I was reading recently in Wassily Kandinsky’s “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” and ran across a curious passage that seems to typify the current state of this “Apo vs UF” debate. Funny that while this was written in 1911, it seems to speak to us today. The following is straight from his book:

“In the search for method, the artist goes still further. Art becomes so specialized as to be comprehensible only to the artists, and they complain bitterly of public indifference to their work. For since the artist in such times has no need to say much, but only to be notorious for some small originality and consequently lauded by a small group of patrons, there arise a crowd of gifted and skillful painters, so easy does the conquest of art appear. In each artistic circle there are thousands of such artists, of whom the majority seek only some new technical manner, and who produce millions of works of art without enthusiasm, with cold hearts and souls asleep.
Competition arises. The wild battle for success becomes more and more material. Small groups who have fought their way to the top of the chaotic world of art and picture-making entrench themselves in the territory they have won.
The public, left far behind, looks on bewildered, loses interest and turns away.”

Interesting words describing the art world in 1911. Seems as if not much has changed…

Any thoughts?

G

I believe there was a man that said "The more things change, the more they remain the same". :D

Warmest Regards,

Dallas

Any thoughts? Yes - you are right - not too much seems to have changed. But it's not only in the arts but in science also. Especially in Mathematics where you can find topics only a handful of people in the whole world are working on...
:blink:

Ciao,
Andreas

:rolleyes::sad:
Joy of Frax

Not much more can be said than that. It could have been written yesterday about us. Except I do believe that most of us still have warm hearts and enthusiasm. That is probably because we are still discovering and learning techniques. In fact, often, it's the feeling of discovery that we like more than what we actually create.

For example, last night I was stepping through Carl's dragon egg tutorial, which is all about using spherical and blur to come up with those cool smooth shapes. I was very pleased to come up with an image. The technique worked. I rendered the image and got fired up about posting it here and there. After looking at the render I changed my mind about posting it. It really wasn't all that interesting. A couple of days ago I did the same thing with a flame sphere, except I posted that image. After noticing that it had been viewed several times but received no comments, I figured that I was the only one interested in the image so I deleted it. I'm going through the same thing with these tiled flames. I'm having lots of fun building them and I have built a pile of them, but I don't think that they are too interesting to anyone but me.

Thanks for posting that

Keith

An artist creates with  emotions. Emotions are just that nothing can stop them good, bad ,ugly or sad. There are always the same.  as long as there has been man there has been artists.

Therese

"One Oneness One"

I'll leave them up this time… My 2 latest images are illustrations of getting caught up in a technique and being less concerned about what the final product looks like. I think that both of those images are cool. After all, both use blur to come up with highlighted spheres, one uses the final transform and the other uses tiling and those are the latest and greatest techniques. Wait a minute, they have been viewed plenty of times but they only have a few comments each. What's up with that? Don't you people know that I created those images using the coolest possible methods? I made highlighted, tiled spheres with Apophysis, which is something that not too many people have done before, but only 2 comments (at this point) on that image?

You made a big fuss (thank you) over that other tiled flame and that one wasn't nearly as complicated to build (more luck than skill for that one). I guess that's a good thing, now that I think of it. You are paying more attention to the final product than you are to the software or methods used. But I think that my new images are cool… mostly because of the fun that I had creating them. You didn't have that fun so it would be silly for me to expect you to think that they are cool too. It's OK. I understand. I can take rejection. I'll get over it, someday, somehow, maybe… I don't know if I can deal with this. Where are my meds? :blink:

Not that there is anything wrong with good methods and techniques, but they are just the means to the end and it is the end that counts

This is related to this topic and it's by artist, Danny Gregory:
http://www.dannygregory.com/2006/04/you_suck_but_en.php

I really like this guy...

Stephanie