I would much rather ask my question instead of continuing to talk stupid but I don't know how. The part about literalness and entertainment seems to come close to whatever it is.
-----Original Message----- From: William Conger <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tue, Jan 18, 2011 1:36 pm Subject: Re: representation and its sgnification OK, so we are supposed to guess your question. Wouldn't it be better if you just asked it yourself? But there's another view regarding literalness in today's art. If you wonder why literal representations are being devalued , generally, in the artworld, I suspect that's more or less true. We live in an age where previously intellectual pursuits into the broad nature of reality and our experience of it beyond the borders of pure science have been conflated with the hugely expanded domain of entertainment and escapism. Anything connected to entertainment is expected to enlarge our fantasy experience and enable us to escape from the harsher and more demanding real world, the real as it is. If you make a painting of something in the real world, like Walden Pond, as if to document it as it is, then you are not joining the rush to put art within the domain of entertainment -- escapism or poetic or aesthetic enjoyment. Forgive my hint of cynicism here for I don't fully reject the validity of our new age of art entertainment. There is something good about a sober trivializing of intellectual activity. It's a way of clearing heads of mistaking our ambitions for our achievements, whether in the studio, at Walden Pond, or in the laboratory. Nevertheless, the preponderance of trivializing entertainment oriented artwork -- and its spread into the formerly pious realms of "serious" art and science, can valorize the truly vulgar and mean conditions of society and overwhelm aspirations for the future. If you care about the future you must be somewhat skeptical, even cynical, of the present. The ironic thing is that art advances toward its future by attacking to the rear. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tue, January 18, 2011 11:25:15 AM Subject: Re: representation and its sgnification Your essential question, "Why does abstract or conceptual art sell for more than representational art? This is not, I am quite sure, the essential question. Neither prices nor titles nor the subjects of the work is part of the question, -----Original Message----- From: William Conger <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tue, Jan 18, 2011 11:09 am Subject: Re: representation and its sgnification Your essential question, "Why does abstract or conceptual art sell for more than representational art?" is really a complaint -- stemming from unnamed causes -- about some aspect of the art world where all sorts of conditions affect the valuing of particular artworks. I know several representational artists (variants of the realist genre) whose work sells for 6 figures, well above the amounts regularly attained by equally well-known abstract artists. And vice-versa. The number one reason for artwork prices is the artist's reputation within a fairly narrow set of artists working in the same general category: realist, abstract, conceptual, etc., up to maybe a dozen different genres and sub-genres. For example, there is still a high-end market for landscape painting even though it's not much discussed in the art press. The same goes for portraiture, or animal painting, or commemorative sculpture, both past and present. To just randomly pick "representational" art without more specific identity (indicating whose work, when, how does it compare with other work by the same artist, peers, etc.) and ask why it's less valued than some other randomly picked or vaguely referenced "abstract" work is not really a question but a generalized and rather empty complaint. One could easily pick any of tens of thousands of abstract works and say they are less valued than some representational works, and then one could easily replace the order of those genres with any other genres in any position and draw the same conclusion. Bad representational art is less valued than good abstract art and an artist's reputation -- track record of shows, collections, sales, etc. is the quickest way to generalize about the relative likelihood of a given work being "bad" or not. It is not a guarantee but hopeful, informed opinion, albeit frequently short-lived. Since I've been reading some Longinus lately, let me paraphrase one of his better observations: Good fortune is one of the essentials of genius. So, lucky and extraordinarily good artists of whatever genre usually obtain better prices for their work than the unlucky but equally good, and certainly better than the unlucky bad. As for the lucky but bad artists, ah, there's the rub. There's always an abundance of those. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tue, January 18, 2011 9:19:19 AM Subject: Re: representation and its sgnification I know I'm being incoherent. If I could frame the question properly I wouldn't need to ask it. In this caes "representational art" means a tradition,probably. I don't think it means any art that depicts an already coded image because I don't think the problem includes the internal coding system of "representational art". I think signify is being used in a referential sense. I n a general sense abstract or conceptual art sells for more than most representational art-Rembrant is an exception. A picture of a literal image of a marsh is not given as much respect as a picture of some paint titled "marsh"-why is this? It isn't the importance of titles and the title doesn't determine the quality of either piece. -----Original Message----- From: William Conger <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Mon, Jan 17, 2011 9:29 pm Subject: Re: representation and its sgnification These questions border on the incoherent. What does representational art signify now? Here's a perfect example of the creative use of words as signs.
