Ted Rall for February 29, 2012

A comic ARTist speaks…

Another gooder spellar lick me? Mlore better,gooder.

Say,I am archaic. Thjank you very much..

Ted,

Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang had a piece sell for $10M last year. Zhang Xiaogang is alive.

Do work of that quality, and you might have a valid complaint. Until then, be happy you can sell some books with your work in it, and be happy you’ve found media channels such as this to advertise your work.

That’s a hilarious notion, that pre-historic artists were venerated and owned a seller’s market.

Marshall McLuhan, what’re ya doin’?

“’Art’ died when talentless hacks like Andy Warhol could sell pictures of soup cans for Millions of dollars!"

Warhol was hardly ‘talentless’, and he was more a symptom of the commoditization of Art than a cause (well, maybe “catalyst” is a better word). I think perhaps Pop Art should have followed the arc of Dada (with which it shares much), though. Do something revolutionary, piss the traditionalists off but change the way we think about Art, and then disappear. Instead, 50 years later we’re stuck with Jeff Koons.

“Jeff Koons?”

If you have to ask, you’re better off. But if you don’t like Warhol, you wouldn’t like Jeff Koons either.

But at least you can watch civilization die on beautiful media! And isn’t the medium the message?

No I meant the piece sold for $10M USD.

For a living artist, that is significant. It points a giant mistake Ted Rall makes in his twisted history. Great art is valued in today’s modern marketplace.

In the echelon of great living artists, I’m happy to give Ted Rall some room, but I don’t see his complaints as valid. Sure there are lots of great artists who don’t achieve commercial success. It’s ALWAYS been like that.

The difference between today and, say, 100 years ago is Van Gogh. Nobody wants to be the guy who passed on snapping up “Starry Night” for the price of a dinner.

1) Every artist who can’t sell a piece believes he (or she) is the next Van Gogh.2) The next Van Gogh may well be an artist who cannot sell a piece.3) Nobody TODAY can tell who the next Van Gogh will be; not the gallery owners, not the speculators (excuse me, “collectors”), not the critics, not the Art Historians. But if somebody gets a REPUTATION as “the next Van Gogh”, people will beat a path to his (or her) door and throw money at him (or her).

You may be buying Microsoft stock out of Bill Gates’ garage, or you may be investing your life savings in Beanie Babies. There’s no way to tell, and that makes people crazy.

Check out the movie “[untitled]” for a good portrayal of how nobody knows anything anymore when it comes to “Art.”

According to one of my teachers back in the day, Goethe proposed a simple test for all art. 1) What was he trying to do? 2) Did he do it? 3) Was it worth doing? By that standard Warhol fails as do most of the other trash painters.

As much as I respect Goethe in general, I have to take his pronouncements with a grain of salt, if only because in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship he lays out his (Goethe’s) ideas for how Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark might be “improved.”

Tastes and mores change. Not all art is “timeless”, nor need it be. Given Warhol’s interest in the disposable, the ephemeral, and the “current”, he might be wryly amused to consider that his own works have outlasted the era in which (and for which) they were created.

Art critics: