all aesthetic values reduce to intensity and/or complexity
That makes perfect sense to me until I try to build an argument around it, and have to figure out what intensity and complexity mean. I still think it's basically true for my own aesthetics, but I don't think it covers all agendas: a lot of institutional/national art seems to value a sort of presence that neither elicits an intense response (in me, at least) nor appears particularly complex. OTOH, it used to be a common insult among art critics to call a work "polite," which I suspect meant that, like this institutional art, its first concern was with avoiding ruffling feathers.
All I meant by my "vestigial" comment above was that, 40 or 50 years ago, it was common to "justify" an abstract artist by saying that they had a license to be abstract because they were also capable of making representational works - their skills in representation demonstrated that they were 'real artists' and adjusted the reading of the abstracts. Something of the same attitude still prevailed when I went to art school in the early 90s. I honestly don't know why drawing would necessarily help a conceptual artists much these days, except as a general sort of planning skill.
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zvi and
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Date: 2009-06-20 01:24 pm (UTC)That makes perfect sense to me until I try to build an argument around it, and have to figure out what intensity and complexity mean. I still think it's basically true for my own aesthetics, but I don't think it covers all agendas: a lot of institutional/national art seems to value a sort of presence that neither elicits an intense response (in me, at least) nor appears particularly complex. OTOH, it used to be a common insult among art critics to call a work "polite," which I suspect meant that, like this institutional art, its first concern was with avoiding ruffling feathers.
All I meant by my "vestigial" comment above was that, 40 or 50 years ago, it was common to "justify" an abstract artist by saying that they had a license to be abstract because they were also capable of making representational works - their skills in representation demonstrated that they were 'real artists' and adjusted the reading of the abstracts. Something of the same attitude still prevailed when I went to art school in the early 90s. I honestly don't know why drawing would necessarily help a conceptual artists much these days, except as a general sort of planning skill.