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|8.16.04 @ 2:15AM|#
Oh yes! I love it. I personally suggest our Chicago Underground Film fest CUFF.org. Guaranteed to offend the offendable. And, guess what, actually supported by ticket sales and private sponsers (like vodka and ale makers). Art that survives on its own. To the best of my knowledge, not Government supported (I actually love it, last year I roped some students from the Art Institute of Chicago there while I was taking pictures out on the pine ridge res., they hated it, raising it's value in my mind immeasurably )
|8.16.04 @ 2:17AM|#
Not meant as an ad, just pointing to some art that isn't on the dole.
|8.16.04 @ 2:36AM|#
Just want to say that that was a great comic; thanks Mr. Bagge.
|8.16.04 @ 2:50AM|#
That comic was extremely spot on. When reading it, I had several "That thought has been partially formed and floating around my brain for a while, but I lacked Bagge's talent to peg it" moments.
|8.16.04 @ 3:13AM|#
I think Bagge is too hard on "Piss Christ."
The appearance of the piece is of a realistic portrayal of the crucifiction, with an glowing gold atmosphere, as if photographed through a lens with a filter. The piece is side/backlit, which creates an effect which my eye read as divine light. Then, you see the title, and the realization of how the effect was achieved dawns on you, producing a paradoxical effect.
From the descriptions provided in the media, and repeated by Bagge, you'd think it was a photo looking down at a bucket filled with frothy yellow liquid.
|8.16.04 @ 3:19AM|#
I find the focus on "framing" and "artistic freedom" over execution and content in Art to be eerily similiar to the "framing" and "neutrality" over investigation and content of stories in the (old) media. Maybe that accounts for the diminishing share of both in popular consumption.
|8.16.04 @ 3:24AM|#
See, there are too kinds of Bagge cartoons on Reason. There are the long, multi-page cartoons like this, which are funny and insightful. Then there are Bagge's one-pagers which I think of as his 'Tom Tomorrow' cartoons, like the last Bagge cartoon on Reason. These are, well, like Tom Tomorrow's cartoons, more concerned with Making A Point than being funny.
One can guess which I prefer.
|8.16.04 @ 3:37AM|#
Bagge was really plugging along nicely until the very end, where he referred to the Chrysler PT Cruiser as a beautiful car. Ughh...
Xmas|8.16.04 @ 3:38AM|#
Stefu,
You should read The Adventures of Bat Boy.
:)
digamma|8.16.04 @ 4:06AM|#
"Heaven forbid a single community should live without the bard's hokey, unintelligible 400-yr-old situation comedies!"
I was with him up to that point.
|8.16.04 @ 7:08AM|#
Yea digamma, you probably have that right. Although I do hate publicly funded bard displays, they tend to the maudlin. They only time I like seeing his plays are when they are put on by self supporting casts. They have to work harder.
Although still, you gotta wonder. Did he just have a bad high school teacher? 'cause I still find "As you like it" or "Midsummer Nights dream" to be both more intelligible than your average tv fare, and more amusing.
s.m. koppelman|8.16.04 @ 10:19AM|#
I gag at pretentious catalog essays, but what's Pete saying? He hates post-1960s high art (Catherine Opie, Andres Serrano) except for the post-1960s high art that he likes (Robert Mapplethorpe, Superflat tea sets)?
That tax-subsidized art is dismal except when it (Mapplethorpe) isn't? That grants and publicly-funded art are new things? (They're not.)
Just this weekend at the so-so Miami Art Museum I saw a bland, lazy sticker collection by a fellow named Jac Leirner and a super Chuck Close show that did a fantastic job of visually explaining a number of techniques he and collaborators invented in order to make a bunch of his pieces. I've seen Close's giant pixilated portraits a zillion times before and didn't want to see them again, but this was a blast, and a book or video or a show of the finished pieces alone wouldn't have been anywhere near as good. This is why we have modern art museums. The one exhibition like that I see every couple of months easily makes up for a half dozen or so lousy ones. The third exhibit was a bunch of pieces from across the MAM's collection along a loose theme of minimalism, a Todd Hido suburban photo alongside a grid of hanging shards of mirror, Rothko-influenced abstract paintings. It was pretty good too. You won't find it in a parking lot, and a book of 6-inch reproduuctions wouldn't be as satisfying. So there.
There's always been a lot of crappy art alongside the great stuff. The 1640s, 1890s, the 1950s, you name it, all had their share of lousy artists working in the modern styles of the day. They seem like more fruitful periods because we've only kept the best parts.
Fun enough bit of first-person cartooning I guess if we resign to Mr. Bagge having aged into a bona fide killjoy (imagine the dismal, irritating companion piece to My Dinner With Andre we'd have if someone filmed him having lunch with Tim Cavanaugh!), but it was a bit much to try to stretch the complaints into some kind of libertarian free-market critique of What's Wrong With High Art These Days. We've had tax- and grant-subsidized art for a long time side by side with bootstrap capitalist art. I'd be surprised if any honest accounting of both through the ages would find one kind inherently better or worse unless maybe you're just looking at industrial-design utility, in which case you toss out not only Michaelangelo's taxpayer-funded frescoes but also the paintings used for those Rockwell magazine covers, no?
And though I share ol' Pete's aversion to most "avant garde" video art, the absurdity of someone collecting it should be familiar to a guy who frequents comic book conventions where connisseurs of his own work don latex gloves before handling outrageously priced comic books in nonreactive archival plastic bags that they have no intention of reading.
|8.17.04 @ 1:24AM|#
I also like Shakespeare's comedies, but "As You like It" and especially "A Midsummer Night's Dream" ARE situation comedies, and pure hokum to boot. Does standard TV fare stack up to it? No, but GOOD TV does! Are Paul Henning's '60s TV shows worthy of public assistance? Ask your granchildren, who surely will be subsidizing them eventually -- lest "The Beverly Hillbillies" be FORGOTTEN, heaven forbid!
Joe: I drew "Piss Christ" fairly accurately, with all its vague, artsy, orange-y hues. Still, it IS a photo of a crucifix floating in urine, and Serrano never tried to hide that fact. Look at what he NAMED the damned thing! If he called it "Orange Christ" we wouldn't even be discussing it right now. That photo is pure art school reject nonsense, both technically and conceptually. It sucks.
Mr. Koppelman: What I'm saying (as if I didn't make it perfectly clear already) re: someone like Robert Mapplethorpe is that he never needed public financial assistance -- and the people selling or displaying his prints after his death even less so -- since he was and is a commercially successful photographer. Even his pictures of flowers sell! How many artists can claim that?
There are countless artists whose work I enjoy who barely make a living, or who will be stuck in their day job forever. But just because I like them doesn't mean everyone else should have to pay for it via public financial assistance. In other words, just because I like them that doesn't mean they're any good.
I also have never met a comic collector who wears rubber gloves while shopping for rare treasures. I'll take your word for it that such people exist, but none of them have ever come anywhere near me (I know, why would they?).
Finally: I think a "My Dinner With Andre" type flick starring me and Tim Cavannaugh would be both a rip-roaring laugh-fest AND a huge money-maker. And poignant, too! Any takers?
|8.17.04 @ 1:59AM|#
Personally, when I hear the term 'modern art', my brain translates that into the term 'CRAP'. I tend more towards representational (read: wildlife) pieces. Carl Brenders is amazing, as is John Seerey Lester.
|8.17.04 @ 9:25AM|#
I think "Bagge's Dinner with Cavanaugh" would be a hit with the "Dazed and Confused," "Friday" crowd.
|8.17.04 @ 9:30AM|#
""Heaven forbid a single community should live without the bard's hokey, unintelligible 400-yr-old situation comedies!"
this is rough but true. i mean, you can sit back and admire the six or so stories all sitcoms tell over and over again as having been honed by one man so long ago...but i can't sit through them. clever elizabethan wordplay only goes so far. you can read or watch the importance of being earnest and get the same effect with 3x the laffs.
bagge is wrong about serrano, but that's why they call it art and not math.
Larry A|8.17.04 @ 10:24AM|#
The kick for me was that I actually had an art professor inform me (complete with snif of distain) that Norman Rockwell was not an artist, but merely an illustrator.
And in college I sang with a men's chorus which routinely scheduled 40 performances a year, often to SRO audiences. Academically we were criticised for performing popular music instead of the proper German beer-garden songs.
Luckily each time the fine arts folks tried to take over and reform us the alumni groups that used many of our performances as fund-raisers pointed out how many thousands of dollars of scholarship funds would dry up shortly thereafter.