12 year old Art Critic
2 years, 5 months ago
Via USATODAY.com:
A twelve-year-old boy visiting the Detroit Institute of Arts with his school has stuck a piece of gum to a $1.5m abstract painting.
The gum did not bind to the fibre of the painting (”The Bay” by Helen Frankenthaler), and the museum’s conservation department expects that after the appropriate chemical treatment the painting will be fine.
It is funny to see this sort of thing going on, and how people react to it. In a very real sense, the boy was entering into a discourse with the painting. I have a friend who due to his healthy scepticism of most modern art is constantly urged to subvert it. My gut feeling is that someones creative work should be respected. Not out of a social-relativism that judges all things as equally valid/good, but because it supposedly carries a great deal of value to whomever produced it.
I am extremely confident that this story would not have been run if the painting was valued at a more modest price. This seems to suggest that the unconsidered engagement of the school boy with the painting was apt: to the journo the story is implicitly about the high value and not about a simple act of vandalism.
March 3rd, 2006 at 1:05 pm
I believe that by entering into the artisitic disocurse one is indeed paying due respect to the art and the related artist. This very real act upon the artwork is a physical manifestation of the reaction that the art had upon the viewer. The realisation that the art had indeed caused a member of the audience to react, to respond in a physical way, is indeed an achievement of its own. The ‘act’ becomes an emotionally stronger critique of the work than chatting among friends, audience, or the elite.
That the atmosphere of the gallery and social construction leads one away from interaction with the art is important. On the one hand it makes the act of intercourse with the work difficult and therefore the work needs to provoke strong interest for physical action to take place. No one stops you talking about art.
On the other hand, we have a unique oppurtunity to creat ironic and fun interactive works. A work that has an intention of being interacted with b ut placed within the context of a gallery with minders and the like, sends very mixed messages. It is a treat merely to qwatch meek audiences to hesitate in their participation with the interactive work.
Honestly, modern artists who point their noses upwards to art subversion, manipulation and appropriation have a lot to learn about the art world. The consciousness of art throughout history has been developed by artists entering into a dialogue of critique via their works.
What are we to do when people enter into this dislogue? Discourage it to the point of death?
In the end, kids will be kids.
March 3rd, 2006 at 1:35 pm
So someone is incited to act physically towards the object of their consternation? An act on the artwork could take the form of destruction and violence… Would we ever consider violence against a proponent of a certain school of thought to be a valid critical reaction? Indeed performance artists have occationally been attacked on stage during a performance, so this is not so unrealistic. In this case I can see how the reaction may fit into the schema of the medium, but it is violence nontheless.
Actually changing/destroying the original work as a critical reaction seems to me to be anathema to discourse - such as Nazi burning of books. Instead of building upon the work it is just trying to censor it.
I think that your comment regarding snooty elitist artists having a lot to learn about the artwork is ambiguious. I think they actually constitute the “art world”, but that it is the “world of art” they must become more in touch with.