Squirm squirm squirm

Full doc is in the hopper, as if any of you philistines fucking care.

Opinions formed from study, reason and logic, with a dash of righteous vitrolic smug: + 1

Opinions formed from Yodawg logic based on money: - infinity

now's about a good enough of a time to say if you pay for your kids art school, they are never going to amount to more than slaves to guys like that (not hughes)

The worst taste on exhibit here is Robert Hughes' arrogance and rudeness. His attempt to dress this man down, to humiliate him publicly, for not being smart enough, cool enough, well-educated and articulate enough, is grotesque.

The art world has *always* had a complex, conflicted, paradoxical relationship to money, status, and power. This was as true in DaVinci's day as it was in Warhol's as it is now. A lot of contemporary art and art criticism is itself an investigation of these issues. Trying to embarrass some random rich collector for liking Richard Prince and Damien Hirst (gasp!) adds nothing worthwhile to that conversation.

Robert Hughes has done some good stuff in his career but this is tacky bullshit.

I don't know. I went to art school. I sat in a lot of rooms with a lot of slides passing by. I've gone to every museum I can personally afford to visit. My tastes are to the architectural these days. I have grown attached to the practical. The great irony of my obsession with art seems to be that I no longer find "art" worth obsessing over.

I'm glad rich folks are still buying art. Keeps them from buying guns.

Haha, Jeff freaking Koons.

A lot of these wealthy collectors don't even choose their own art, there are consultants and companies that specialize in that, you don't have to cultivate your own tastes if you have the money to hire someone else to think for you.

When that guy said the Klimt piece is no Mona Lisa, that got me thinking (perhaps for the first time): why is the Mona Lisa, of all things, considered such a classic? Turns out the Internet had what seems like a pretty good answer:

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The Mona Lisa revolutionized painting. The pose itself broke tradition--previously, portraits were invariably full length. Leonardo introduced the waist-up, hands-folded-on-lap approach, which allowed for a much more intimate treatment. The pose was imitated immediately and became fashionable for portraiture by such painters are Raphael. The background is painted in a gradation of lights and colors, losing details in the distance, instead of the traditional approach in which foreground and background are equally distinct. Mona herself is rendered with extraordinary vividness--one has a sense of viewing the living woman. (The effortless realism of photography has perhaps diminished our capacity to appreciate this.) Leonardo displayed in this work a mastery of technique that was unknown at the time, profoundly impressed his contemporaries, and has seldom been equalled since.

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Okay, I'm sold. It's a bit like "Citizen Kane" or "The Birth of a Nation" before it, in terms of introducing new techniques we consider so routine these days, we don't even pay attention to them any longer. (The thing we notice about "The Birth of a Nation" today, the rampaging racism, was probably its least surprising characteristic 97 years ago.)