Unsuitable for Framing

So there I was, sitting in the exam room of my physician, naked except for the modesty sheet the nurse had given me, freezing my ass off.  Don’t call the florist just yet, girls, it is just a routine annual physical.  When you get to the age where there is more hair on your back than on your head they come with the territory.  As is common in the market place of medical services I was waiting.  Now I don’t mind, I don’t really have anything else to do.  But for fear of having the sheet slide off of my chiseled physique, I opted to use both hands to hold it in place foregoing the opportunity to peruse the Time magazine offering the latest news of the Romney candidacy for president.  To keep my chattering teeth from destroying themselves I concentrated on the sole piece of artwork in the room, an impressionist painting (I’m quite confident it was a print reproduction because, although my doctor practices in Del Mar, a rather snooty coastal community in North San Diego County, I doubt they decorate with original art work) that as best I could decipher was an ocean scene of some kind populated with a myriad of boats.

After considerable effort, I decided it was either a regatta on some bay fronting a city skyline featuring a large skyscraper or, a rather interpretive depiction of the battle of Trafalgar at the instant of a massive explosion hoisting a waterspout hundreds of feet above Admiral Nelson’s fleet.  I could not make out with certainty any flags that would indicate the nations involved or any freshly severed limbs flying through the air so I faulted on the side of the regatta theme.

 I share this story not to titillate (remember, I was naked) but to launch a rant about art and the pretentiousness associated with it. Let me state; I believe artwork should faithfully portray the subject matter in detail enough that the casual observer does not have to strain his intellect or imagination to recognize it, or grab for a sick bag. The Italian classicists had it right.  When glancing on the visage of David, Michelangelo left no room for misinterpretation.  

Did anybody ever ask Monet to sit for an eye examination?  I feel pretty confident they would have found evidence of severe cataracts or at least astigmatism.  I don’t believe he was using interpretive imagination.  I think the guy painted exactly what he saw!  How do I know?  Because when I take my contact lenses out, the world looks just like a Monet painting… and I qualify as legally blind.  But art aficionados being who they are, one of them one day encountered a Monet painting and, to bolster his own standing as an expert, christened the style “impressionist”.  All of his associates, not wanting to seem out of step with the current trends in art, harrumphed, nodded, chewed their Victorian mustaches and said, “Quite! Impressionist! Extraordinary!” And thus, the movement was begun.

But did they stop there?  No!  There is only so much demand in the world for paintings featuring fuzzy flowers. The maestro painters of the twentieth century observed, quite rightly, that their medium was being usurped by the science of photography.  So the painters, to keep up, created super-realism.  This is painting that strives to reproduce the clarity and sharpness of the photograph.  But after a short while, the artists discovered that after all the hours of painstaking micro-brush strokes they had delivered something that could be accomplished by a talented amateur with a modest quality camera and a diligent processing lab in a fraction of the time at an iota of the cost.  In other words, the economics of super-realism didn’t pan out… thank you Mr. Eastman. 

Picasso? Please! Give me a straight edge and a box of crayons.  I’ll show you cubism!

The art world, seeking to remain relevant, then looked to the other extreme for its salvation.  If they couldn’t be more accurate in capturing the realities of the visual world, they could certainly be more obtuse.  So, you take the post World War II social upheaval, a total relaxation of any standards and mix in copious amounts of illicit pharmaceuticals, voila, you have abstract… e.g., Jackson Pollock!  Has anyone besides me considered that his work was the product of poor attention span and drug induced tremor?

 

 

There is one school of art that has caught my eye; Surrealism.  At least when Dali offers you a melting watch, you know it is a melting watch!  The philosophy eludes me.  Why would a watch melt?  I know the processes by which one could make a watch melt.  I just don’t see value. (I refer you to my blog posting of 8/22/13, How or Why?)

 

 

 I could go on and on with examples but I’ve exhausted my meager knowledge of fine, or not-so fine, art. And any way, by doctor has entered the room and she gets nervous when I mumble to myself during the examination.

 “Turn your head and cough.”