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Its disappointing to me how this community responds to Jackson Pollack. Most of the Pollack supporter's comments seem to assume that if a person doesn't think h

by phaus 6y ago

Its disappointing to me how this community responds to Jackson Pollack. Most of the Pollack supporter's comments seem to assume that if a person doesn't think he's a genius of incredible technical ability, then that means that person is automatically an ignorant person that's making wild, uninformed, random guesses about how art is created. I think Pollack's paintings are aesthetically pleasing. I'm not a professional artist, however I am an art and art history hobbyist. I have been for decades. I like his paintings. I don't, however, think they are special or that he was an artistic genius whose paintings should have broken the record at one point for the most expensive work of art ever sold. That's OK though, we all have different tastes and a guy with $100 million just happened to have different tastes from this guy with no millions. However, my opinion isn't random or uninformed. I know how a painting is created. How the surfaces are prepared. How preparatory drawings and smaller studies are done. How the final drawing is made. How the underpainting is done. My art is pretty bad compared to professionals. However, studying it for decades means I've watched actual masters do their thing for a countless number of hours. I know how the Italian masters created their works of art in great detail. I know how Pollack created his. The level of technical skill required to become a master of classical realism is absurd. Pollack's strength was executing and publishing an idea no one had done before. In the grand scheme of all of art, I don't think that's a particularly strong strength when compared to masters of classical realism. My opinion is based on an intimate knowledge of what it takes to be that good. If you disagree with my conclusion that's fine and reasonable but to pretend that everyone doesn't consider him a highly skilled genius is ignorant is in itself pretty ignorant. If I wanted to create a work like Pollack's, there would likely be a learning curve, but we aren't talking the same amount of practice and preparation that classically trained artists require to even be semi-competent. Like I said before, the biggest strength of the work he is known for was originality, not technical competence. He might have also been technically competent as an artist, but when I look at the works that made him famous I don't see it. I'd be willing to hang all kinds of abstract / modern / postmodern art on my wall because it adds color, sometimes has great composition, and is aesthetically pleasing. However, most of it just isn't meaningful to me in the same way that other genres of art are like classical realism and impressionism. I don't think anyone should feel like that's a personal attack on their preferences. I'm not missing something, it just has a different effect on me. If you don't like classical realism you aren't missing something either, you just like different things.

shrimpx 6y ago
Pollock and DeKooning were thoroughly disinterested in painting in the classical or modernist sense. So to look for the skill or traditional aesthetic in these paintings is starting off on the wrong foot. They were good traditional/modernist painters but in their seminal stage they were struggling badly to erase from themselves any trace of el Greco, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, etc. My read is that they ended up making explicit in the painting the process of this struggle for self liberation. The painting is a record of these guys living in there, in the painting, struggling. It’s the socks on the floor and crumbs on the table of a messy lived-in apartment. DeKooning erased and covered and added, obsessively for years, often leaving the “final product” as an aesthetically disharmonious “ugly painting”. He’s destroying anything recognizable, that looks like a reference. All the while looking for some kind of semblance, because he knew total destruction was meaningless. He wants some kind of sweet spot between something and nothing. The work is deep, it’s philosophical, it’s a real struggle with meaning and identity. Pollock is similar in his disdain for recognizable forms. He loathed the idea of being associated with the cubists, which is what his earlier work pointed to and he actively tried to escape it. The verbatim image is a second class citizen in these guys’ work. The image is not supposed to give you that “art-like vibe” that you get from “good art”. These are precisely the lame, obvious things they’re working against. Their work is a struggle to liberate themselves from stereotypes and the image is a record of the struggle. If one doesn’t find a DeKooning painting beautiful it doesn’t mean anything. They haven’t even begun digging into the wealth of knowledge inside it.
- phaus 6y ago
  I'm not starting off on the wrong foot. I started off fully aware that the point of Pollack's action painting wasn't technical ability. I only mentioned it because there are lots of people in this thread who actually seem to think his paintings displayed a genius level of technical ability that mere mortals could not possibly attain through any level of hard work. The issue I have is that within the high art community and art historians and art critics there is no limit to the amount of shit they will swallow from con-men. They eagerly await the next completely ridiculous story. I'm certain there were lots of modern/abstract/etc artists that were legitimate, and as you said, struggled and worked hard their entire lives to produce work. One of the biggest problems I have with finding meaning in such work is that given the fact that the resulting product of such artists can either be a flag draped on a toilet, a black dot drawn in the center of a piece of paper, random plaint splashes repeated in a semi methodical way in order to create a coherent composition, or even shit in a can, I am not convinced that we have managed to accurately separate charlatans and con men from people that actually put effort into what they did. And if you have an industry where mediocre or even laughably bad end products are similar in apparent quality to celebrated masterpieces and there are millions of dollars at stake you can be certain that the con men have shown up in droves. You can derive great meaning from Pollack and others that it didn't inherently possess. It can have a real impact on you, your life, and how you see the world. That doesn't mean there's an inherent wealth of knowledge to be found that I'm missing out of ignorance. It just means that the art work speaks to you in some way. Picasso was actually a highly skilled classically trained artist and that experience was an important part of what he became. I only like a few of his paintings, but in some of them while it looks strange to a person accustomed to traditional art, the competence and technical mastery is clearly apparent to someone that knows what they are looking at. Nude Descending a Staircase is a legitimate masterpiece, for example. And also, to be clear, I'm not saying that any of the examples I listed are not "real" art. They are all real art, I just find master level works of classical realism, expressionism, and many other genres more interesting, due to the undeniable difference in technical mastery and work ethic required to produce them. And by work ethic I don't just mean the number of hours a person spends doing a thing. If I spend 10 years playing basketball 16 hours a day with my kid in my driveway I wouldn't get to magically claim that what I'm doing makes me just as good at basketball as NBA players and demand that the world ignores the fact that my results aren't even close to what theirs are. I get it that they weren't interested in being considered "good" artists. That's fine, they can do whatever they want and the world has enough room for everyone. I am just not interested in people that don't care about being good at what they do for a living. I'm not interested in social statements or political statements that aren't accompanied by substance. Other people might be and that's great. When it comes to all forms of art, media, music, film, etc, the things I find most interesting are when people or groups of people are operating at such a high level of skill that almost nobody in history can compare to the work they produce.

by phaus 6y ago

shrimpx 6y ago

Pollock and DeKooning were thoroughly disinterested in painting in the classical or modernist sense. So to look for the skill or traditional aesthetic in these paintings is starting off on the wrong foot. They were good traditional/modernist painters but in their seminal stage they were struggling badly to erase from themselves any trace of el Greco, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, etc. My read is that they ended up making explicit in the painting the process of this struggle for self liberation. The painting is a record of these guys living in there, in the painting, struggling. It’s the socks on the floor and crumbs on the table of a messy lived-in apartment. DeKooning erased and covered and added, obsessively for years, often leaving the “final product” as an aesthetically disharmonious “ugly painting”. He’s destroying anything recognizable, that looks like a reference. All the while looking for some kind of semblance, because he knew total destruction was meaningless. He wants some kind of sweet spot between something and nothing. The work is deep, it’s philosophical, it’s a real struggle with meaning and identity. Pollock is similar in his disdain for recognizable forms. He loathed the idea of being associated with the cubists, which is what his earlier work pointed to and he actively tried to escape it. The verbatim image is a second class citizen in these guys’ work. The image is not supposed to give you that “art-like vibe” that you get from “good art”. These are precisely the lame, obvious things they’re working against. Their work is a struggle to liberate themselves from stereotypes and the image is a record of the struggle. If one doesn’t find a DeKooning painting beautiful it doesn’t mean anything. They haven’t even begun digging into the wealth of knowledge inside it.

phaus 6y ago
I'm not starting off on the wrong foot. I started off fully aware that the point of Pollack's action painting wasn't technical ability. I only mentioned it because there are lots of people in this thread who actually seem to think his paintings displayed a genius level of technical ability that mere mortals could not possibly attain through any level of hard work. The issue I have is that within the high art community and art historians and art critics there is no limit to the amount of shit they will swallow from con-men. They eagerly await the next completely ridiculous story. I'm certain there were lots of modern/abstract/etc artists that were legitimate, and as you said, struggled and worked hard their entire lives to produce work. One of the biggest problems I have with finding meaning in such work is that given the fact that the resulting product of such artists can either be a flag draped on a toilet, a black dot drawn in the center of a piece of paper, random plaint splashes repeated in a semi methodical way in order to create a coherent composition, or even shit in a can, I am not convinced that we have managed to accurately separate charlatans and con men from people that actually put effort into what they did. And if you have an industry where mediocre or even laughably bad end products are similar in apparent quality to celebrated masterpieces and there are millions of dollars at stake you can be certain that the con men have shown up in droves. You can derive great meaning from Pollack and others that it didn't inherently possess. It can have a real impact on you, your life, and how you see the world. That doesn't mean there's an inherent wealth of knowledge to be found that I'm missing out of ignorance. It just means that the art work speaks to you in some way. Picasso was actually a highly skilled classically trained artist and that experience was an important part of what he became. I only like a few of his paintings, but in some of them while it looks strange to a person accustomed to traditional art, the competence and technical mastery is clearly apparent to someone that knows what they are looking at. Nude Descending a Staircase is a legitimate masterpiece, for example. And also, to be clear, I'm not saying that any of the examples I listed are not "real" art. They are all real art, I just find master level works of classical realism, expressionism, and many other genres more interesting, due to the undeniable difference in technical mastery and work ethic required to produce them. And by work ethic I don't just mean the number of hours a person spends doing a thing. If I spend 10 years playing basketball 16 hours a day with my kid in my driveway I wouldn't get to magically claim that what I'm doing makes me just as good at basketball as NBA players and demand that the world ignores the fact that my results aren't even close to what theirs are. I get it that they weren't interested in being considered "good" artists. That's fine, they can do whatever they want and the world has enough room for everyone. I am just not interested in people that don't care about being good at what they do for a living. I'm not interested in social statements or political statements that aren't accompanied by substance. Other people might be and that's great. When it comes to all forms of art, media, music, film, etc, the things I find most interesting are when people or groups of people are operating at such a high level of skill that almost nobody in history can compare to the work they produce.