Thursday, November 5, 2009

Art for art's sake

I spent my morning marking exams in a coffee shop in the city yesterday. After I was done, I went for lunch in Chinatown before catching a tram out to Richmond to pick up the painting I had bought a couple of weeks ago.

Nate hadn't previously seen the painting and his reaction, upon viewing the canvas, was one of surprise and utter disbelief manifested, rather irritatingly, in a fit of uncontrollable laughter.

Nate (between bouts of laughter): "Jesus Christ. I could have painted that."
Me: "That's not the point. Look at the colours and the brush strokes."
Nate (still laughing): "It's shit"

By now, I felt like I was the National Gallery of Australia in the 1970s, just after it had bought Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles for a cool $1.3 million. Like Nathan, the Australian public just didn't get it. But look at the value of Blue poles now! It's worth hundreds of millions. Nathan found my over-the-top anology most amusing. So, feeling defeated, I crawled off to bed.

5 comments:

Evol Kween said...

Don't worry about it, Andrew doesn't understand anything that isn't a landscape or a portrait either.....

Victor said...

Like love, it's all in the beholder.

And in reference to Evol's comment I have to admit that I'm in Andrew's camp.

Victor said...

Addendum - all in the eyes of the beholder!

The Mutant said...

I'm one of those uncultured sods who likes paintings to look like the things they're supposed to.

My artistic experience doesn't extend much beyond colouring books, and I can now nearly keep inside the lines the whole way through.

Can I interest you in buying one of my works?

Adaptive Radiation said...

I did a bit of research and I think my painting is an example of 'gestural abstraction'.

According to Wikipedia:

"[It] is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied"

Btw...Nate was still laughing about the painting last night...grrr.