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art

the art renewal center.
Even more testing today. Carin's feeling a bit better, well enough to go to work. She got sent back home shortly thereafter, having left her breakfast there. An insensitive coworker told her she was probably pregnant, and had morning sickness. (She's not, and some cursory research tells me that morning sickness is primarily nausea. Carin is having dizziness, which is leading to nausea if it gets too intense.)

Normally, I think of any anti-Modernist movement as a uniformly bad thing, attached to the trappings of modernity as I am. On the other hand, Modernism as an art movement is something I never really got. It all seems like an endless rehash of a moderately clever joke Marcel Duchamp told once. I've recently become rather fascinated by the Art Renewal Center (Wikipedia article), which is all about art prior to modernity, which is, come to think of it, the sort of thing that art types go nuts over, but only if it was made more than a hundred and fifty years ago. It's as though photography put the kibosh on realistic art.

That's Dante and Virgil in Hell on the left, there. Now, I know almost nothing about art. I know strikes me as beautiful, and that's about it. I've tried to read some of the posted essays on the ARC site, but they come off as impenetrable--written in another language. But the art, to me, speaks for itself.

When I took a drawing class (I learned that I don't have the patience to draw well), we took a field trip down the hall to see some visiting art. It consisted of a set of vertical lines, evenly spaced. Well, we thought, at lest they're evenly spaced. It turned out that the artist had engineered some racks to which multiple paintbrushes could be attached. She gave a long and confusing talk about what her art meant, and on the way back, we asked our instructor if perhaps we could be bullshit artists instead of trying to draw that damned heap of cloth again. He replied that no, we couldn't do that until we reached graduate school.

This art--it's the sort of thing Concrete would have on his walls. Of course, because it's public domain, I can actually afford to hang it on my walls in poster form, if I so desire.

Of course, what none of the glowing exegeses on the work of William-Adolphe Bouguereau (the fellow responsible for the piece posted here) mention is the incredible unabashed sexism that drips from these works. (Darn you, "Women's Studies in the Arts"; now I can't un-notice it!) It's not so evident in this one here (no women), but in something like Hylas and the Nymphs or Nymphs and Satyr, consisting of dewy, idealized, eager-looking women throwing themselves harem-style at one guy, or perhaps just sitting around looking ornamentally accessible... it's absolutely ridiculous; it's like the eight hundred pound elephant in the room, that nobody writing about the artists notices. I can't be the only one, here.

Of course, I remember seeing that re-gendered version of The Turkish bath and all, but it amazes me that people can write about the art and not notice how painfully sexist it is. Real pretty, though. I do appreciate quality craftsmanship, and these guys are all about that.

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