High-minded but low-bodied art criticsm

Now, I want you to take a long, hard look at this painting.  No, no, not a quick glance, really study it, put your sun-glasses on if you have to.  It is by a man called Clyfford Still (1904-1980) and it is worth $30m - not, of course, that such a fact would alter your high-minded appraisal of this creation.  If you are somewhat unclear as to what it represents the artist has helpfully entitled it "1957-J no.2".  Right, off you go and in due course let me have your analyses but, please, n0 more than ten paragraphs!

 

 

 

Well, there you are then, what do you think?  Of course, you may not feel up to writing too much of a critique this being the Sunday morning after the Saturday night, as it were.  In which case you might care to emulate that well-known art critic, Ms. Carmen Tisch, 36, who, according to NBC Southern California, when she saw it in the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, she:

dropped her pants at a museum and rubbed her rear end all over it

Lest the finer, more sophisticated point of her critique be misunderstood, she:

tried to urinate on it but apparently missed.

Well, I suppose a butt wipe and a pee saved us all from ploughing through a 1,000 words of turgid art criticism but somehow I can't see this new, direct-action style of reviewing works of art catching on at the Royal Acadamy!

As so often I am obliged to those reprehensible subversives at I Hate The Media.

 

Comments

[Whyaxye]

Tried to urinate on it but apparently missed?!!

Without being sexist, there are some things that men simply are better at.

As the feminist writer Camille Paglia acknowledges:

“Freud thinks primitive man preened himself on his ability to put out a fire with a stream of urine. A strange thing to be proud of but certainly beyond the scope of woman, who would scorch her hams in the process. Male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendence. A woman merely waters the ground she stands on. . . Women, like female dogs, are earthbound squatters. There is no projection beyond the boundaries of self.”

[David Duff]

"Women, like female dogs, are earthbound squatters"

God, you're brave, 'W', or is that you know for sure Mrs 'W' never reads what you write?

[Kevin B]

I think the clue as to why she failed with the urination but succeeded with the ass-wipe is in the painting's title.

[A K Haart]

I see it as too much of a pastiche of dried out and fixated post-modern euphemisms, relying with an excessive lack of self-aware restraint on a cynical disregard for the tainted exigencies of artistic nihilism. Almost Dadaist in its contempt for space qua space qua fixity within a space-like mode, it does manage to project itself quite neatly as an almost ritualistic, even otiose summary of artistic theatre as played out in the ghettoes of materialism.

To rough for bum-wipe though.

[David Duff]

Clever Kevin, you spotted the sub-text!

'AK', masterful, if I may say so, and (or perhaps I mean 'because') your critique is totally incomprehensible. That's the sort of thing we like to (pretend) read in the smarter art magazines. I particularly like that word 'qua' which I must look up one of these days.

[Andra]

Well, "crap" was the first word that come to my mind.
Apparently, I was pretty close.

[David Duff]

Succinct, Andra, and that's the way we like it.

[missred]

"pants" came into my head.

[EC]

Could it possibly be, Mr. Duff, that this particular masterpiece was picked because it hearkens back to a very recent post of your's that included the same word as I thought....TITS? First word that came to my mind anyway.....

[Andra]

EC:
You're a very sick man.

[David Duff]

Nothing wrong with tits, Andra, I have worshipped them since I was fourteen and 'EC' might have a point. Anyway with missred's comment that makes a very fair summary: crap, pants and tits. You won't read that sort of finely tuned criticism in the big Sundays!