[lbo-talk] Re: Art is Dead

Brian Siano siano at mail.med.upenn.edu
Sat Aug 23 05:31:27 PDT 2003


On Fri, 22 Aug 2003 21:20:47 -0700 (PDT), Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:


>
> Not at all. Lots of great film/video stuff is being produced all
> across the world, and the videogame culture is in one of its boom
> phases. -- DRR
> ----------
>
> The operative but missing adjective was `traditional', as in
> traditional visual arts, i.e. painting, drawing, printmaking, etc.

Again, I think you're wrong. Sure, most of the stuff we're told is "art" is, frankly, garbage, but a lot of commercial art is Pretty Darned Astounding. Even caricatures in _Entertainment Weekly_ compare favorably with the works of, say, Corvarrubas, and you're likely to see a high degree of both wit and craft in advertising. Take a look through any of the Artists' Directories and catalogs available at most bookstores, sourcebooks for art directors, and you'll see some pretty astounding stuff. (Sure, bitch about it being part of 'corporate culture,' but you might as well reject Michaelangelo for creating 'church culture.')

And let's not forget comic books, which have given us both popular heroes (Superman, Batman), genuinely original artists of profound insight (Robert Crumb), and writer-artists of astounding technique and individual vision (Chris Ware, Charles Burns).

This is one of the greatest times for the visual arts. Sadly, a lot of people just don't know where to look for the really good stuff.



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