DTC 477 - Hand-out article

Upon finishing the article, there were several topics still running through my mind.
Firstly, the idea of art galleries being exclusionary in more ways than one.
The way they exclude so much vital art, the way they are run largely by whites even today, and how they attract only a more luxurious clientele.

It does make me sad to think of that, as it is a museum's founding principle to display historical data accurately and completely. Art museums, as described in this article, are failing miserably at that, pretending that only certain kinds of art has been made and in certain places through-out history.

Understandably, these museums are catering to what is popular, familiar, and easy to digest. But if all history books were to be changed to only these categories of facts, history itself would be much more different. There would be no large wars, genocides, and famines.

It is important to display all art in a public forum not just because it seems more fair to artists to get there work out there and for the public to be able to decide its value rather than some stuffed shirt behind a desk, but because the art world (like all other aspects of life) needs to be gauged with opposites.

There is no hot without an idea of cold, large without small, love without hate or, my point, Good without Bad.

Without all art forms having a fair forum of which to be judged and presented on, we're getting a pre-selected distortion of the art world, being told what is good and accepting that the public's opinion has no credibility or value in a art setting.

Art is for the people, it is creativity and sharing on a basic level, regardless of whether it is comfortable or beautiful. It is a shame to know that the most uncreative of people are in charge of so much of how the art world is percieved.

I agree with the author, why not change that today.

-Thomas

DTC 477 Recreation

My recreation is above, below is the original;

Salvador Dali - Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man

Mine is called "The Rebirth of Man" and comments on how the surreal and nonsensical in the past if adjusted a little bit could be symbolic of something we may desire and achieve in the future (artificial life).

A Sculpture, by me?

I'm awful at sculptures, and I've had several attempts to confirm this.
I find them interesting, but have always lacked the ability to take an idea from the two demensional drawing to the real world.

As a part of a different classes' project, I created this sculpture.

It's an elephant, if you're curious. It isn't supposed to be realistic, in fact I meant to add several more segments to the legs before calling it complete, but as a bad sculptor I feared for the structural integrity of it should I add more (it isn't the most stable thing).

It is a photograph/sculptural representation of my fondness of Salvador Dali, which I found ironic because of DTC 477 I am doing a recreation of a Dali piece.

This one is a homage to this Dali piece:

As you can see my legs were not nearly long enough!

Just posting for the enjoyment of others, I thought that this was an interesting way to combine two mediums (photography and sculpture) to express an admiration of an artist.

The sculpture is made out of empty plastic bottles, if you're interested. The paint on the board is supposed to be splotchy.

-Thomas

DTC 477 Shanken 15-30

I'm always interested in unique ways of using equipment and mediums.

I think there's something special about the kinds of work that can emerge from distorting, destroying, and confusing digital media. 

There are many traditional works where people use their medium to realistically record a moment in time or a figment of their imagination. While I love that kind of work the most, there's definitely a unique and not entirely mutually exclusive set of people who are using mediums in a different way.

From the reading I'm thinking of page 22s paragraph on Mary Lucier's Dawn Burn and the recreation by Jochen Gerz in his Prometheus piece.

The idea of pushing a medium to its absolute limits to find out what happens is exciting to me, and honestly I believe that it is people who endeavor to create those kinds of works who really provide a blueprint to the expansion and refining of a medium for future inventors and thinkers.

Using the Dawn Burn example, we get an interesting work of art from the failure of a technology, but it also provides us with a goal for the video industry to perhaps one day create a lens capable of handling the sun in its entirety.

Works like this take a stroke of ingenuity, something I always admire. 

-Thomas 

DTC 477 Sharken 1-15

In this section I picked up mostly on the beginning statement about technology in the artistic culture.
The book says that electronic arts are slowly beginning to be pulled into the mainstream, but I still feel that such a movement is moving too slowly.

It would be fantastic if in ten years contemporary art galleries and museums were everywhere, but I feel as if it just won't happen.

I would love to live in a time where the electronic medium is widespread, but have the feeling that in most cases it's too far "out there" from what people expect art to be to be accepted in the masses.

Artists are in part to blame, stereotypes come to exist originally from a distorted truth. If artists create landscapes and portraits as realistically as possible a thousand times, people are going to expect it.

With the often slow-changing perceptions of society towards a creative movement and the stereotypes artists are forced under, I fear it will be past even my time before new medium artwork is truly accepted as mainstream.
(Though isn't part of being an artist going against the flow? In which case the entire desire of artists for contemporary artwork to be mainstream becomes flawed.)

In closing I want to say there is nothing wrong with the traditional mediums and techniques, I admire them. But I feel it places the artistic mind in such a narrow confine.
The artistic class has unlimited potential to change the way the world sees things, so it seems a shame to pretend that the world is the same as it has been for hundreds of years (with classic subjects such as scenery and portraits).

Hopefully I'm wrong and society proves to be more forward thinking than I anticipate. I'd like nothing more than to be a elderly guy walking through a museum and seeing some modern artwork with some real depth on the walls rather than another portrait of a cattle.

-Thomas