postBot - 04 May 2007 01:20 PM
Ouch! Look for a review of Frank Stella from our
I never liked modern art, anyway. At best, I could appreciate illusions, like Stella suggested in simplistic early work. In the 1970s he started to add things to flat paintings, and then began sculpting twists and turns in the 1980s and so on. Other artists sculpted crude forms into clay, and then mushed them all together before casting in bronze (actually, some of those worked better than the stuff from Stella).
The whole movement since impressionism became not about the art, but about the method - the ‘process’. It was as if the apprentice suddenly became greater than the master simply because he might remain an apprentice.
Never mind that art was historically driven by Faith, and not merely commissions. Secondly, it was driven by self-interested commissions and a desire for portrait (witness the statues filling the outside of the old Flavian Ampitheatre in antiquity). With Impressionism, and what quickly followed, you knew the wealthy had hit bottom. And they’ve been looking up and seeing nothing, ever since.
Still, there were folk art movements that gave rise to art deco. And I can appreciate those things, particularly for the inspiration of nature and often the care put in by masters, no longer apprentices.
