Re: conceptual art (which I do have a fondness for)...from an article about Yoko Ono, by Lisa Carver, in this week’s Sunday Times Magazine.
“...she is not easy, her paintings aren’t recognizable, her voice is not pretty, her films are without plot and her happenings make no sense. One of her painting you are told to sleep on. One of her paintings you are told to burn. One of her paintings isn’t a painting at all—it’s you going outside and looking at the sky. Most of her stuff is not even there. This is why I love her. This is why we need her. We have too much stuff already. It clutters our view, inward and outward.
We need more impossible in our culture. Go out and capture moonlight on water in a bucket, she commands. Her art is instructions for tasks impossible to complete. We already have a billion lovely things and a million amazing artists who have honed their talent and have lorded it above us. People wearing their roles as artist or writer or filmmaker or spokesman as a suit of armor or as an invisibility cloak or as an intimidatingly, unaquirably tasteful outfit.....
There are two schools of art. One is what is made beautiful by the artist; the other is to make way for the viewer to see or feel what is already beautiful.
The first is to make something ornate and unreachably special with skills. The viewer or listener is awed, their belief regarding the order of things is confirmed and they are reminded by this unachievable beauty of their own powerlessness. And I do love that kind of art, the beautiful kind.
The other way to make art is to tear down what’s between us and nature, us and eternity, us and the realization that everything is already perfect. In this experience of art, the viewer or listener loses respect for the current order or arrangement of civilization and thus becomes powerful, like King Kong, and outside civilization, like God—or simply like the shuffling janitor who is pleased with his own work and sleeps well....
Ono used the negative positively.....It takes an enormous lack of ego to not put your imprint on everything you do, to not employ your learning and position. To stand back, to hold back, to keep your mouth shut. To yell with your silence, when you know you very well could make soothing and welcome sounds at the drop of a hat.....It takes willpower to overpower the will to power....."
Plenty to chew on there, methinks.
Nemo
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