William: I understood cheerskep's comments as statements of his opinion and
reflections of his experience on the list serve, as attempts to help me to
understand responses I've received or posts which might be made.
I mean to come to the list to learn about art and artists, not to pronounce
conclusions or convince others, of anything.
I do bring a valuing of the tangible or reproducible about some issues,
which probably reflects my training as a scientist.
Although I don't fear conflict, I'm much too naive/unsophisticated to want
to provoke a fight.
Psychological studies of art and artists may exist - I know nothing about
them. I expect that today's artists are as diverse and rebellious as the
artists of any time. (OK, probably more so than artists in King Tut's time
and area.)
I'm quite happy to be educated on the list by members. If my views are
antiquated and romantic, they are likely to be changed as I keep my eyes
open to what I read here.
I'm not the whole public, I'm not an art critic; if you want me to know
something, let me know.
Geoff C
From: William Conger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Literary and graphic artists - cheerskep
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:05:06 -0700 (PDT)
Many people, including myself, know far more about contemporary art and its
audiences than you are led to believe by Cheerskep's oddly imperiously
judgmental comments on the forum's artist members As a clinical
psychologist you might be expected to question such summative and
universalist comments, especially since they lack any substantive data.
There is no study that shows or even suggests that contemporary artists as
a group favor or don't seek and appeal to their audiences (let's ignore for
the moment that no guidelines for grouping audiences exists except in
popular, casual guesswork, and no guidelines exist to define contemporary
art audiences). If anything, the trend to be noted by the types of
contemporary art exhibitions being presented nowadays, shows an effort to
be more popular, more entertainment oriented, more accessible to casual art
audiences. The widely recognized work of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst are
just the most widely noted
confirmations of this turn to the popular in late modernism.
Actually, today's artists are better educated across the arts and
humanities than ever before. Some of them are well educated in the hard
sciences, too. That's partly due to the dissolving of traditional
boundaries in all fields. If you read contemporary art criticism and look
at the careers of artists who curate exhibitions and lead university
programs and who publish frequently in peer reviewed journals, you will
note the extraordinary breadth of artists'intellectual contributions today.
For instance, I, too muddled for Cheerskep, once read a paper (re G.
Seurat) at the American Psychological Association Conference in Chicago.
It was well received by professional psychologists and psychoanalysts. Many
other artists have done much more. Frankly, Cheerskep, and possibly you as
well, have antiquated and romaticized views of artists and their work.
That is partly due, perhaps, to the fact that most of the artists here are
rather conservative in their
views and practices.
Actually, the bad effect of socialst propaganda art is not all still bad.
Under the Socialist regimes artists were prodded and pushed to engage in
practical applied arts, like theater design, weaving, other crafts.
Today's art scene is burgeoning with new work that questions and blurs the
old distinctions among the crafts and between them and the traditional fine
arts. Some of that new creativity stems from the art mandates of the
socialist era.
WC
