Tag: modernart

Contemporary / conceptual art can be difficult to understand. This can help you.

"Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A) in the Art Institute of Chicago

And by this, I mean this piece by Sherri Irvin: Contemporary art is made out of rules that mobilise us to act. It rightly states that…

Conceptual art often confounds. The key is to understand the rules of the artwork and the aesthetic experiences they yield.

She says conceptual art has three sets of rules:

  1. rules for display
  2. rules for conservation
  3. rules for participation

I agree. If you understand those rules, you can better understand works like the one above, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA) (1991) by Félix González-Torres. (One of my favorites.) Now you may not grasp everything the artist is trying to express, but you will get closer to it.

I highly recommend her essay. It should open up such work to you the next time you encounter it in a museum or elsewhere.

(Image linked to in the article and is courtesy of Wikipedia)

Four new links on Gerhart Richter

Here are four relatively new pieces on Richter, for fans of him (like me). The last one is fun especially.

  1. Gerhard Richter’s Slippery Mystique
  2. Gerhard Richter at the Met Breuer | Apollo Magazine
  3. Gerhard Richter gives Holocaust art to Berlin | Painting | The Guardian
  4. Saltz Challenges: Produce a Perfect Faux Gerhard Richter Painting, and I’ll Buy It – Slideshow – Vulture

(Photograph: Markus Schreiber/AP)

 

On John Baldessari

John Baldessari passed away recently.  He was one of my favourite artists from the post World War II era. Here’s two traditional write ups on him from the leading papers of our day:

  • John Baldessari on his giant emoji paintings: ‘I just wondered what they’d look like large’  The Guardian
  • John Baldessari, Who Gave Conceptual Art a Dose of Wit, Is Dead at 88 –The New York Times

They are fine. However, I found what helped me reappreciate him was this piece: A brief appreciation of John Baldessari by Austin Kleon. It’s a short piece, but I came away from it with a better appreciate of Baldessari than I did from the other two.

Finally there is this interview in Interview magazine where he speaks with the artist (and former student) David Salle. Well worth reading.