Saxony line I-IV
The last time we wrote on overstockart.com's top ten oil paintings of 2011 featuring paintings no more recent than 79 years. It made me pause for a second. I thought maybe oil paintings stopped being made well. But, as any good thinker does, I went to the source. Upon further investigation I believe that the top ten paintings of 2011 won their award due to the layout and marketing of the website and not because of any intrinsic value within the paintings. Score one for Capitalism, zero for art. But, I did like some of the paintings from artists that I had not ever noticed before.
One of them was a lady by the name of Hannah Höch from my western neighbor of Gotha, Thuringia. She was a German Dada artist who had a penchant bucking against conventions and traditional roles of men and women. Which could explain the hairy arms of a female mannequin or the winking male mask upon slender female legs in those pictures above. Or she could have been like most dada artists and have simply been strange.
Of course, whenever one thinks of Dada art, which is surprisingly often, they instantly think of Marcel Duchamp's seminal piece Fountaine. The thought provoking nature of a urinal has forever shaped the way we view art. The dethroning of the artist as a god and shifting art estimation from valuing the creative process' work to the more sophisticated mind's interpretative prowess has allowed us to have a definition of art so vast that everything can be considered art. (Thankfully for this blog, my labor no longer constitutes the merit of the work. It simply exists as art, next to literary genius like Plato's Republic, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Proust's In Search of Lost Time and Meyer's New Moon).
On a completely unrelated note I recently hung a reproduction of the Mona Lisa at a 14 degree tilt in a frame that I bought from the local hardware store, took a polaroid of it and signed my name on the white bottom part and submitted it to the local art show. The piece is entitled "Abs? Ur De Leibniz" Last night was the opening of the show and my picture was nowhere to be found. I plan on writing a rather scathing oped piece for the New York Times denouncing the bourgeois establishment that this plastic art community now operates under through their neo-expressionist, novocolonial oppressive mechanistic mindset. On the upside however the piece can be found on eBay for the low bargain of $4.95 and rising (plus $19.95 s&h).
Score two for capitalism, zero for art.
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