tom moody

Picking up a certain "I hate artists" zeitgeist surfing the web today. Encountered the following within a matter of hours:

1. The "artist or ape" quiz. Yours truly scored 100% but then I've been painting for years.
2. David Townes' trenchant question: "Why does modern art keep ending up in expensive galleries, then? Because popular curator wisdom suggests that art patrons are more interested in original experiences than in pleasurable ones." David, it sounds strange but "modern art" describes a period style. It's customary to refer to the current stuff as "contemporary art" (or postmodern if you feel adventurous).
3. There are two threads debating whether Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty should be protected from damage from oil drilling in the Great Salt Lake. The Paddy Johnson thread refers to the earthwork as art and the boingboing thread refers to it as "art." (To weigh in on the Smithson: it was underwater for 24 years so preserving it now feels like saving a ghost. Sol LeWitts get painted over and no one squawks.)

In view of this hostility to folks who are trying to bring a modicum of joy and challenge to our lives, please enjoy a little spittle back in your face, modern art hater, with some quotes from the Abstract Expressionist painter Adolph Gottlieb:

"Abstraction enrages (the average man) because it makes him feel inferior. And he is inferior."

and

"I'd like more status than I have now, but not at the cost of closing the gap between artist and public. I'd like to widen it!"

Those quotes came from Donald Kuspit, who, for the record, thought they were adolescent.

CPB (Camille Paloque-Berges), late of Nasty Nets and whose blog cpb.tumblr I like a lot, made a GIF of the "project space" that Cory Arcangel did or didn't do for Art Review dot com beta.

[What's this about? Art Review's web designer sent Arcangel some panels to show the layout of the website project space Arcangel was going to decorate for a one-off commission. Just some random stupid stuff the designer threw on there, including rolling polygons and a photo of an inflatable alien toy. Arcangel replied--"just use those panels as my piece, thanks" or similar words, so they did. A commenter at Art Review who'd apparently never heard of Duchamp and/or was put off by Art Review's hyperbole in describing Arcangel* criticized the easiness of that appropriation gesture and Arcangel's online army of crazed partisan dittoheads swung into action to defend the artist, just like they used to when I had comments.

CPB screen-captured one of the polygons and the alien to make a GIF.

*"digital appropriationist, pop-media protagonist, trash-technology koan-maker"]

Where We'll All Live in a Post-Cloverfield Attack (designs for NY disaster housing via Curbed)

Rejected design: a cloud city where dirigibles filled with neighborhood residents hover over the rubble of their former homes. The computer renderings are very attractive in a dystopian science fiction book cover kind of way.

PS Cloverfield inspired, by the way. Critic TedG voiced suspicion that the handheld camera was always aimed where it needed to be aimed to tell the story but I thought Abrams & Co pulled off basing an entire movie on the contents of one video camera. I would add it to a list of interesting one trick films that includes The Lady in the Lake and Memento. The party scene at the beginning came off especially well, as did the "rescue from the leaning building," but I'm tiring of digital bugs and gratuitous body invasion scenes. (See also The Mist.)