Douk said:
Now I may have a knack for it but it seems that it takes no effort to write good poetry.
Your definition of good poetry may differ from mine. Although effort is not a necessary property of it.
With all forms of art, the name seems to be more important than the work. A painting done by a famous french guy would be loved more than a painting done by a corporate guy in a suit who acts business like. This isn't relevant in a school setting, but it helps to understand what it takes to not make good art, but to make your art liked.
Quality of art is not really about how many people like it.
Anyways on topic, the business of art seems to be the most dangerous thing to invest in. The most important skill is marketing and your image, then your artistic skill (if any) follows.
True art tends to get ruined when business interests get involved. Best to ignore that kind of thing.
As an aside, it would be interesting to hear what sort of music you like, whether it is bands with big marketing teams behind them, or the more independent outfits.
I personally think it does not take skill to make abstract art. I'm not saying its ugly or not art, I'm just saying its easy.
For me, the quality of a piece of art has fuck all to do with how much skill it took to make.
99% of art is shit. This is because 99% of everything is shit.
99% of art critics are idiots. This is because 99% of all people are idiots.
Trying to teach any kind of art appreciation in the context of school is doomed to failure. So take what you learn there with a pinch of salt.
My favourite poem is
Lessness by Samuel Beckett. It's something like twenty pages long, and constructed by writing loads of nonsense sentences and randomly choosing what order to put them in by pulling them out of a hat. For the first few pages I was like WTF is the point of this, but I kept reading and it was like, wow this is wonderful, such pleasing rhythm.
My favourite performace piece was probably Gustav Metzger's
Acid action painting, although I didn't witness it myself. "Three nylon canvases coloured white, black and red are arranged behind each other, in this order. Acid is painted, flung and sprayed onto the nylon which corrodes [destroying the nylon] at point of contact within 15 seconds."
Below is a picture generated by a computer program I wrote. When I wrote it I had no idea how it would turn out; I discovered it by accident while developing a method for generating procedural terrains. The program code would fit on a postcard or napkin. There is no Photoshop or anything like that involved, just a random number generator, a very simple mathematical procedure, and directly setting pixel values.
For me it is not about praising the artist but praising the art itself. The artist is just the messenger, the vessel that the art uses to gain corporeal form. To get caught up on how much skill a piece of art took to make, is to miss the point completely.
And BTW, my favourite painting is Picasso's
Guernica. So I don't
just like "modern art" (although it is abstract, it is not in the same league as the works I listed above that make heavy use of random processes).
I would rather awe at something that took hours and required mastery of tools than to praise someone for something I could have done.
If you still want to see some modern art that you could not have done yourself, check out Wassily Kandinsky.
EDIT: Also, I thought the same way as you about modern art when I was younger.
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