Bah! Humbug!
JerryB said:
I don't agree. It's because the work was fairly new that it can't be seen in the context of posterity. If it had survived, the work would have been an important insight for future generations into one particular time. Just because it's not popular and people don't get what it's about, doesn't mean that it's impact on culture as a whole is not worthwhile. Remember that alot of people didn't like or get the Impressionists when they first started showing their work many moons ago...
Yeah. But is that art? It's certainly been labelled as "art". It's a bit like the label "classical music". I've heard a lot of atonal crap that's received that label. There's mountebanks out there that receive the apellation classical composer, almost as soon as they've graduated music school. But, do people really listen to their stuff?
I've read screeds, by the likes of George Steiner, on the need for art and literature to be "difficult". Although the very opacity and obtuseness of most of the difficult, not to say shite, stuff that's so labelled by the citics and literary/artistic establishment just comes across as elitist.
A lot of the stuff that got incinerated the other day was conceptual stuff. Somebody had an idea, a visual pun, perhaps and someone else made it for them, to their specifications. Is that art?
Some of the stuff was of the installation art variety: collections of objects and stuff laid out in an apparently meaningful way and often filling entire rooms, or buildings. Is that art? Some might say it showed extreme anal retention.
The modern stuff that's palmed off on the World at Large as Art is 99% con. and 99% crap. It's all part of an elitist and authoriarian system that uses money and exclusivity to set unreachable, not to mention incomprehensible, standards by which the great mass of people are supposed to understand, that the "Powers that Be", the trendsetters and jetsetters, have rarified and exclusive taste, which must be valid, because it's
"Art".
Thereby, wannabe patron, scum like George Saatchi, validate themselves as people of taste and discernment: cutting edge sort of people, by shelling out millions of pounds for their collections of half baked ideas made concrete and creating a market for the rubber stamped trash of their leering and contemptuous anti-artist protegés, who are only too happy to sell on their smelly arse wipings for five and six figure sums. .