as an art student trying to figure out my place in the vast world of art, these videos have been inspiring in carving out my own perspective. it's a daily struggle and knowing I will learn and grow more keeps me going. works like these are so vital to keep the tired heart of the art world beating
The magic algorithm showed me Episode 1 and I have been faithfully accompanying the series ever since. Whatever comes next you will have my dedicated minutes of attention from the Northeast of Brazil 🤸
Excellent video, as someone who enjoys art, but knows very little about it, I really enjoy how concise and realistic you are when explaining these pieces. You present them for what they are, and critique them with more fact than opinion, which it seems most other art critics wont do. I hope you continue to produce more videos like this!
This channel is high quality content and honest btw. Thank you. It’s refreshing to hear someone point out the obvious crap that passes for art. And by a well-educated individual who expounds upon the subjects at hand. Keep it up.
IMHO an artist from my generation who successfully bridged form and content or aesthetics with conceptual was Felix Gonzalez-Torres. For me, his work synthesizes engaging forms and materials with concepts that are equally engaging because they are about love, death, pleasure, etc. There is real pleasure gained from wrestling with the marriage between the two. It also provides an antidote to the over-emphasis on a generalized "identity" of an artist with the more specific biographical experience of an artist. Head+heart+hand.
as my university course on essay writing said "the purpose of an essay is to move the reader, from one argument to the other". The teacher went on to say that it is like art which is also supposed to move the viewer. This has been my metric for art ever since. "Does this move me?" or as you put it "What do I feel?". About Rowland trying to impart some of the sense of the horror of slavery: A few years ago in little ol' Switzerland in the art and history museum of my hometown there was an exhibition about the Switzerland and the slave trade. The most powerful part of it for me was a chair. A simple victorian chair. Brown wood with comfy-looking green cushions. There was small panel next to it that simply said: "The stuffing is made from slaves' hair". This conveyed such a sense of the human body as property, a ressource. It was simple, to the point, and crucially, it didn't need a five page booklet to explain what you should feel about it. "The meaning is not quite clear, like a dream." "what does this work stands for?" do your dreams stand for anything? and yet, don't they stand for everything therefore? Anyway, ill end this comment here before waxing poetc. Great video as always.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments as always. I think the story of the victorian chair is an excellent counterpoint to the Rowland show. I definitely had the thought that he may be better suited to curated things for a history museum.
Something very telling/interesting that this was made/released right around Kissickgate -- touching on a very real shift in the way we're approaching art here. Also, 'contemporary art as illustration/infographic for artist press releases' is an amazing little analogy
Kissickgate lol. We are working on a new episode that's a direct response to Dean's article in Harper's, so stay tuned! His critique of identity art is valid, but his nostalgia for the early 2010s is strange and something we wanna unpack.
@@TheYearbookCommitteeNYC I think most of the nostalgia comes from him being in his 20s and was partying and less jaded with the art scene in that time.
These videos are a treat. An insightful and elegantly presented critique of some of the issues surrounding conceptual art, which I wholly buy in to. Your work deserves a wider audience.
Your like the pied piper leading short people to an early demise up a set of stairs not built for them. Please Remember the responsibility that comes with your power! Another top notch video, I'm a big fan.
Great episode. Admittedly, I was a bit underwhelmed upon my first real visit to Chinati in Marfa a few months ago to witness the Judds, Flavins, Andrés of the 20th century. I suppose much of the recoil I felt was at the particularly strong emphasis on controlling the space -- a direct observation of how Judd came about approaching his whole aesthetic in Marfa and the reverberations from there -- and my recoil and mistrust of it perhaps colored by the inability to do so myself. I see how an art work can be vaulted into cathartic revelation or lowered into disposable trash simply based on how it's presented and where. Controlling the space / experiential field around said piece is part of the art, too. But thinking on it more, I think Judd was taking a new angle on a long-held artistic tradition, established (at least in a European sense) by the installation of massive artistic works in gothic cathedrals and underwritten by the church to serve as permanent installations, installations where the artist could know exactly how and when and where and why their work would be experienced, in perpetuity. Not all of us get that privilege. So I suppose I've softened a bit on the "Minimalists" (I know, Judd and his friends would've hated being called that), for they weren't trying to shoehorn other composite elements into an aesthetic, revelatory experience as some artists are trying to do today, which is a respectable achievement. Still, I do wonder if the Millennial / Gen Z pendulum swing back into representation / "traditional" forms & content works are a signal that we as a culture are rejecting what once was or if we're are now so inundated with representational media by way of the internet age that we know not of any other way to express ourselves but by those means? Love it or hate it, Minimalism was fucking smart.
Excellent episode. Your questions and observations are spot on and deserve strong consideration. The DIA visit is an excursion into power art politics. Whereas Duchamp's Readymades are transformation of inherited manufactured goods into fine art, Rowland is an example of the institutional transformation of a woke artist's wheelbarrow of manufactured goods and self-serving virtues into stillborn craft. The art world powerbrokers are demonstrating who owns the room, who owns the ambient meme, and what the Dia's Pavlov's patrons will be conditioned to genuflect to. Rowland's intellectually vacant echo chamber is an example of performance art by proxy. The artist performs nothing. He instructs the patron to perform feeling guilt, remorse, and political anger about a Readymade plot of land not much different from any other plot of land. He tells you what to experience. Unsurprisingly, a [bad] mood is predictable. Contrast this with Yoko's content that merely tells you to go and experience. Or Serra's scale work that subliminally imposes experience on you. Conceptual Art and its red-headed step-child, Minimalism, are little more than intelligent fine craft whose artistic intent volume knob is cranked up to eleven with the full expectation that its not for everyone. It should be remembered that [Western] aesthetics are a manufactured constraint born of Judeo-Christian, Greek, and Pagan influences. The vernacular of beauty is tightly coupled to ideal forms, spiritual purity, and the inevitable generational rejection of all of it. Beauty is an elephant in a larger space. Some of that space is being suffocated by legitimate and illegitimate fiscal agents. For aspiring fine artists, the art market ghouls at DIA are far scarier than the shadowy confines of a basement tunnel in Queens.
Nice video. It’s like trying to find the sweet spot between some artistic essence and ideological capture, and what’s in play pulling to either extreme. 🤙🏻Yee haw!
I sincerely hope you keep making this stuff for a long time, this is fabulous. By the way, I am 99% sure Mr. Madsen is some Danish guy and not some German guy
re: urbano's work: feels like hauntology, baby! which sometimes feels owned by gen x but which millennials have as much of a cultural obsession with, i think, and for good reasons. excellent video as always.
I think it’s important that you’re helping people demystify art a bit. I love Dia! It’s got that whole room of mounds of perfectly shaped earth and wood - a pile of forbidden snacks, if you ask me
I won’t go to an art institution to learn about black enslavement, I’ll go to a the myriad of other institutions that cover the topic in a more straight forward way that doesn’t try to dress up a tragic part of history for the sake of it.
@@TheYearbookCommitteeNYCThank you! ...And, I really appreciate that you've addressed the sort of existential crisis of the Millennial's (& Z's) role (not the ideal term, but will have to do) in art. ...A crisis symptomatic of larger and broader issues, surely. When you mentioned a trend of millennial artists turning towards traditional mediums and craft, honestly, I'm kind of excited. Excited for something that's reactionary? Do I even know myself, anymore?
“A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience.” Does this Rothko quote suggest a certain safety zone, or even a bit of cultural insulation for painting and art more generally? (I am referencing both your episodes #2 and #5 here, for my questions here) This Rothko quote, makes me wonder where he and his paintings fit into the eloquent and ongoing “conversation” your films elicit. An aesthetic experience. Moreover, the freedom to have an aesthetic experience! Are these ultimately spiritual dilemmas? At least, first spiritual, then political and then cultural. And, if Rothko was on the right track, then is the emotional-even spiritual-response, he was seeking for the viewers of his paintings, timeless? Ultimately free of the constraints of historical, political and even cultural contextualization. I truly don’t know; but I relish your films for helping me form promising questions.
Thanks, Daniel. I think the Rothko quote is getting at the same thing I'm describing during Episode 5 when I'm discussing Judd and the minimalists. Both Rothko and the minimalists felt their works of art were valid on their own terms without having to make reference to anything outside of themselves (i.e. It's not a picture of an experience). The minimalists, however, were concerned that painting was so mired in the history of painting that it was impossible for the painting to embody an experience. Rather it was doomed to remain the picture of an experience (to use Rothko's formulation). The relationship between the colors and the forms on the canvas, no matter how abstract, still suggested the illusion of pictorial depth. So, the painting, however much it tries to escape becoming a picture, always appears to the viewer as a window into an illusionistic space and not as an object in its own right. Regarding the spiritual/political dilemma, the minimalists are bumping up against the edge of art's possibilities. Modern art ultimately shows us that we are capable of meaning-making, a power that in pre-modern civilizations rested only in the hands of Gods. For modern art, Rothko wants to say that a painting in the same way that nature is valid. The only was to truly make good on the discoveries of Rothko and of modern art more generally is to transform society in a way such that the desires and the beauty which is expressed through art can be expressed at the level of the total design of the world.
Questions: Is the content of Richard Serra's sculpture not the physicality of his material (sculpture is the form), and isn't the form of Yoko Onos' Grapefruit not the written poetry of her instructions (instructions are the content)?
As someone whos worked at a museum with a Rowland show and had the more or less thankless job of trying to entice museum-goers to read one of his 14 page essays while they look confusedly at a pile of bikes, I feel the critique of Rowland was a little weak but overall I enjoyed the presentation.
the atrocity is that they buried souls in unmarked graves back then ..... so all them souls are not located by markings ..... SACRED GROUND its separates ignorance from the feeling. Its funny how you have the opinion yet you want it explained to you.....
Interesting video for sure. A little confused at around 13:10 when you talk about art with no reference to anything outside of itself. i don't really see how this is possible as art is essentially always attached to culture, which is of course on going. let me know if i got something wrong there, genuinely curious
I think it makes sense if you compare the kind of sculpture that the minimalists were doing to a classic piece of sculpture like Rodin's "The Thinker." Rodin's sculpture is operating at two different registers. There is the material of the bronze, and then there is the representation of the human figure. In order for the Thinker to work as art it has to make reference to something outside of itself. In this case the human figure. The entire tradition of western art from the Renaissance up until the 20th century had been representational in that way. The minimalists tried to break with that tradition. They settled on boring cubes and similar structures because those kinds of structures lend themselves least to being mistaken as a representation of anything. Even a totally abstract work that is still gestural in some way might lend itself to looking like a face or a bird like in Bracusi's work or in the work of Noguchi. I have a separate video which going into this problem in a bit more detail: th-cam.com/video/M6ClbD53pBI/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=TheYearbookCommittee
While agreeing with you about Rowland's installation, the sexy puppet on the floor playing poker was pretty kitch, as were some of the paintings you flashed up. If it's mood, then it's manga mood, ho-hum.
Yikes. The sloppy logic of this anti-Rowland screed is too much. It’s convenient that you never stop to consider that contemplating an inaccessible monument to racial violence might, for some viewers, provoke the precious “feelings” that you identity as the core of aesthetic experience. This take also ignores the fact that ideas can generate pleasure in the mind just as visual form does. Obviously you feel only contempt in relation to Cameron’s work and its refusal to conform to your expectations of art, and that’s your right to feel that way. But the conservatism and lack of imagination in this attempt to delegitimize his practice is ridiculous. Can your mind accommodate the possibility that for some people this gesture might feel very powerful and even emotionally charged ? It might even conjure up potent images of lives and land. Yes it requires you to read text and then use your imagination, but so does all of written culture. What is to be gained by policing the boundaries of art in this way ? I get that the reactionary edge-lord in a trench coat is an archetype that will play well to a certain demographic - but this reads as self parody at times- and I don’t think that’s what you’re after. I make paintings and generally enjoy work that has the type of visual pleasure you seem to want to champion, but the laziness and narrow mindedness of this takedown makes me want to defend the validity of Cameron’s approach. Perhaps your obvious discomfort with Cameron's subject matter and approach is evidence of his work's relevance? The one thing that this video documents well is the tendency to use people of color as scapegoats for a certain type of discontent, frustration, and misplaced anger.
i dont fully agree with the idea of donald judd interested in feeling...i guess that is a 21 century point of view of his work but we cant denie, following michael friedS "Art and objetuality", the interest of minimalist in space and the concept of presentness...and actually conceptual art was a form of subversion, to save art from commercial, sentimental attachment and "mystic truths". Actually Donald Judd produced a lot of writings to explain his intentions and obviously the transgressive gesture was real in the 60´s but not today....
wonderful episode. polemics disguised as 'art' are very trite. if you have a polemical stance, at least have the chutzpah to take it all the way and make me really feel the anger (or whatever) you're feeling as an artist.
This feels like watching kid show where the main character keeps yapping about how useless school is and how knowledge that he needs he already has. I hope that im not the only one who understands why there are explanation sheets to pieces of art that are conceptual and not forced upon observer
Good video. Great to see someone doing this work. Thought provoking. But "feeling"? -- pretty vague. Yes, the extreme versions of conceptualism remove the body, and art is very much the body telling what it has observed. If that's pretty much the point of making art, to then so reduce the body's response to art is definitely problematic. But an idea too can be beautiful, and isn't communicating beauty the point? On top of that, conceptualism has been pretty aggressively "embodied" since the 1980s; the examples you give are '60s/'70s. Rowland's work is a bad work, but for quite other reasons than "conceptualism." Some of these you adeptly make clear.
Feeling doesn't have merely to do with the body. It's about emotion. And giving form to those emotions. Making them objective i.e. turning them into an object. Science for example can try to write and equation which explains the feeling of sadness. By poetry, music and painting do a much better job.
@@TheYearbookCommitteeNYC Language fails us here (as is only appropriate!). But we all have different approaches to (and uses for) art. You may be more in touch with your "feelings" than I am with mine. For instance, no work of visual art has ever brought a tear to my eye, while for many I think it can and does. I am not a hardened case -- music has moved me to tears on countless occasions; objects, though, including paintings, not. (For me, art-making is a tool for controlled self-evolution.) There is at present, yes, a valid search to find fresh purpose for art (provoked in part by panic over AI), and this search may involve a diminished role for the "conceptual." All well and good. Thing is, "conceptualism" has entered the water supply of the human population; it is nothing more nor less than the ability to re-package reality with our minds, and everybody, not just specialists called "artists," can do it at will. The fruits of this capacity are everywhere in the man-made landscape. "Conceptualism," which started (arguably) in the art context, is the most successful art invention since surrealism, because both revealed something fundamental about human capacities -- what it means to be human. So, like s-ism, c-ism has quite transcended art; the genie is out of the bottle. That said, you make a ton of good points, and the search you articulate is clearly felt to be a necessary one by young artists on the ground, so have at it, and bravo! And please keep doing these no-bullshit essays -- they are clearly working!
That's a good question. We made a feature length documentary that tackles precisely that question. But a big part of it has to do with their misapprehension of the history of modernism. The film will be released sometime next year. But in many ways this channel is devoted to answer that question as well, so we'll be doing some more videos soon which get at that problem from different angles.
@@TheYearbookCommitteeNYC I don't think it's true that the appreciation of conceptual art is so purely intellectual. Unfortunately I can't think of any world famous examples, but in Brazil, where I live, there are a couple of exhibits in the contemporary art museum in Inhotim that I think are at least somewhat conceptual and provoke a reaction that's not purely intellectual, one by William Kentridge and the other by Victor Grippo.
'What you see is what you see'. 'It is that which you see before you- begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error.' - Huang Po, 9th Century CE Many thanks. Love this vid. Imagine going to hear Mozart and being met with only a wall text.
FINALLY! Somebody who's actually critical not just a tour guide to the gallery. Love your videos and can't really get enough of them!
Thanks for watching! Feel free to show your support on patreon :)
This is one of my favorite new series on TH-cam. You’re 5 for 5 with these episodes 🙏🏼
this is my favourite of your videos so far. great work!
Thank you!
as an art student trying to figure out my place in the vast world of art, these videos have been inspiring in carving out my own perspective. it's a daily struggle and knowing I will learn and grow more keeps me going. works like these are so vital to keep the tired heart of the art world beating
I agree with all, except "tired heart" adjective
The magic algorithm showed me Episode 1 and I have been faithfully accompanying the series ever since. Whatever comes next you will have my dedicated minutes of attention from the Northeast of Brazil 🤸
no wayyy new episode!!! this stuff is like streaming service level quality tbh. i hope one day yall can get a deal with some!!
Thanks! I hope so too!
Excellent video, as someone who enjoys art, but knows very little about it, I really enjoy how concise and realistic you are when explaining these pieces. You present them for what they are, and critique them with more fact than opinion, which it seems most other art critics wont do. I hope you continue to produce more videos like this!
This channel is high quality content and honest btw. Thank you. It’s refreshing to hear someone point out the obvious crap that passes for art. And by a well-educated individual who expounds upon the subjects at hand. Keep it up.
Thank you!
IMHO an artist from my generation who successfully bridged form and content or aesthetics with conceptual was Felix Gonzalez-Torres. For me, his work synthesizes engaging forms and materials with concepts that are equally engaging because they are about love, death, pleasure, etc. There is real pleasure gained from wrestling with the marriage between the two. It also provides an antidote to the over-emphasis on a generalized "identity" of an artist with the more specific biographical experience of an artist. Head+heart+hand.
I freaking love you man!! I like the way you see the world. Great job 👏 ❤
as my university course on essay writing said "the purpose of an essay is to move the reader, from one argument to the other". The teacher went on to say that it is like art which is also supposed to move the viewer. This has been my metric for art ever since. "Does this move me?" or as you put it "What do I feel?".
About Rowland trying to impart some of the sense of the horror of slavery: A few years ago in little ol' Switzerland in the art and history museum of my hometown there was an exhibition about the Switzerland and the slave trade. The most powerful part of it for me was a chair. A simple victorian chair. Brown wood with comfy-looking green cushions. There was small panel next to it that simply said: "The stuffing is made from slaves' hair". This conveyed such a sense of the human body as property, a ressource. It was simple, to the point, and crucially, it didn't need a five page booklet to explain what you should feel about it.
"The meaning is not quite clear, like a dream." "what does this work stands for?" do your dreams stand for anything? and yet, don't they stand for everything therefore? Anyway, ill end this comment here before waxing poetc. Great video as always.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments as always. I think the story of the victorian chair is an excellent counterpoint to the Rowland show. I definitely had the thought that he may be better suited to curated things for a history museum.
bless the algorithm for showing me this
Let us all pray to our AI overlords
Halarious 😅
This was my favorite episode yet. Keep them coming you are really saying what so many are thinking and discussing off camera.
I am loving this series! Telling all my friends about it. Great work!
Awesome, thank you! Please share
Something very telling/interesting that this was made/released right around Kissickgate -- touching on a very real shift in the way we're approaching art here.
Also, 'contemporary art as illustration/infographic for artist press releases' is an amazing little analogy
Kissickgate lol. We are working on a new episode that's a direct response to Dean's article in Harper's, so stay tuned! His critique of identity art is valid, but his nostalgia for the early 2010s is strange and something we wanna unpack.
@@TheYearbookCommitteeNYC
I think most of the nostalgia comes from him being in his 20s and was partying and less jaded with the art scene in that time.
These videos are a treat. An insightful and elegantly presented critique of some of the issues surrounding conceptual art, which I wholly buy in to. Your work deserves a wider audience.
Why?
Your like the pied piper leading short people to an early demise up a set of stairs not built for them. Please Remember the responsibility that comes with your power! Another top notch video, I'm a big fan.
Lol yeah those steps were a bit treacherous!
i absolutely love every single one of your episodes. please keep making these.
Thank you! More to come
Great episode. Admittedly, I was a bit underwhelmed upon my first real visit to Chinati in Marfa a few months ago to witness the Judds, Flavins, Andrés of the 20th century. I suppose much of the recoil I felt was at the particularly strong emphasis on controlling the space -- a direct observation of how Judd came about approaching his whole aesthetic in Marfa and the reverberations from there -- and my recoil and mistrust of it perhaps colored by the inability to do so myself. I see how an art work can be vaulted into cathartic revelation or lowered into disposable trash simply based on how it's presented and where. Controlling the space / experiential field around said piece is part of the art, too. But thinking on it more, I think Judd was taking a new angle on a long-held artistic tradition, established (at least in a European sense) by the installation of massive artistic works in gothic cathedrals and underwritten by the church to serve as permanent installations, installations where the artist could know exactly how and when and where and why their work would be experienced, in perpetuity. Not all of us get that privilege. So I suppose I've softened a bit on the "Minimalists" (I know, Judd and his friends would've hated being called that), for they weren't trying to shoehorn other composite elements into an aesthetic, revelatory experience as some artists are trying to do today, which is a respectable achievement.
Still, I do wonder if the Millennial / Gen Z pendulum swing back into representation / "traditional" forms & content works are a signal that we as a culture are rejecting what once was or if we're are now so inundated with representational media by way of the internet age that we know not of any other way to express ourselves but by those means?
Love it or hate it, Minimalism was fucking smart.
I dont know anything avout the art world, but this is such an engaging and sharp presentation. I love this series!
Excellent episode. Your questions and observations are spot on and deserve strong consideration.
The DIA visit is an excursion into power art politics. Whereas Duchamp's Readymades are transformation of inherited manufactured goods into fine art, Rowland is an example of the institutional transformation of a woke artist's wheelbarrow of manufactured goods and self-serving virtues into stillborn craft. The art world powerbrokers are demonstrating who owns the room, who owns the ambient meme, and what the Dia's Pavlov's patrons will be conditioned to genuflect to.
Rowland's intellectually vacant echo chamber is an example of performance art by proxy. The artist performs nothing. He instructs the patron to perform feeling guilt, remorse, and political anger about a Readymade plot of land not much different from any other plot of land. He tells you what to experience. Unsurprisingly, a [bad] mood is predictable.
Contrast this with Yoko's content that merely tells you to go and experience. Or Serra's scale work that subliminally imposes experience on you. Conceptual Art and its red-headed step-child, Minimalism, are little more than intelligent fine craft whose artistic intent volume knob is cranked up to eleven with the full expectation that its not for everyone.
It should be remembered that [Western] aesthetics are a manufactured constraint born of Judeo-Christian, Greek, and Pagan influences. The vernacular of beauty is tightly coupled to ideal forms, spiritual purity, and the inevitable generational rejection of all of it. Beauty is an elephant in a larger space. Some of that space is being suffocated by legitimate and illegitimate fiscal agents. For aspiring fine artists, the art market ghouls at DIA are far scarier than the shadowy confines of a basement tunnel in Queens.
I fucking love this series
Love your videos! never stop! So important for the culture!
Thank you! More to come
Really appreciate these!
Love these videos especially when you speak on people posturing as radical.
Nice video. It’s like trying to find the sweet spot between some artistic essence and ideological capture, and what’s in play pulling to either extreme. 🤙🏻Yee haw!
Great content, as always.
Thank you!
I sincerely hope you keep making this stuff for a long time, this is fabulous. By the way, I am 99% sure Mr. Madsen is some Danish guy and not some German guy
You are correct about Madsen. He lives in Berlin though!
re: urbano's work: feels like hauntology, baby! which sometimes feels owned by gen x but which millennials have as much of a cultural obsession with, i think, and for good reasons. excellent video as always.
I think it’s important that you’re helping people demystify art a bit. I love Dia! It’s got that whole room of mounds of perfectly shaped earth and wood - a pile of forbidden snacks, if you ask me
Thanks! This was insightful.
Its kinda funny that fact has become so ambiguous that it becomes a form of art.
I won’t go to an art institution to learn about black enslavement, I’ll go to a the myriad of other institutions that cover the topic in a more straight forward way that doesn’t try to dress up a tragic part of history for the sake of it.
Yes I was also thinking that what Rowland is trying to do would be much more effective in a history museum than in an art museum.
Great stuff as usual, best art channel on TH-cam.
The museum visit is like from the movie Square. Thank you! Love the critique.
Good vid. Nice punchy ending.
keep em comin!!!!!!!!!!
😙😙
Brilliant!
Artist's name @ minute 20:47?
...And, great commentary.
Emma Stern
@@TheYearbookCommitteeNYCThank you! ...And, I really appreciate that you've addressed the sort of existential crisis of the Millennial's (& Z's) role (not the ideal term, but will have to do) in art. ...A crisis symptomatic of larger and broader issues, surely.
When you mentioned a trend of millennial artists turning towards traditional mediums and craft, honestly, I'm kind of excited. Excited for something that's reactionary? Do I even know myself, anymore?
I like this mood
“What is [the value] of art?”
art = it’s value
🤔
“A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience.”
Does this Rothko quote suggest a certain safety zone, or even a bit of cultural insulation for painting and art more generally? (I am referencing both your episodes #2 and #5 here, for my questions here) This Rothko quote, makes me wonder where he and his paintings fit into the eloquent and ongoing “conversation” your films elicit.
An aesthetic experience. Moreover, the freedom to have an aesthetic experience! Are these ultimately spiritual dilemmas? At least, first spiritual, then political and then cultural. And, if Rothko was on the right track, then is the emotional-even spiritual-response, he was seeking for the viewers of his paintings, timeless? Ultimately free of the constraints of historical, political and even cultural contextualization. I truly don’t know; but I relish your films for helping me form promising questions.
Thanks, Daniel. I think the Rothko quote is getting at the same thing I'm describing during Episode 5 when I'm discussing Judd and the minimalists. Both Rothko and the minimalists felt their works of art were valid on their own terms without having to make reference to anything outside of themselves (i.e. It's not a picture of an experience). The minimalists, however, were concerned that painting was so mired in the history of painting that it was impossible for the painting to embody an experience. Rather it was doomed to remain the picture of an experience (to use Rothko's formulation). The relationship between the colors and the forms on the canvas, no matter how abstract, still suggested the illusion of pictorial depth. So, the painting, however much it tries to escape becoming a picture, always appears to the viewer as a window into an illusionistic space and not as an object in its own right.
Regarding the spiritual/political dilemma, the minimalists are bumping up against the edge of art's possibilities. Modern art ultimately shows us that we are capable of meaning-making, a power that in pre-modern civilizations rested only in the hands of Gods. For modern art, Rothko wants to say that a painting in the same way that nature is valid. The only was to truly make good on the discoveries of Rothko and of modern art more generally is to transform society in a way such that the desires and the beauty which is expressed through art can be expressed at the level of the total design of the world.
Irate Gamer vibes
Questions: Is the content of Richard Serra's sculpture not the physicality of his material (sculpture is the form), and isn't the form of Yoko Onos' Grapefruit not the written poetry of her instructions (instructions are the content)?
subbed, enjoyed the watch:)
Thank you!
When he was explaining high modernism I felt like his bored girlfriend
you deserve a tax break for your community service to the world sir, thank you
As someone whos worked at a museum with a Rowland show and had the more or less thankless job of trying to entice museum-goers to read one of his 14 page essays while they look confusedly at a pile of bikes, I feel the critique of Rowland was a little weak but overall I enjoyed the presentation.
That does sound thankless indeed! I would be curious to hear more of your thoughts. What did you find lacking in the critique of Rowland?
Wow. I needed to see this. A bit creepy. A bit like AI is God.
the atrocity is that they buried souls in unmarked graves back then ..... so all them souls are not located by markings ..... SACRED GROUND its separates ignorance from the feeling. Its funny how you have the opinion yet you want it explained to you.....
15 ORIENT GALLERY MENTIONED
Interesting video for sure. A little confused at around 13:10 when you talk about art with no reference to anything outside of itself. i don't really see how this is possible as art is essentially always attached to culture, which is of course on going. let me know if i got something wrong there, genuinely curious
I think it makes sense if you compare the kind of sculpture that the minimalists were doing to a classic piece of sculpture like Rodin's "The Thinker." Rodin's sculpture is operating at two different registers. There is the material of the bronze, and then there is the representation of the human figure. In order for the Thinker to work as art it has to make reference to something outside of itself. In this case the human figure. The entire tradition of western art from the Renaissance up until the 20th century had been representational in that way. The minimalists tried to break with that tradition. They settled on boring cubes and similar structures because those kinds of structures lend themselves least to being mistaken as a representation of anything. Even a totally abstract work that is still gestural in some way might lend itself to looking like a face or a bird like in Bracusi's work or in the work of Noguchi.
I have a separate video which going into this problem in a bit more detail: th-cam.com/video/M6ClbD53pBI/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=TheYearbookCommittee
While agreeing with you about Rowland's installation, the sexy puppet on the floor playing poker was pretty kitch, as were some of the paintings you flashed up. If it's mood, then it's manga mood, ho-hum.
Yikes. The sloppy logic of this anti-Rowland screed is too much. It’s convenient that you never stop to consider that contemplating an inaccessible monument to racial violence might, for some viewers, provoke the precious “feelings” that you identity as the core of aesthetic experience. This take also ignores the fact that ideas can generate pleasure in the mind just as visual form does. Obviously you feel only contempt in relation to Cameron’s work and its refusal to conform to your expectations of art, and that’s your right to feel that way. But the conservatism and lack of imagination in this attempt to delegitimize his practice is ridiculous. Can your mind accommodate the possibility that for some people this gesture might feel very powerful and even emotionally charged ? It might even conjure up potent images of lives and land. Yes it requires you to read text and then use your imagination, but so does all of written culture. What is to be gained by policing the boundaries of art in this way ? I get that the reactionary edge-lord in a trench coat is an archetype that will play well to a certain demographic - but this reads as self parody at times- and I don’t think that’s what you’re after. I make paintings and generally enjoy work that has the type of visual pleasure you seem to want to champion, but the laziness and narrow mindedness of this takedown makes me want to defend the validity of Cameron’s approach. Perhaps your obvious discomfort with Cameron's subject matter and approach is evidence of his work's relevance? The one thing that this video documents well is the tendency to use people of color as scapegoats for a certain type of discontent, frustration, and misplaced anger.
i dont fully agree with the idea of donald judd interested in feeling...i guess that is a 21 century point of view of his work but we cant denie, following michael friedS "Art and objetuality", the interest of minimalist in space and the concept of presentness...and actually conceptual art was a form of subversion, to save art from commercial, sentimental attachment and "mystic truths". Actually Donald Judd produced a lot of writings to explain his intentions and obviously the transgressive gesture was real in the 60´s but not today....
wonderful episode. polemics disguised as 'art' are very trite. if you have a polemical stance, at least have the chutzpah to take it all the way and make me really feel the anger (or whatever) you're feeling as an artist.
Yes at least make some good art!
This feels like watching kid show where the main character keeps yapping about how useless school is and how knowledge that he needs he already has. I hope that im not the only one who understands why there are explanation sheets to pieces of art that are conceptual and not forced upon observer
goated
Good video. Great to see someone doing this work. Thought provoking. But "feeling"? -- pretty vague. Yes, the extreme versions of conceptualism remove the body, and art is very much the body telling what it has observed. If that's pretty much the point of making art, to then so reduce the body's response to art is definitely problematic. But an idea too can be beautiful, and isn't communicating beauty the point? On top of that, conceptualism has been pretty aggressively "embodied" since the 1980s; the examples you give are '60s/'70s. Rowland's work is a bad work, but for quite other reasons than "conceptualism." Some of these you adeptly make clear.
Feeling doesn't have merely to do with the body. It's about emotion. And giving form to those emotions. Making them objective i.e. turning them into an object. Science for example can try to write and equation which explains the feeling of sadness. By poetry, music and painting do a much better job.
@@TheYearbookCommitteeNYC Language fails us here (as is only appropriate!). But we all have different approaches to (and uses for) art. You may be more in touch with your "feelings" than I am with mine. For instance, no work of visual art has ever brought a tear to my eye, while for many I think it can and does. I am not a hardened case -- music has moved me to tears on countless occasions; objects, though, including paintings, not. (For me, art-making is a tool for controlled self-evolution.) There is at present, yes, a valid search to find fresh purpose for art (provoked in part by panic over AI), and this search may involve a diminished role for the "conceptual." All well and good. Thing is, "conceptualism" has entered the water supply of the human population; it is nothing more nor less than the ability to re-package reality with our minds, and everybody, not just specialists called "artists," can do it at will. The fruits of this capacity are everywhere in the man-made landscape. "Conceptualism," which started (arguably) in the art context, is the most successful art invention since surrealism, because both revealed something fundamental about human capacities -- what it means to be human. So, like s-ism, c-ism has quite transcended art; the genie is out of the bottle. That said, you make a ton of good points, and the search you articulate is clearly felt to be a necessary one by young artists on the ground, so have at it, and bravo! And please keep doing these no-bullshit essays -- they are clearly working!
yes art is suppose to be like jokes in the same way that your trench coat is supposed to fit three small children standing on each other's shoulders
i have been growing frustrated with the abundance of "meaningful" but bad art because of the same kinds of reasons you detail. great video
Yeah it's bleak out there. Thanks for watching!
Why are Millennials not able to produce much significant art?
That's a good question. We made a feature length documentary that tackles precisely that question. But a big part of it has to do with their misapprehension of the history of modernism. The film will be released sometime next year. But in many ways this channel is devoted to answer that question as well, so we'll be doing some more videos soon which get at that problem from different angles.
I don't care for conceptual art but I think you're oversimplifying.
What do you think we've missed?
@@TheYearbookCommitteeNYC I don't think it's true that the appreciation of conceptual art is so purely intellectual. Unfortunately I can't think of any world famous examples, but in Brazil, where I live, there are a couple of exhibits in the contemporary art museum in Inhotim that I think are at least somewhat conceptual and provoke a reaction that's not purely intellectual, one by William Kentridge and the other by Victor Grippo.
you kinda look like a young Werner Herzog
I think it's the stache lol
Or Harold Rosenberg
'What you see is what you see'.
'It is that which you see before you- begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error.' - Huang Po, 9th Century CE
Many thanks. Love this vid. Imagine going to hear Mozart and being met with only a wall text.