got told by a professor that this means this. but in reality know so little that any piece of garbage that someone calls "art" is immediately cutting edge, smart, forawrd-looking, ahead of its time, etc etc etc. it dont take nothing to convince someone who cant draw for shit that somethin on a paper is art, cuz they dont know no better. when you put so much god damn analysis and talking into art, flattening it out into some kinda mechanical dead creature to look at and specualte about you just ruin it.
Lacey K said:it seems like people come outta school with the attitude of someone who just learned to play chess just waiting to house someone at the next game. Full of new ideas and conflicting information and ready to challenge all the accepted ideas about art just like the people who love to come out like " I hate the beatles." its controversy and expressing new feelings about shit but alot of students think they know it all and get mad cocky and arrogant about shit once they get a lil info into em. I always wonder, if no one told you that the white line on the white canvas was great, would you think it was?
Lacey K said:What makes it great, other than what you already been told about the context its in and the other background information about it. if you cant appreciate or understand a painting/image without someome explaining it to you, the history of it, then you cant act like you know because then its obvious that the meaning is whatever youre told. it takes years and years of drilling and explaining to give the art student the context to review and observe art and thats how people who spent time in art school come to conclusions that seem like the opposite of logic about the value of a piece of artwork. does it make you better and more knowledgeable that you can say you prefer a all-blue 50-foot wall to kathe kollvitzes holocaust charcoal drawings, or does it just mean that youre understandin it in a totally different way that aint necessarily related to its artistic skill , aesthetic value, or the meaning of it. Iunno. The thing about takin the artistic skill out of art is that you cant tell if it was made by a artist or not anymore. A circle is just a circle, when showed to people who like to over analyze things its a statement, but, the truth of it is, the circle itself did not take any skill to create. it took intent of the artist, it took thinking by the artist to decide what they thought they were saying, but the PIECE ITSELF shows no skill.the circle might provoke thought, but just that alone dont make it worth praise. alot of shitty things can provoke thought.
Lacey K said:if the point of it is not to create art but to make a point then the line is blurred thats when it crosses over, to me, closer to advertising and not fine art. anyone can do what they just did, is the art in the intent of the artist? I could make a circle just as easy as a mentally retarded 7th grader with a compass could make a circle, and if no one told you who did it, would you even know? No..... some of the shit that people give mad credit to could be done by ANYONE,you see a million pictures by college art students that could pass for some shit by famous abstract artists, cuz other than the name attached, you dont even know. it seems like any graphic representation of anything is considered art. maybe thats a definition of it but is drawing the wal mart logo art? If i draw the logo and photocopy it and then put it ona wall and take a picture of it, is that my "Conceptual art installment?" the point im makin is that it seems like to many people, it aint the art ITSELF that people give credit to, but the idea goin thru the artists head when they made it which means that theres a whole lotta room open to interpretation. "Sure its a empty page, but she had just experienced the death of her mother when she made it! Its clearly a representation of loss!"
Lacey K said:Yal are writing off alex gray like hes some kinda hack like thomas kinkade, who can draw pretty english gardens out the ass, but cant say nothing for shit. i understand the point of view of "you can paint something that looks real, but really means nothing at all and aint that great, and its worth less artistically than a cubed-out picasso mess on a canvas." Aint nothing wrong with that, i can understand that, cuz lookin pretty aint the end all be all of what art is all about. but i think you are definately reducing the quality of his work to make a point. Alot of times the critics of shit remind me of the celebrity magazines that just spend all their time gossiping about who did what and aint involved at all, just watch and analyze from the side lines. spend too much time on the side watching and judging and not enough time doing shit of your own and then its just a bunch of meaningless judgements said by a talking head.
atlas said:The Judd cubes are an extreme example of art this is all concept, and no craft, but they're waaay more "art" than something that is all craft, and no concept. We have a word for the latter, its called "craft". If you disagree with that assessment of high art vs. craft, I don't know what to tell you. Anybody can learn how to draw. The anatomy and color Grey uses could be duplicated by anybody with a BFA in painting.
atlas said:I hope everybody thinks a debate is more fun than an Alex Grey Circle Jerk, because I'll never be able to resist a good argument.
thujone said:i'm a fan of Naoto Hattori, he is an amazing psychedelic artist who I personally find has more depth to his creativity than Alex Grey
HisNameIsFrank said:Well,riddle me this. Why are you even debating in an appreciation thread,anyway? Me thinks with all of your book smarts,you've failed to learn the definition of appreciation.
HisNameIsFrank said:How,exactly,is Alex Grey shallow? Please explain..
You think Hattori has more depth to his creativity than Grey? Hattori's good,but his work is really nothing more than Salvador Dali on higher grade acid.
On the contrary I think Alex Grey's art is great because it "is about something: teaching it, revealing, provoking discussion."atlas said:this post is called What I say to my friends who love Alex Grey/visionary art
We all agree that art is a really wide field, so lets narrow it can say Fine Art is what we're talking about. Fine Art, we should agree, is defined by its role in society, rather than its visual beauty, or how it conforms to beauty. Fine art concerns itself with more than representation; fine art is about something: teaching it, revealing, provoking discussion. Fine art is a kind of material philosophy. That's how people like Warhol made it into what we will call the canon. That is how I intend to dismiss Alex Grey's work. It is, in my opinion, bad aesthetics, bad philosophy (of art). Therefore, any discussions of skill, or technique, are immaterial to the discussion (as I have defined it, anyway). Though, I will say, in my opinion, his skills and technique do not make him a particularly compelling craftsman.
It's silly to dismiss Grey because he falls under an extremely vague art category. Yes some visionary artists have mainly magical/pre-rational and ethnocentric themes. Greys work clearly doesn't have such a focus. While it may have something to say about those elements it clearly goes into modern and post-modern territory which is where it gets interesting in my opinion.The spiritual has been the first role of artistic depiction for as long as art has existed. Anything predating spiritual art, is better described as visual history, or simple communication (cave paintings retelling an event). Grey is participating in a tradition with quite a legacy. My first observation is that visionary art is willfully anachronistic. It, like the new age movement that gave birth to it, is xenophilic, primitavist, and experiential (rather than conceptual).
That's not a very critical argument.. Criticising through categorization is just too partial in this instance. If you are going to associate Grey with any philosophy I'd say he leans more towards the integral philosophy.Visionary art's pedigree is a philosophy, but that philosophy is uncritical, dogmatic, and limited. The result is art that is actually less spiritual and more political than say, Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson.
I'm not sure what your definition of senses is so I'm not going to touch that but I don't see how it relates to your critic of the chakras. Obviously his work deals with the self. People identify part of their self as the human body. So why not? Oh right, because it doesn't fall neatly into your rigid categories of "fine art."Grey's art isn't about revealing a world that is obscured to us by the limitations of our senses. Its about confirming the primacy of of the icon, of depiction as a reliable means of teaching and revealing truths. I don't understand why a belief system that relies so heavily on what isn't visible (charkas, auras, "energy") would retreat to a straight visual vocabulary in order to represent itself.
awwe, baby had a bad trip and wants to blame Grey for it? Poor baby.Its been a while, but I used to moderate Psychedelic Drug Discussion. You're going to have to take on faith that I value cognitive liberty, endorse the validity of altered states of consciousness, and accept a spirituality that has a great deal in common with Grey's own. Grey is the one, however, who is operating within the vocabulary and the structure of everything that is ostensibly opposed to his worldview. Firstly, depiction effectively closes any debate about the nature of the visionary experience. Accepting the validity of Alex Grey's art is a great way to give Alex Grey undue influence over your own mind during a visionary experience. His ideas are really just another culture's religious art, and while I'm not dismissive of religious art, it detracts from spirituality, and predetermines your experience the way it has to Christianity. Orthodoxy is a plague, it perpetuates bad ideas, allows the powerful to control people, and homogenizes thought. If you primarily identify yourself as a devotional eastern religion follower, then Grey is someone who enunciates your teachings, the same as the Sistine Chapel does for renaissance Italian Catholics.
I agree, although I've grown weary of academic deconstruction of art and the toxic environment it creates. Ultimately art is about expressing yourself and hopefully growing from the process. The world would be a better place if more people did that regardless of what the snobs over at the liberal arts think of it.Art appreciation isn't about sitting, looking, evaluating, and then expecting people to feel the same way. Its about exploring the motives for the art, its position in historical, cultural, and philosophical contexts, and evaluating if it says anything at all (agree or disagree). If you reject that interpretation of art appreciation, then have fun retreating to "its my opinion, and I refuse to explain or even understand why I hold it" every time somebody challenges you.
Jean Lyotard said:Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.
I'm sorry,atlas. I really do try to read your posts,but I never make it past the third or fourth sentence before I feel like I'm in art class,listening to some pompous professor droning on and on and on and on and...well,you get the idea. Lacey k said it best when she said that you're a good example of education ruining your ability to appreciate great art.atlas said:^^
I must say, I remain unconvinced. First, I'll just throw out my favorite concise postmodern definition:
It follows that the post post modernism would be a transcendence on the order of mag....blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
The problem with post-modernity's relativity is it's partial and monological. Yeah it's great for inspecting 2nd person aspects of reality but try deconstructing the bus that's about to hit you and see what happens. The problem with modernity isn't that it's wrong, it just that it doesn't acknowledge that its worldview is nested in a sliding scale of context and declares it's perspective as absolute. As such there is nothing wrong with introducing modern elements within a wider pluralistic context(They are true as far as they go). Modernity has alot of good things to say looking from a 3rd person perspective, Post-Modernity has alot of good things to say about the 2nd person perspective, and Pre-Modern civilization had alot of good things to say through the 1st person perspective. Here is art that takes the truths of all three perspectives and tries to put them into one coherent integration. Ofcourse institutionalized post-modernism will have nothing of this which is one of the reasons why I refer to him and others like him as post post-modern. Post-modernity in a way incorporates pre-modernity and modernity as contexts. But it does so by absolutizing the 2nd person perspective in the same way that modernity absolutized the 3rd person. Clearly reality is much more than just semantics. The difference between post-modernity and post post-modernity is the transcendence of a monological 2nd person perspective towards an integrated worldview.atlas said:It follows that the post post modernism would be a transcendence on the order of magnitude as was the departure from high modernism to post modernism. All I'm seeing now is a name given to the attempt to retreat from postmodern relativity. Postmodernism as a world view already begs the postpost question: what is to be done with these remaining narratives, structures, and the would-be narrative of narritivelessness. Were that not the case, all postmodernists would be be raving anarchists, and they aren't.
Grey's embracal of structuralism and post-structuralism throws up red flags in both camps. Yes, his work shows and accepts developmental hierarchy's as a partial truth but that doesn't automatically put him in the structuralist camp. Being able to enter countless cultural spaces and pull out the similarities requires a pluralistic perspective.A distinction must be drawn between theory/text that embraces postmodernism, and refutes it, and works that prefer to exist as enforced islands of text surrounded by a sea of post-structuralism. The latter is how I see Grey's work. A willfully modern attitude that exists in a post modern climate. Because of that, Grey's work still deconstructs itself the way all other texts do.
I think you're giving too much emphasis on the surfaces of the work. As you said yourself the work is made to be experiental. If you're spending all your time trying to analyze the art and no time experiencing it then you're missing the whole point. The question is does experiencing his work put you into a pluralistic/post-modern worldspace? In my experience the answer is yes. As the saying goes the proof is in the pudding.Grey's work still reveals a belief in a binary world of material and spirit, Man and woman, life and death, sky and earth. I get that he shows their interconnection, but he doesn't address their reliance on each other as semiotic concepts. I have never looked at a Grey painting and thought "this is a text that questions what it itself is about". He uses referents in the way in which they have been used for a long time, and he paints in a very consistent visual language. That's not necessarily a criticism. All my favorite modernist art has very totemic, very spiritual, very monolithic ambitions. But I don't think his art addresses postmodernism at all.
HisNameIsFrank said:I'm sorry,atlas. I really do try to read your posts,but I never make it past the third or fourth sentence before I feel like I'm in art class,listening to some pompous professor droning on and on and on and on and...well,you get the idea. Lacey k said it best when she said that you're a good example of education ruining your ability to appreciate great art.
yougene said:As the saying goes the proof is in the pudding.
atlas said:We just have to agree to disagree about the validity of third and second order understandings of reality. IMO, there isn't any reliable way to have an unmediated understanding of phenomena. Ego death is a good way, but we don't really have any reliable way of knowing thats true either.