Quote - > Quote - Pollock was actually good at creating esthetically interesting works using this technique. He started off as a post-impressionist (I think this is the correct term), ala middle-period picasso, and started using a looser and looser brush stroke. Even his early abstract splatter paintings are representationalI and even figurative. In fact, most of his "abstracts" are really representational, but not figurative.

 

To be honest, Pollock has been an artist that I've often used as an example of bad art that has value in the art world. When I look at Pollock's work, all I see are splashes of paint that do little to move me. I haven't seen a detailed analysis of one of his paintings, but have heard other others waxing If the artist has concocted some significant, meaningful backstory, to explain the work, it usually comes across as an artist who put more thought into what he meant to do than the actual painting. It goes back to "The Emperor's New Clothes" where con artists' convinced the emperor that only one of fine intellect and station could recognize the incredible beauty of the outfit they created while all dunces and fools would see nothing at all. Art critics have elevated many works, that are otherwise nothing, into valued art. It's hard for me to take the art world seriously when a vertical canvas of a single uniform color can fetch over $900,000--which is what the painting sold for.

 

Yeah, the blue canvass didn't do a thing for me, and I am a big fan of abstract art. I don't think that backstory is required for art, in fact it often gets in the way, and I usually like to look at a piece of non-representational art for a while before looking at the title. I find myself that a piece of abstract art either grows on me after I look at it for a few minutes, or I remain unmoved. I think in the case of Pollock it takes me a few minutes to get the feel of the work. Perhaps one reason why I like abstract expressionism (aside from the fact that I like most schools of modern art) is that it is rather reminiscent to me of music. (IIRC, Kandinsky was very influenced by musical notions). As to the "Emperor's new clothes" sort of art, one of the biggest perpertrators of that was Duchamp. However, he, as well as other dadaists, were not really making art qua art, but rather statements about art. I find his work intellectually interesting, but aesthetically boring. I find Jean Arp, and his obsession with "navels" (small wooden spheres) just boring.

Just as art can be a tool for illustration, it can also be a tool for commentary (albeit sometimes a blunt tool). Sometimes the commentary is political, and the art is representational (or not, eg. Guernica). Othertimes the commentary is about aesthetics, or the politics of art, such as most of Duchamp's work. Sometimes it is purely abstract, with a drive away from the figurative  such as Kazimir Malevich's "Suprematist" paintings (Suprematism is a doctrine which holds the depiction of pure feeling as paramount and is described by Malevich in a pamplet translated into English and available at http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/malevich.html

Quote - If abstract work moves a person emotionally, that's okay. Art is something that is in the eye of the beholder. Overall, I'd expect most Poser users to tend to realistic art or they wouldn't be using Poser very much..

 

Probably true for most of us. I'm probably an exception, since my main interest in Poser is to create illustrations for a variety of gaming projects. However, given that I want them to be reasonably good aesthetically. My personal artistic preferences, howver, tend toward the less literal, but, with the exception of some mock album covers I'm thinking about nothing I'm likely to do will be based on that. I also find that its fun to capture the feel of various other graphic arts within Poser, in particular late 18th-mid 19th century figurative painting, surealism, and photorealism. (Photorealism in the painting sense, not in the usual Poser sense of looking like a photograph.) I guess I just like everything. (For example, I like pretty much all periods of Western Classical music, from Gregorian chant to the atonal.)

Quote - The funny thing about art auctions is that they are not simply about buying art, but also represent a gamemanship aspect where setting new records for forms of art elevate the valuation of all art of that type. After all, what other means is there to value one-of-a-kind artistic works? The "crazy" person, who paid just under a million dollars for the blue painting, increased the value of all that artist's work as well as similar works, and probably increased the value of his personal collection significantly more than the premium paid for this painting. Similarly, if such works didn't sell for their expected pricing, similar works would begin to lose such valuations.

 

Exactly. It's a fairly irrational market driven by ego and scarcity, and it is one which, unfortunately, museums are increasingly priced out of. Incidentally, one interesting fact about Rothko is that he refused to take private commisions if the work wasn't going to be displayed in a public space, and refused to hand over a commisioned work to Seagrams when he found they were going to put it in a boardroom instead of a lobby; he gave it to the Tate gallery instead.