Loving an idea

[sarah]

I'm sitting here thinking about art and not knowing where to post this idea.
I'm thinking about art and getting griped about people who think cataloging titles is a sign of discriminating taste. Taste is subjective it can't be catalogued. Okay, so I love Henri Matisse. He is the original as far as eye candy. But here's the point, I couldn't name a single damned painting of his, not one. But I could tell you all about them because his use of color and line, his impressions of life, that's what stuck with me from the moment I walked into a museum and saw the big colossal blue woman, not the freaking title of the work. It gives me great pleasure to recount all the little details of his paintings. It gives me no pleasure to waste my brain space on the titles. I think I'll do a series of paintings that are just titles: in big black letters: "Girl with flower in her hair" I don't know if it's been done before, but think of the popularity -- all those cataloguers would have scads of material to work with.

[serule]

Categories give people a way of defining the picture in question without any interpretation of their own. Most people don't want to have their own interpretation of art work because they are worried that for some reason it may be wrong. They miss the fact that viewing a piece of art is foremost a very personal experience.

[sarah]

Exactly! And how can personal experience be wrong?

[mccutcheon]

that's a good idea. go with that. I've wanted to add an art gallery on the site for some time now, I even have a few artists lined up, but sloth isn't into it.

[<sarah>]

Well, I'm forced to rethink some things I once thought -- which is why I love art, and posting this here. I love art.
I saw this exhibit, it was H.C. Westermann at the Hirshhorn Museum of the Smithsonian, and you know what it was so fucking depressing it made a Picasso look like shiny happy finger paint.

When I walked by seeing the coffin for a crooked man out of the corner of my eye, I wanted to run over and see what it was all about. Then I saw his death ships and really wanted to know more. This is a little about him and the exhibit:

During WWII he enlisted in the Marine Corps and was a gunner on the USS Enterprise. He was once found the body of his friend among the other dead waiting to be buried at sea. He saw hundreds of sailors burned to death aboard the USS Franklin after a kamikaze attack. He then went on to serve in Korea where most of his platoon was killed. When he returned to the US McCarthyism was in full swing and he was disturbed by a government who would manipulate its citizens to embrace simplistic or destructive beliefs, he said he felt contempt for "all clubs, bureaucracies, gallery dealers, professors . . . and oh yeh, all politicians." He was a tough tattooed, cigar -smoking body builder who championed America but opposed war. He used very thick sturdy wood in a lot of his sculptures and said, "a man doesn't build something that's going to last a thousand years if he doesn't have hope or optimism."

He died in 1981 -- here I go again, in love with another dead artist. Anyway, he changed my mind about how I look at art.

[mccutcheon]

I could kill the Sloth so you can love him too.

[<sarah>]

okay, does the Sloth have hidden talents that I don't know about? I'm sure he does.

[Sloth]

No need to kill me I'll die soon enough

[mccutcheon]

Sarah are you saying the Sloth isn't a pure artist of the highest calibre?

[<sarah>]

what's a pure artist of the highest calibre?

i don't know!!

i do know i love mc and his soon to be 1000 posts, a not yet recognized art form, and he's alive proving i'm an inconstant woman.

[bicycleprince]

Sarah, you are of the highest calibre. Love reading these posts about how you look at art.