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[Nabubrush]

VW cutting right through it all.

[miles]

(re my hating on Rothko)

Look, I know there's probably some deep meaning behind his stuff, or somehow he boldly broke new ground. And perhaps it's philistine of me to say "Shit I could do that!" But, Rothko paintings... seriously, I could do that. Look at this bullshit. I do not understand why anyone likes this.

I meant to say this earlier but I got sidetracked by that scary looking dude from the first page and a bunch of stuff mostly from smells that was mostly over my head, but I absolutely could not do that. Maybe if I took a few painting classes I could reproduce it, sure, but right now I could not do that.

The main point is that even if you could do that, you didn't. Several years ago, with very little technical proficiency at the guitar (but more than I have now), I could have been part of a pretty mean Ramones cover band. But no one would make a case that the fact alone I could have copied what they did is somehow an argument that they sucked. There might be plenty of other reasons why they sucked, but this would be a pretty bad one. With several more years of study I could have had started a pretty mean one man Segovia act. Would this mean Segovia sucked?

This leads to the same point others have been making (I think), but anyway, I thought of this again because of this post:

What it took for me to realize that that was what was going on was a discussion about a girl we know who almost got kicked out of art school, because they found out that all of her paintings were "copies" of some photographer. My art friends were much more upset by this than I was, so they explained that this is major cheating.

Were you surprised that she was almost kicked out? I'm surprised she wasn't. Unless she was taking a class on painting faithful reproductions of photographs, but she clearly wasn't as she apparently managed to pass off more than one painting without disclosing it was a copy. Never having taken an art class, I assume that the rules are generally the same as they are in the humanities. Original work is expected and when you do borrow something, you have to disclose that and give credit.

Or I guess maybe it's easy to assume that you go to art school to merely learn how to paint (or whatever it is you are doing there). OK, now I think I see what you meant.

[miles]

Here's and example using the Rothko painting I had the most immediate emotional response to:



What emotional response do you have to these colours?  And to go deeper, what does your response remind you of in your own life? 

This is not to say you have to like the painting.

I actually like that painting but am terrible at explaining why (I like what choop said but I don't think that would have been my reaction, so I can't claim it). I wonder if our emotional reactions are that different. Maybe it's just that our life experiences are.

On the subject of me being terrible at explaining things, I flirted with studying film my freshman year, mostly because of a reaction I had to Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror. It probably seems like a big pretentious circle jerk to a lot of people, and I get why, but I was so moved by it. I think part of the reason I only took one class is because I couldn't explain why I loved the movie so much, and lost interest in trying to write about film in general. My papers ended up focusing almost exclusively on technical stuff, which got boring. Also, I had very little confidence in my ability to produce movies.

[jay-ell]

This is an interesting discussion and I hope y'all keep it up.

I don't have much to contribute because I like most kinds of art but don't really have a dog in the fight. And when it comes to decorating at home, I circumvent the whole thing by exclusively using family photos taken by a friend who went to art school, posters from live theater performances Pedro was in during college, and "outsider art" created by me and my children*.

* Next week we're doing an abstract collage of acrylic on canvas using cross-sectioned apples as stamps. I'm going to hang it in the kitchen. This is seriously what passes for art in my home.

[Carlos del Vaca]

I don't have anything to add, but I am thrilled that my bitching about Rothko led to three pages of discussion.

[Nabubrush]

Mildly interesting (to me) that we've probably all also heard people say the same thing about rap. I know I have.