Lorne Bridgman, who is currently being featured in The Lounge, was having some website issues earlier this week. That was a drag because:
A) You should look at more of his work
B) I really like his site. It’s easy- I don’t feel stupid when I go there and can’t get something to stop scrolling or can’t figure out how to get back to the home page. And I really really like seeing all the thumbnails. 95% of the time that an AB goes to your site, it isn’t her first time there. So, I likely know roughly what I’m looking for- seeing all the thumbnails at once lets me get to the image right away without scrolling through piles of work I don’t have time to see.
C) I wasn’t able to show you these two lovelies:
Ages ago, when I was planning this blog, I sketched out an entry about animals and photography. Rachel at Shoot beat me to the posting but I still think it’s worth expanding on the theme of these shots of Lorne’s long enough to show you a bit of Amy Stein’s series Domesticated:
I love the tension in this series. Intentional or not, she seems to be insinuating that we’ve encroached on their territory rather than what looks like their encroachment on ours. The photos are so bright and so lovely and yet there is a menacing specter to them- as if this is a parallel world where the animals have decided to reclaim, quietly but universally, their territory. I love how subtle this message is in her work.
Domesticated has received a lot of attention- winning her the Saatchi Gallery/Guardian Prize in 2006. A monograph of this series will be published in the fall of this year. And there’s lots more good work in her series’ Woman and Guns, Stranded and Halloween in Harlem. Amy is also a prolific blogger, check it out regularly here.
______________________
I got an email this morning, asking me to contribute to a new on-line project called What Isn’t Art. Ian Aleksander Adams describes his project:
I couldn’t find one place that collected the opinions and content (on the nature of art) in an easily searchable and clean manner… I decided the easiest way of presenting the information was as a blog that people could discuss and submit content to, both original essays as well as found information, quotes and excerpts. As a starting point, I’ve supplied the blog with ten backdated posts from various sources, and a few people from varied backgrounds (from pornstar to art buyer) are working on original content to be posted soon.
I’m honoured to be included along with the pornstar and will work on my submission but in the meantime, Ian’s most recent quotes come from Thomas Kinkade:
which is cheekily juxtaposed with Robert Rauschenburg:
Check out their ideas on What Art Is at What Isn’t Art. Kinkade makes a more coherent (read: accessible), angry and contentious point. He lashes out at Rauschenberg and the “New York critical establishment, stating:
To (the art world), the important art is not the art that’s real, that has meaning to real people, it’s the art that’s endorsed by about 40 curators, about 80 critics and about 200 gallery dealers. That little cult of about 1,000 people are the important ones, and you and I don’t matter.
So this is about the accessiblity or corresponding mystification of Art. Personally, I’ll still cling to my standards and put my money on Rauschenburg even though I’ll only ever be able to afford a Kinkade. I’m not sure Kinkade’s democratization of Art serves any real benefit, do you?
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Glad you picked up on that juxtaposition. When I saw Kinkade mentioning Rauschenburg, I figured it was only fair to give him a chance to respond (over a 40 year gap, but it feels like a response nonetheless.)
Well, it’s fair to say I don’t expect either of them to actually be dropping comments any time soon.
I have a friend who buys “art” to match her sofa. I’ve never once even thought about whether the art in my place goes with anything else in my place. I think that, for me, is the difference. Art isn’t the same as decoration.
Decoration (read: Kinkade) never challenges; art often (though not always) does.
For me, those definitions work as well when I’m looking at a photographer’s portfolio–if the work doesn’t invoke some questions, then to me it just isn’t there yet.
PS. I love that word. Juxtapose juxtapose juxtapose. Just sounds awesome every time.
The image with the goats on the tree is great. It was on rotation on the Corbis-Website.. great stuff!
Well, I’m not a fan of Kinkade’s, but I’m going to try a counter-argument anyway.
Leslie contends that “decoration never challenges, art often (though not always) does.” Entirely reasonable. Part of the question is whether it is the *challenge* that is important or whether it is the *reward*. We can certainly argue that the rewards earned by working through a challenge are more “valuable” in some way, but that doesn’t deny the value or rewards achieved easily. As measured by Kinkade’s obvious popularity, perhaps, the rewards of his accessible, often-allegorical (speaking of challenging subjects) work are rewarding to his quadrillions of buyers.
There seems to be some complaint about Kinkade that it lacks depth. Is it enough sometimes for something to be beautiful? If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then perhaps we can’t immediately condemn Kinkade’s romanticized view of beauty because we don’t like it. Was Bierstadt schlock or merely “romanticized”?
Maybe none of that holds together, but I think there’s probably a case to be made that doesn’t rely on Kinkade’s popularity as a cornerstone of its justification. In the end, Kinkade’s democratization may serve no purpose other than its own, especially since he seems to try to distance himself from the art world. In his mind, maybe that’s what he’s accomplishing: setting up something that IS apart from the art world he doesn’t seem to respect. Is that a good thing? My guess: anyone reading this blog probably doesn’t think it’s a good thing. Maybe we’re right.
Well, Heather, considering that what Kinkade sells aren’t originals in the sense the art world understands it, but prints of various kinds, I think you could afford a comparable Rauschenberg, if there were a print made of it. (His originals go for upwards of $100K on the secondary market – I think he doesn’t sell original oils himself anymore.)
Marshall raises a good point – what’s the effect of “apartness” from the art world, which is in Kinkade’s case also closeness to the commercial world. Looking at the Rauschenberg image above, it strikes me that it’s no more meaningful than the Kinkade unless I place it within an art-history context and “read” it for its place in that ongoing conversation. In a sense in the art-history context, Kinkade is more substantially oppositional, even as there’s nothing oppositional about him in a shopping-mall-and-church context. But in the way that he highlights that conflict, he has his place in art – in a way similar to self-consciously “kitsch” painter Odd Nerdrum, but Nerdrum remains within the art world, with his ambivalent ironies and anti-modernist approach as well as in where and how he shows.
Art-world artists have been making installation, alternative-space and non-object-based work that critiques the commodity economy and ivory-tower elements of the art gallery and museum for decades (or longer, if you think back to Duchamp). The noticeable thing about that critique is that it is always a partial rebellion, subject in the end to the gallery-world and academia-world set of measures of significance. Kinkade’s hostility to those measures, actually undermines them. There’d be too much sophistry in saying that Kinkade is therefore a topsy-turvy kind of radical – but he does “challenge,” no?
Pets and children are the most fun to shoot. I’ve been shooting animals at a different spot in their life cycle : http://www.thatcherkeats.com/fla.html . When the system collapses, these guys will do better than many of my closest friends who merely know how to shop for bargains in major metropolitan centers.