Wherefore Art?
Click on image to enlarge.It amuses me when people decry the graffiti splashed all over the buildings, buses, railroad cars, and freeway overpasses of the monstrous sprawling, smog-choked, rat-infested, garbage-strewn eyesores we call cities. To compound the irony, there are people smearing huge canvases with what sometimes looks like excrement, calling it art, and getting it displayed in high-end galleries. I don't claim that all graffiti is good or welcome. Nor do I detest all abstract or conceptual art. But I can tell you that of the two I'll take the graffti, if for no other reason than it explodes out of genuine passion, requires a determination and resourcefulness to accomplish, and carries no reward, other than possible jail time. Now that, to me, is an artist.
posted by John M Crowther @ 7:01 AM
5 Comments:
I beg to differ. If you lived in the same urb as I do, where we are all dependent on the subway to get us to and from work, I don’t believe you would not enjoy looking out through the graffiti scratched onto the glass windows of the shiny new and pristine clean trains that now run on the old Lexington Avenue line. In my opinion, these unremovable scratches do not explode out of genuine passion, nor do they require a determination and resourcefulness to accomplish. They’re just vandalism of the laziest sort.
Ah, but that assumes I accept the "city" as anything but human detritus, and the subway as anything more than the humans' equivalent of one of those little wheels in a hamster cage. I won't claim that all graffiti is art. I personally feel that about 99.5% of what self-proclaimed artists do in the name of Impressionism should get them 10 to 20. But even if one condemns graffiti, it would still be blight upon blight.
Among the various pieces of art I own are two photos of graffitti decorated freight cars. A local Lansing artist hunts them down. John you need to get back to Italy. LA is souring you. the late sci-fi writer Ted Sturgeon once said 99% of everything is crud.roger
>>John you need to get back to Italy. LA is souring you.<<
Roger may be right in his diagnosis. A couple of early morning hours looking at La Primavera in the Uffizi followed by a hot cappuccino and a cold bath … or a even a cold cappuccino and a hot bath, for the matter – would probably do the trick. Graffiti is to Botticelli what a hotdog is to a Fiorentina steak.
I could be wrong but isn't this the attitude of most of the famous people in Hollywood. Not knowing any of them, can only go on what I hear on the so called news stations. Great cartoon, John C.
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