Art – A Brief History by Marilyn Stokstad – on Realini’s Best 150 non Fiction books list http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world 10 out of 10

 Art – A Brief History by Marilyn Stokstad – on Realini’s Best 150 non Fiction books list http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world

10 out of 10

 

 

The erudite and very well educated, plus the snobs and pretentious ruffians will dismiss this work as too simple, basic, maybe irrelevant for them, as they have accumulated much more than they can find within and it may well be that this meant for those with little information and knowledge about art, trying to educate the masses (as those ‘fool’s guides’) and remind those who have forgotten periods, classic paintings, authors, styles, including names like Constantin Brancusi, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso.

 

This is a turbulent time for the under signed and he is very upset with a question of…art, wherein this Brief History would come in handy, for it is good to remember Marcel Duchamp, who is mentioned within and the readers are invited to answer a question related to him – at the end of the various sections, we are offered choices for the questionnaires and in this particular case, I think they gave the choice between Deschamps and Brancusi – and his perhaps most famous, iconoclast work, Urinal called Fountain…

Evidently, this has caused an outcry, just like other breaks with tradition had done and will do in the future, when people have questioned the validity of the new proposition, or most often, dismissed it as nonsense or garbage, the impressionists (my favorite of all) have been rejected and not allowed to expose within the confines of the main arena, until of course they would become mainstream and then they would be left behind by the new waves, currents such as the fauves, best represented by Henri Matisse, or the action painters with their leader Jackson Pollock, the abstractionists with the most famous of all, Pablo Picasso.

 

There is also Damien Hirst, the best-known, most successful artist of the moment presumably, and his famous animals cut in half and then presented in formaldehyde of which he says he prefers it ‘'because it is dangerous and it burns your skin…If you breathe it in it chokes you and it looks like water…I associate it with memory…’

In other words, the concept of what art is a fluid, and there is no universal definition, accepted template, and this why books like Art – A Brief History would help, albeit at the end, what constitutes art would depend very much on the perspective of the viewer - ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ – and for the traditionalists, Rembrandt will always be paramount and the preferred choice, while new waves bring in new thinking…

 

If the artist’s shit constitutes art remains to be debated, unless that has been established and I am not aware of it, when I came across the concept, I laughed and it was included in a short story collection, where that was the intention

 

Mircea Cartarescu, the dominant author in this land, for about two decades the talk of the literati, who think he deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature, has a collection of short stories http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/12/irish-cream-by-mircea-cartarescu.html and in one he mentions this incident, of the can with the shit of the artist that is supposed to be a work of art, and it is both humorous and apparently a serious thing.

Now let us move to the present and see what we can do about another situation like this, which affects the Mogosoaia Palace, a historic and architectural monument, one of a handful of examples of Romanian, Brancovan Architecture, that is the site of an ‘art exhibition’, which means they have gathered some dead branches and placed them within the walls and then on them, near the entrance to the Palace.

 

When I first saw the things, I was sure that they had been dumped by workers who had been constructing, repairing something, and in their negligence and disregard for something alien to them – they lack the education, they are not familiar with the paramount importance – they just threw this against the walls of what is a Protected Building, that is a construction where we are not allowed to Interfere.

Aghast at what was going on – there are other circumstances that I find appalling, such as the waste of energy with public lights that are left unattended for four hours, or maybe ten, each day, the fact that the security guards sleep, or just do not show up for work, a while back, they had watered the lawns with the lights on, because the two systems were connected and nobody bothered to find a remedy, who cares, if it is from the public purse - - I have sent a complaint to the Town hall of the capital, which has control over the place.

 

Twice, they had not answered, sending instead my email to the local ‘Cultural Center’, which has replied pompously that what I saw as garbage is in fact an ‘Art Installation’ and then they continued with a brazen, arrogant, ghastly tone, dismissing the notion that they must stop wasting, for the lights are needed for the security of that ‘oh so important monument’,  but hey, what about the security company, and then the tens of lights are always on surround the tennis court, and are far away from the palace.

Then to the question of the art installation, let us assume that it is priceless – just like the animals cut in half by Damien Hirst, well, the corpses, he does not kill them – and needs to be exhibited, but to the detriment of the Place itself, do they have to put the safety, preservation in danger to the extent that they damage the walls just to put some dead branches in evidence, is that the New Thing, the theme is

Destroy the History and Make Way for the Nihilist new Wave, paid for by taxpayers, under the ‘supervision’ of someone so vain that he destroys the very thing that ensures such a cushy job – there are plenty of other failures, but let me finish with this…they have brought in for the alleys of the area stones that are so big (they are supposed to be fine pebbles) that they make walking almost impossible, never mind people with locomotion issues or the joggers, ordinary humans have trouble using the park…

 

As they say in Under The Volcano, salud y pesetas

http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html