08w17:1 Luc Tuymans Fail

Posted April 23rd, 2008 by timothy. 1 Comment

This totally confirms my art-world cynicism. (Via Boing Boing)

Further, Tuymans image is apparently this one (a screencapture from Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil at 29:50):

Fucking Monkies from Chris Marker’s visit to the Japanese sex museum

Luc Tuymans’ ‘relevant’ version from the above video

John Ralston Saul, in Voltaire’s Bastards (p497-498):

“The official artists do amuse the court of critics, experts and social followers. In a way they are more conservative and patronizing than the official artists of the late 19C. Take Lichtenstein, for example, who was pushed to paint blown-up versions of comic strips when, in 1960, one of his sons pointed to a Mickey Mouse comic book ad said, ‘I bet you can’t paint as good as that.’ He painted an outsized picture of Donald Duck. In 1962 he caused a sensation in the art world with his cartoon-based show at the Castelli gallery in New York. In November 1963 Lichtenstein said, ‘My work is different from comic strips – but I wouldn’t call it a transformation…. What I do is form, whereas the comic strip is not formed in the sense I’m using the word; the comics have shapes, but there has been no effort to make them intensely unified.’ 19 This may sound surprisingly pretentious from the mouth of the leading pop artist, but Lichtenstein, after all, for a good part of his life was a university professor of art. On the other hand, copying comic strips made him rich and famous. This process had to turn, however, on one shared assumption – that Lichtenstein was an artist, while the cartoonists were not.”

“There could be no clearer example of how completely the craft and art functions have been separated by Western society. In hijacking the secondary idea of personal artistic merit, the artist himself loses track not simply of the technical craft so essential to earlier painters, but of the real relationship between the painter’s image and the public. Lichtenstein ripped off the true public images – the comics – while denigrating them and thus amusing his fellow experts. Like most people caught up in the abstract reality of ritual, they assumed quire naturally that the cartoon was just an amusing tool to be manipulated by their talents. There really isn’t much difference between Marie Antoinette’s bon mot over bread and brioche and Warhol’s soup cans. They are both expressions of clever artificiality, not of intelligent relevance. “