i hate art

new (unintentional) anthony baiting answers.

I have the same problem. I seem to have some weird block when it comes to visual art.

tha top three (i can't even be arsed to think of any more):

1. ed keinholz

2. joseph cornell

3. egon schiele

and it's funny, because the combined influence of the first two around 18-20 almost was enough to push me into art as a vocation, at least sculpture/assemblage. also, i read a lot about art; i particularly enjoy a lot of art criticism, esp. robt. hughes. but i'm still oft curiously unmoved by the subject matter.

I'm kind of like this with films and even fiction writing to some extent (though I feel much surer discussing novelists) - some people respond more intensively to some forms than others. It doesn't make you a philistine unless you try to blame it on art rather than you.

also very sensetive/receptive to (good) graphic design (i.e. rekkid packaging.)

A shocker i know but most visual art does not hit me in the gut the way writing or films do. It is much more a ceberal pleasure for me, a way to think and process in vital but unique ways .

see, i think i'm really the same way, anthony. the top 2 artists are really the only ones to hit me, immediately, in a gut sense the way say, laughing stock or spiritual unity or even fucking nevermind did at age 13. and i still react mostly to the guts and the black stuff inside than the noggin. maybe i am a philistine after all. (oh, like that was up for debate.)

Och, Kate-baiting answer as well.

Even if they might not have had a direct effect on you, their work has had an effect on people that would have had an effect on you. Just off the top of my head, half a dozen visual artists who have had a massive impact on culture- impacting upon music, writing, film, etc. These are not even necessarily my favourite artists, they are just artists whose repercussions I see every day in my visual journey.

Andy Warhol - needs no explanation, I hope. HR Geiger - if you've been to a horror film in the past 20 years, he's affected you. Amano - Manga and Anime has had a huge cultural impact on the west in recent years. Damien Hirst - has become almost a visual joke, take anything from cars to beer and put it in a vitrine and bissect it. Dali - from a thousand college dorm rooms, the effect is undiminished. Monet - slipcovers for a thousand middle class sofas.

I don't think that your brain is broken, maybe you've just not been trained to recognise the artists. I think you probably have absorbed hundreds more visual artists' styles, but since you've not had a name to hang on it, you've considered yourself blind to it.

A friend of mine warned me "See 'The Cell'" a hundred times, and I finally listened to her and rented it, thinking "Oh, GAWD, J-Lo in a hundred different states of nudity" yet I laughed, laughed OUT LOUD whenever there was a visual reference to Hirst, to Serrano, to that bloke with the creepy Victorian photos whose name I can never remember... Joel Whitkin or something like that.

I think people are afraid of fine art, especially visual art, because it has this awful reputation for bad Conceptual Art and for attracting ridiculous pretention. But it still affects you every day, you still see it, even in watered down or inspired versions in the mass media.

Yes, but it doesn't stop it feeling weird that this particular artform leaves me almost entirely cold. I can go to a gallery and look at something and think oh yes that's clever/interesting/boring/stupid but it goes no further. There's no visceral impact at all. I just can't imagine ever reacting to visual work as intensely as I did to Mason and Dixon or the new D-Plan album. I can't even imagine how anyone can, it's that bad. Just like a bit of my brain is missing.

Andy Warhol - needs no explanation, I hope. HR Geiger - if you've been to a horror film in the past 20 years, he's affected you. Amano - Manga and Anime has had a huge cultural impact on the west in recent years. Damien Hirst - has become almost a visual joke, take anything from cars to beer and put it in a vitrine and bissect it. Dali - from a thousand college dorm rooms, the effect is undiminished. Monet - slipcovers for a thousand middle class sofas.

okay, kate yer right, i will concede all those points. except for the basic association that you seem to be making (and correct me if i'm wrong) that creeping, sweeping cultural generalizations which have seeped into my brane through direct and indirect sources over the last twenty odd years have as much direct and visceral impact as standing in front of said work of Art (or, in a pinch, staring at a reproduction in pricey hardcover in barnes and noble..you don't think i can actually afford them do you?) and being MOVED by it. i still agree with mssr. hughes that the only real way to gauge a reaction to an artverk is to be in its physical presence: the quality of the paint (or other material) itself, the physical textures, the color, the three-dimensionality, the (for lack of a better word) real- ness of it. i do not agree for one moment, however, that the endless reproduction of dali, et al leaves the work undiminished. (aside from the fact that i think all of the artists you mentioned are shite) such assembly line (either figurative or literal, of which it's a cliche - but not an untrue one - to say that warhol is the father of the entire sodden affair) tactics strip any residual meaning for me from an already dangerously-close-to-cliche icon; it's wallpaper. just because something has been tattooed on my brane by the kulturkampf arbiters of middle-brow taste doesn't mean that a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy has as much resonance for this personage (rather than the cultcha-at-large) as the intimate awe, horror, joy, whatevah of close contact.

Walter Benjamin talked about how the 'aura' of a piece of art was diminished by reproduction (in an essay called, er, 'The Work of Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction). As ART became Reproductions, they became products, mere badges saying "I'm the kind of person civilised and middle class enough to like art".

I agree with the poster above who said that you have to 'forget' the detritus of context and just see it as colour upon colour, texture upon texture, look at it for its physicality. Perhaps look for the ways it represents the colours and textures you see outside the gallery. *Don't* look for things to talk about: art and language inhabit different zones.

Kate - The guy who makes the creepy Victorian Photos is Joel Peter Whitkin. I did a Google search for him ans was surprised to find a load of Metallica fansites, apparently Kirk Hammet is a fan of his work (which lends credence to your argument-hey!).

Seeing the Cell was a humorous experience for me as well, though it was a bit depressing to realize that A: most people in the audience were not getting the references, and attributing the power of the images to the dierctor, and B: That the works themselves had become in their current context no more than props in a really shitty psychological thriller. In a sense, though, seeing Hirst or Odd Nerdrum or Matthew Barney in the context of a horror flick did heighten the work's visceral effect, and perhaps this leads us back to the original question--could part of the reason art affect us less viscerally be it's traditional isolation in acontextual white space? Seeing an artwork on a movie screen while eating your popcorn in a darkened theatre might produce a more visceral experience than seeing the same work in the safety of some immaculate gallery. What if, when going to see an exhibition of Whitkin's photos, you encountered a darkened gallery in which the prints themselves (in lightboxes or something) provided the only light source? What I'm trying to say is that I think we make internal assumptions about artwork based on context and presentation.

Perhaps one of the reasons you feel so alienated from the experience of artwork, Jess, is because the work is presented in such a cerebral way. On the other hand, it might have more to do with the work you are looking at. Okay, enough rambling from me...

Will gets Benjamin backwards, but then so do most ppl. who teach him. He thought the loss of "aura" was radically egalitarian and good. Anyway, I like vs. art as art, but I have too much of a verbal/analytical brain to deal with art. Especially as there seems to be the prettiness factor and then the "concept" & concept art seems so shallow to me compared to conceptual explorations in music, lit, film.

I'm all about the pictures. I would say I like a lot of the Fauves, some of the Impressionists, and a few of the abstracts. Kandinsky, Miro, Monet, Munch, Seurat, Spilliaret, Malevich, Schwitters, Heron, Ernst and Rauschenberg, all painted pictures I like. For me art is all visual, I enjoy it very much on a superficial level.

the only visual art i can remember being very moved by in the last year were an illustration for a zen buddhist fable about twelve oxes and a Tang sculpture of some guy meditating. i'm not sure why, either, but i don't think it's a deficienty.

The weekly Jim Woodring cartoon at the back of the Stranger (weekly alt. mag in Seattle) has yet to fail to move me... same could be said for Chris Ware's weekly cartoon.

s'funny how reading Chris Ware can be so...comforting.

i did say *except* for cartoonists guys. ;)

woodring is one of the best cartoonists of all time, imo; his work will be remembered out of 1/1000th of his peers. a completely beautiful vision, indeed.

agreed on chris ware. if i can find it, i'll post my old screed on "chris ware and the phantom of empathy" if anyone's interested.

I'm interested!

People get Benjamin wrong becos of connection w/ Frankfurt School whose keening cry for debasement of aura still hangs over cultural studies. 'Mechanical reproduction' and consequences (rad. egalitarian or end of aura) not exclusive to art but applies equally to other cultural forms, where we generally *do* see it as liberating - popular music especially. Is reproduction specially problematic re (fine) art, and if so why?

Benjamin distinguishes between film/photo as artforms which are intended for mass audience/are more 'engaged' with reality vs. painting which never can engage 'reality' or a mass audience. Perhaps our idea of fine art toaday is similar to Benjamin's idea of painting in 1935.