ICN...art or just visual piss? (1 Viewer)

Remember reading this article last year. Kind of a shit article.

[font=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]Dim, cloned conservatives[/font][font=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]

Modern graffiti is not subversive - it is a formulaic, bankrupt cliche

[/font][font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Jonathan Jones
[/font][font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Saturday August 7, 2004
[/font][font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Guardian

[/font][font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]The French artist Jean Dubuffet gave the name "art brut", raw or wild art, to the untutored graphic productions of children, the insane and graffitists. A statement signed this week by Tony Blair deserves to be recognised as "criticism brut" - ignorant, clumsy, yet a stroke of raw genius. In apparent unawareness of 50 years of modern thinking, Blair and 121 MPs have signed a statement published by Keep Britain Tidy in response to its report that councils spend £27m a year erasing street daubs. Endorsing the hygienic organisation's call for zero tolerance of teenagers with spray cans, the MPs declare baldly that "graffiti is not art, it's crime". [/font] [font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]The natural liberal response to this is to defend the richness and wildness of graffiti, the layers of rotting posters, scrawled secret language and spray-can calligraphy that makes dull walls speak hidden dreams in fat lurid lettering. But I don't feel like standing up for Banksy, Wanksy and whoever else is currently rated as a subversive street artist. Most of them are boring, talentless mediocrities who benefit from exhausted ideas that protect graffiti and exaggerate its aesthetic merits. [/font]

[font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]To deny any connection between graffiti and art is not tenable, given the fascination it has exerted on serious painters since the second world war. Dubuffet's discovery of outsider art, including street writing and drawings, in 1940s France had immense creative repercussions. The American painter Cy Twombly took it as an excuse to write indecipherably on his canvases, creating a dirty beauty redolent of a library toilet (some of the most erudite graffiti in Britain vanished when the old British Library closed, along with its conveniences). In the 1980s the intellectualism of Twombly and Dubuffet spawned a far coarser appropriation of street painting by art dealers who fell over themselves to represent the graffitists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. And that's when it all went wrong for graffiti. [/font]

[font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]The random and spontaneous street writings that artists started to look at in the 1940s really did have a barbarous, artless quality. In a 1948 painting by the American realist Bernard Perlin, two boys stand in front of a wall on Canal Street in lower Manhattan that's covered with jagged inscriptions, names of the otherwise nameless, completely without the idea of art yet collectively forming a manic pattern. It's exactly this quality of an art that does not want to be art, that has never heard of art, that Dubuffet was looking for. Once an artist is aware of the expectations of "culture", Dubuffet claimed, she loses all originality: the only art that matters is the art that does not know itself. Graffiti half a century ago had this innocence. It has long been commercialised, corrupted and, worst of all, acknowledged. [/font]

[font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Graffiti can only be interesting as art if it lacks art - if it is indeed, as Keep Britain Tidy insists, "crime". To create official graffiti walls, invite graffitists to transfer their style on to canvas or album covers, to photograph it for coffee table books and pompously defend it against old people who find the scrawls outside their flats frightening, is not only a bit naff, belatedly advocating something that had its day in Manhattan galleries 30 years ago, it kills whatever real interest graffiti might have. [/font]

[font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Graffiti began as a great modern idea; but it has become a bankrupt cliche. Dubuffet loathed European fine art for being routinised by convention. But if you really want to see the dead hand of convention, look at graffiti. The spray-can notations are not spontaneous or raw, they are regulated, repetitive. We all know the form: chunky fat lettering, mega-sized cartoons, tags. The crude signatures that Perlin portrayed on a wall in New York 50-odd years ago would not hack it as graffiti at all now - where's the art? If you want to be recognised as a graffiti artist, to be allowed to decorate a council-tolerated wall, or defended by art critics, you have to paint in what has become, since the 1980s, a highly formalised style. [/font]

[font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]The intellectuals who first saw graffiti as outsider art, and drew on its rough power for their own paintings, had nothing in common with the minor artists who emerged from the 80s Manhattan graffiti scene. And yet it is those minor 80s talents who provide the example to today's spray-can wannabes. Why? Because Haring and Basquiat made money and became famous. So now we must pay attention to their dim clones, whose art is in reality conservative. In fact, graffiti could hardly be more conservative in its notion of what art is. Why is graffiti art? Because it's painting. Which pretty much places graffiti artists in the same camp as the Daily Mail. [/font]

[font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Graffiti has become as dreary as the record industry that commissions it for album covers. Its gallery version is bought by pathetic record producers to hang on the wall to assert streetness. Call it art if you want. But it's very bad art, and about as subversive as copperplate handwriting.
[/font]
 
paul- said:
I really dont understand how people get so worked up about seeing seeing tags around town.
Personally i feel all street art,wether its a banksy stencil or someone initials done with a shitty marker,helps brake the monotony of endless brick walls and billboards.

There is some pretty nasty racist "street art" out my back lane.

It's cool though cos it's "art", right?
 
spiritualtramp said:
There is some pretty nasty racist "street art" out my back lane.

It's cool though cos it's "art", right?
Well obviously theirs exceptions...duh.
Im not going to defend the daubing of swastikas on synagouges or similair ignorant expressions but for the most part little messages,initals,thoughts...etc left around the walls of town i really enjoy reading...simple as.
 
BBC News - Cheltenham Banksy 'Spy Booth' artwork defaced


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This really was the most irritating thread ever. I don't know what I was hoping for, but I didn't get it. I left thinking that the apologists were all delusional brats. I don't think I was wrong. And the conflation of "street art" with the inescapable ICN / UEK shit-trail...ugh. Miserable. It was so much worse 9 years ago though.
 
I was just taking a piss..and I had this very same thought..I even thought about starting a thread called FUCK ART (all capitals natch)

My point being..unless you are painting up some mad crazy shit thats far out or just generally using your hands and mind to make stuff thats AWESOME looking.

It isnt art.
 

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