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BBC Documentary – Who's Afraid of Conceptual Art | BBC Documentary 2016

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24 thoughts on “BBC Documentary – Who's Afraid of Conceptual Art | BBC Documentary 2016”

  1. Most present contemporary are crap, theres nothing inspiring or cutting edge about it, I am not talking about likes of Marcel, D, Beuys or kusama here.

  3. Conceptual art is, essentially, a 180 degree departure from what we have traditionally thought of as “art”.
    And by art, I mean the visual arts: painting, drawing, sculpture architecture etc.
    The big problem is that while the traditional visual arts have a millenniums long history, this new kid on the block,does not.
    Sculpture has evolved from The Venus of Willendorf to the Great Sphinx, the Venus De Milo, Michelangelo's David up to Rodin, the Statue of Liberty and Alexander Calder.
    The arts of painting and drawing can be traced back to the cave paintings of Lascaux in France to The Sistine Chapel, Monet and Degas, Mark Rothko and beyond.
    And through all of the changes, these art forms have stayed essentially the same:making marks on paper, canvas, wood, plaster etc. and building up forms in three dimensions as sculpture and architecture.
    Along with the evolution of these art genres has developed a language and a set of criteria that form standards by which such pieces can be critiqued, evaluated and placed in historical context.
    And while some people might like the lurid landscapes of Thomas Kinkade, his paintings are not and should not be hung alongside the landscapes of Church, Cole, van Gogh, Cézanne and Thiebaud.
    There IS such a thing as bad art and we know what it looks like and why!
    It is called esthetics.

    This cannot be said of Conceptual art.
    All sorts of crappy, bogus and hare brained stuff is piled up or strewn across the floors of museums and exalted as art because no one knows or can know what is worthy and what is not.
    So you get pieces of blank white paper crumpled up in a ball, three basketballs suspended in a fish tank and cans of human excrement.
    Welcome to the wonderful, wacky world of Conceptual art !

    Let me tell you that when my brother was just starting school, he rebelled at the rules of spelling.
    Why did words have to be spelled in a particular way?
    Why couldn't he spell them as he wanted to spell them?
    He resented the rules and he resisted the authority of those who made them !
    Keep this in mind.

    I think that Conceptual art originated with people who could not and would not do the difficult work required to become a 'traditional' artist.

    Can't master the necessary skills ?
    No knowledge of perspective?
    Can't draw?
    Don't want to have to learn color theory?
    Can't master composition?
    No knowledge of human anatomy?
    Can't render tonal values
    Can’t be bothered ?

    These are skills that you have to WORK to prefect.
    It’s difficult.
    It takes…..effort.

    But maybe you want a fast track to the exalted position of "artist “.

    Well then, here's what you do:

    Belittle the importance of those skills and debase the notion that they are a prerequisite to creating art.
    Instead, create an art genre that you CAN do.
    A new genre.
    And let's call it Conceptual art.
    Conceptual artists claim that IDEAS and CONCEPTS are the main feature of their art.
    They can slap anything together and call it ''conceptual art'' confident that viewers will find SOMETHING to think about it no matter how banal or trivial the artist's concept!

    There is no way conceptual art pieces can be judged.
    The promoters of this art have attacked the motives and credibility of authorities and critics who might disparage the work.
    They have rejected museums and galleries as defining authorities.
    They reject the idea that art can be judged or criticized .
    All of this results in a decline in standards.
    And when you jettison standards, quality suffers.

    There really IS such a thing as BAD art !

    We know this only because we have standards and criteria by which such things can be evaluated.
    It seems that conceptual art comes down to a basic idea:
    No one has the right or authority to make any judgements about art !
    Art is anything you can get away with !

    A whole new language has been created to give the work an air of legitimacy and gravitas.
    Conceptual art is 'sold' to the unwary public with ….."ArtSpeak".

    ArtSpeak is a unique assemblage of English words and phrases that the International Art world uses but which are devoid of meaning!
    Have you ever found yourself confronted by an art gallery’s description of an exhibition which seems completely indecipherable?
    Or an artist’s statement about their work which left you more confused than enlightened?
    You’re not alone.

    Here are examples of ArtSpeak:

    'Works that probe the dialectic between innovations that seem to have been forgotten, the ruinous present state of projects once created amid great euphoria, and the present as an era of transitions and new beginnings.''

    Or

    ''The exhibition reactivates his career-long investigation into the social mutations of desire and repression. But his earlier concerns with repression production–in the adolescent or in the family as a whole–give way to the vertiginous retrieval and wayward reinvention of mythical community and sub-cultural traditions.''

    This language is meant to convince me that there is real substance to this drivel which is being passed off as art.
    I don't buy it.

    But plenty of other people DO buy it.
    Not because they love the work.
    They are laying out enormous sums in the belief that their investment will bring them high returns in the future.

    One Jeff Koons conceptual piece is three basketballs suspended in a fish tank.

    @t

    Here is Koons' own ArtSpeak explanation of his floating basketball 'concept' verbatim:

    “ This is an ultimate state of being.
    I wanted to play with people’s desires.
    They desire this equilibrium.
    They desire pre-birth.
    I was giving a definition of life and death.
    This is the eternal.
    This is what life is like, also, after death.
    Aspects of the eternal”

    Rather lofty goals for 3 basketballs suspended in a fish tank!!

    It sold for $350,000.
    I wonder what it would have fetched without Koons' name attached to it.

    Or take the case of Martin Creed's ball of crumpled white copy paper.

    @t

    He made almost 700 of them!
    Some sold for hundreds of dollars.

    Martin Creed, when asked during an interview how he would respond to those who say the crumpled paper ball isn’t art said :
    “ I wouldn’t call this art either. Who says, anyway, what’s good and what’s bad?”

    Interviewer:
    ''When confronted with conceptual art, we shouldn’t worry whether it’s art or not because no one really knows what art is.''

    Is this what art has come to??

    _____________________________

    Something radical has happened to the art scene in the past 50 years.
    Cubism slid into non-representational art….what is often called Abstract.
    Abstract or non-representational art is a legitimate and often profound genre.

    But to many people, it appeared as if this new style had no structure, principles or standards of evaluation.
    It’s markings seemed random and arbitrary.
    Something that anyone could do.

    Any composition of blotches or scribbles was “Abstract Art”.
    This was the slippery slope that led to the abandonment of standards in art.
    Art is what I say it is….and lots of people jumped on the art bandwagon.
    Anyone can be an artist.
    Anyone can mount a show.
    And who is to say if it has value or not ?

    A tacit agreement has formed among critics, galleries, publications and auction houses to promote and celebrate certain artists and styles.
    Objects with no artistic merit are touted and praised .
    Their value increases with every magazine article, every exhibition in a prestigious gallery.

    And when they come up for auction, sometimes the auction houses will lend vast sums to a bidder so that it appears as if the work of the particular artist is increasing in value.

    The upward spiral begins and fortunes are made.
    And many are reluctant to declare that the Emperor is, in fact, naked lest they appear boorish unsophisticated Philistines !
    This is what dominates the art market today.

    The love of money is the root of all evil.
    It has corrupted politics.
    It has corrupted sport.
    It has corrupted healthcare.
    It has corrupted religion.
    And now it has corrupted art.

    But, there is reason to hope.

    As much of the wisdom of the Greeks and Romans was kept alive through the Middle Ages in small pockets of learning and culture, ateliers have sprung up around the world that are devoted to preserving and handing down the traditional visual arts: drawing, painting and sculpting to each new generation.

    And when this craze for conceptual art has burned itself out and when visual art is no longer looked on as mere decoration and when schools that have dissolved their art programs want to reestablish them again, the world will find these skills preserved through the atelier movement.

  4. The sound is just terrible. I can't continue watching this. It's like watching porn with a bad internet connection. Not fun at all.

  6. All this worthless B.S. was intended to replace the real and rare talent that only one in a million people are able to do with paint and sculpting .
    Go to the Louvre museum in Paris to see examples of the one in a million real talent. And while this real talent flourished under the authoritarian regimes of church and state, open democracies came onto the scene in the late 19th early 20th century, and the elites, no longer able to control the artist, also could not control for who had this one in a million type talent, therefore the deliberate dumbing down of art to what a 5 year old or a simian could do began, thus allowing the elite art world, always hand in hand with ruling state officialdom, to control not only the propagandistic direction of art for the state, but more importantly to choose who the "art celebrities" would be without real talent getting in the way.
    In this way of promoting their own handpicked art stars, regardless of talent, the elites developed the capability through hype and promotion, to condition future generation to normalize this crap, and even to celebrate it, propagandizing their social agenda for the state, and now sadly, relegating those with real talent to the always ignored third and fourth tier levels (Norman Rockwell was a victim of this, only somewhat recognized after his death when no longer a living dynamic threat to the agenda).
    This programme reduced the threat of those with the real talent from influencing the public with their skills. REMEMBER: Art when it is at the highest levels in society is about power, money and control. It always has been, even when it was a matter of artist painting those mind-blowing murals on the ceilings of castles and churches, or Michelangelo sculpting tombs for the powerful.
    The difference is that real talent, because it CANNOT BE CONTROLLED FOR in an open democratic society – because artist born with real talent come in all shapes and colors, with varying beliefs, political ideologies, ethnicities, physical appearances, fat, short, ugly handicapped perhaps, etc., – must then be replaced, by those whose agenda is to control for power and money, with a system that CAN BE CONTROLLED FOR, a system where all the celebrity "artist" just happen to agree with the prevailing paradigm of the elite, where they just happen to overwhelmingly be of the same demographic of the elite – race, socio-economic class, gender, education, where they just happen to have the same views on social issues, religion and politics of the elite, and miraculously where the majority of them happen to be relatively good-looking, young and white, from Harvard MFA programs, perhaps in loving homosexual relationships raising children in a healthy environment….you see what I mean. Normalizing and conditioning in order to perpetuate power and money among a certain ruling group. It was that way when the art was really one in a million talent fabulous, and it is still that way when the art is absurdist garbage. The only variable was the changing forms of government and their relative ability to control the individual and society.

  9. Some people work in a sweatshop, some people cannot sell a single painting until they commit suicide and there's this.

  10. Very hard to watch,not because the sound was bad but the subject matter. conceptual , contemporary and modern art as is so called comes from the mind of deranged people, who call themselves artists

  12. 11:16 Creed is thinking to himself, "Shit, I'm talking to an actual academic here… Hope I don't get found out" – like a high schooler bsing his way through a history presentation done in the 10 minutes before class started.

  22. Conceptual Art is an indulgence into poor peoples' mental illness and carnality that steals the wealth from proud ignoramuses. Otherwise, it's a purposeful scam from tricksters emboldened by the CIA during the Cold War against the East and encouraging the debauchery and decline of the West.

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