Can someone please explain to me how to become a "world class" fine artist? I swear I don't get it. What is it that I need? Attitude, charisma, mystique, socialite skills...definitely not talent, no none of that. Dadaism was a movement of un-talented cynics who called themselves artists and look at them. They managed to stick into the books of history. I think what's needed is a severely distorted sense of humor. Make a sculpture that means nothing, a sculpture that you KNOW means nothing and then add a lot of anarchist attitude around it. Show it to a close group of equally distorted group of artist friends and make a movement out of it. Then let the critics start sniffing around and watch them make grand analysis and conclusions out of the pieces.
That's how you get to be famous. You don't have to have any real meaning behind it, you let the critics do it. Read so deep into something that was never there...that's the whole brilliance of it. Akin to letting the viewer create their own story, as oppose to giving the viewer a story and letting them judge the content of it. Of course, the latter is much harder to do (you know, it requires strict training and knowledge of art and stuff) so it's an easier feat to create ambiguous objects and letting their existence be justified by people who don't get it, but they really want to get it. Get it?
That's how these fine artists define their existence and fool the world into thinking something is far more poignant that it really is. This brings me to my disdain for Google's new attempt at making your personal page more artistic by hiring 70 "world class" artists (more like wealthy socialites with pangs of creativity). Look through most of the available options and it suddenly becomes clear that most of these artists created pieces that feel like nothing more than color or texture exercise. Sort of stuff you're required to do as basic learning criteria in beginner Adobe Illustrator classes, but since they are done by people who are "cool" it is considered world class art.
Call me low brow but I never appreciated modern art. To me, it feels like ego masturbation for people who like making art but don't like studying it. Throw some broken dishes on a canvas, paint over them, and then paint a portrait of a celebrity friend over it and suddenly you're the renegade, mover and shaker in the art world (2 points for whoever knows which artist/director I am referring to). It's more of the hipster appeal that sells the work, rather than technique itself. Artists like Basquiat just don't appeal to me. I find the whole aura of him and his ilk silly and pretentious, especially since so many wonderful, talented artists are stuck doing industrial drudge work.
But, I digress, to each his own. As long as there are people willing to live their shattered dreams vicariously through, young, intense artists, or those who pay their way through being cultured, there will be a world of crappy artists who make a living (or not, the hottest artists are the dead ones) selling their cognitive fecal matter as something of substance and value.
So throw that elephant dung on the virgin marry, make statues of pregnant women bending in sexual ways, hang toilet seats on a wall, and make elementary shapes of stainless steel. You're living the dream of millions of people.
