Jackson Pollock’s Largest Painting Is Touring the World, and Its Mysteries Are Coming to Light artnews May 5, 2020 2:07pm
Progressives can't comprehend how Trump supporters can overlook the utter absurdity of the stuff he says, but they’re ready to be seen contemplating a big formless drop cloth if it’s attributed to Jackson Pollock. Both are examples of faith over reason and to a rational neutral party they actually look about the same.
The painting cited in the article was commissioned for a hallway outside Peggy Guggenheim's apartment in NY, twenty four feet of blank space. The lore has it that Pollock didn’t do anything but stare at it for days and days until finally, at the very last moment, he completed it all in one night. That must have been a really long night because a crew of high school kids, each with a paint bucket marching back and forth stroking and smearing and cleaned up next morning couldn’t have done it. They told this improbable fable because there’s really not much to see, a classic example of the sizzle not the steak. Opportunistic commentators climbed onboard.
One thing is for sure, however: Mural was an instant hit. Critic Clement Greenberg wrote, “I took one look at it and I thought, ‘Now that’s great art,’ and I knew Jackson was the greatest painter this country had produced.”
So Mr. Greenberg who are you exactly, some literary nobody who in a blinding flash recognizes great art and suddenly you’re famous too, haven’t we seen this act before? Clement took point position for abstract expressionism but lots of popular publications, scholarly treatises, tax sheltering foundations and the mighty NEA were ready to declare figurative art of any sort dead, obsolete, retrograde and boring. In college art classes students were told copying nature was too ‘easy.’ The motives and the mechanics of this reconstruction of the cultural landscape are covered in this blog twice just recently, but the result in any case was to rob the american people of a form of uncensored communication and expression. Was the cultural lobotomy of the populace the main goal or just collateral damage of the cold war rivalry of mirror-image adversaries, it doesn’t matter now.
It’s time to look at art for what’s actually there, and not imagine instead that it represents some many-tiered edifice of successive brilliant conceptual breakthroughs, the world of art like a child's tea-set version of science where real discoveries are made. I don’t care how many zeros go on the price tag, three hundred of the same thing with slight variation isn’t a signature style, it’s a trademark straight away. By now third generation derivations of the modern masters hang in motel rooms and medical facilities everywhere, so that after all these years average people don’t remember what was lost. Well it isn’t going to be that difficult to fix this problem if we each do our parts.
The first thing would be to really recognize Jackson Pollock in his work as alcohol-drenched, nihilistic and defeated, it’s all there. Against the wall in a goodwill store instead of a grand museum, think about it. Average citizens understands this well enough, they have eyes. Well it couldn’t last forever. As soon as some small independent art museum decides to deaccession a Rothko or two and beat the rush, the real value of the industry’s sacred stockpile will be revealed, a hissing balloon, any day. The next thing you can do is to start looking at all the art available in your neighborhood and thereabouts. Pictures of things have voices, and people who look at a lot of art can hear them. When one sings a song you like take it home, it won’t cost millions.
Progressives can't comprehend how Trump supporters can overlook the utter absurdity of the stuff he says, but they’re ready to be seen contemplating a big formless drop cloth if it’s attributed to Jackson Pollock. Both are examples of faith over reason and to a rational neutral party they actually look about the same.
The painting cited in the article was commissioned for a hallway outside Peggy Guggenheim's apartment in NY, twenty four feet of blank space. The lore has it that Pollock didn’t do anything but stare at it for days and days until finally, at the very last moment, he completed it all in one night. That must have been a really long night because a crew of high school kids, each with a paint bucket marching back and forth stroking and smearing and cleaned up next morning couldn’t have done it. They told this improbable fable because there’s really not much to see, a classic example of the sizzle not the steak. Opportunistic commentators climbed onboard.
One thing is for sure, however: Mural was an instant hit. Critic Clement Greenberg wrote, “I took one look at it and I thought, ‘Now that’s great art,’ and I knew Jackson was the greatest painter this country had produced.”
So Mr. Greenberg who are you exactly, some literary nobody who in a blinding flash recognizes great art and suddenly you’re famous too, haven’t we seen this act before? Clement took point position for abstract expressionism but lots of popular publications, scholarly treatises, tax sheltering foundations and the mighty NEA were ready to declare figurative art of any sort dead, obsolete, retrograde and boring. In college art classes students were told copying nature was too ‘easy.’ The motives and the mechanics of this reconstruction of the cultural landscape are covered in this blog twice just recently, but the result in any case was to rob the american people of a form of uncensored communication and expression. Was the cultural lobotomy of the populace the main goal or just collateral damage of the cold war rivalry of mirror-image adversaries, it doesn’t matter now.
It’s time to look at art for what’s actually there, and not imagine instead that it represents some many-tiered edifice of successive brilliant conceptual breakthroughs, the world of art like a child's tea-set version of science where real discoveries are made. I don’t care how many zeros go on the price tag, three hundred of the same thing with slight variation isn’t a signature style, it’s a trademark straight away. By now third generation derivations of the modern masters hang in motel rooms and medical facilities everywhere, so that after all these years average people don’t remember what was lost. Well it isn’t going to be that difficult to fix this problem if we each do our parts.
The first thing would be to really recognize Jackson Pollock in his work as alcohol-drenched, nihilistic and defeated, it’s all there. Against the wall in a goodwill store instead of a grand museum, think about it. Average citizens understands this well enough, they have eyes. Well it couldn’t last forever. As soon as some small independent art museum decides to deaccession a Rothko or two and beat the rush, the real value of the industry’s sacred stockpile will be revealed, a hissing balloon, any day. The next thing you can do is to start looking at all the art available in your neighborhood and thereabouts. Pictures of things have voices, and people who look at a lot of art can hear them. When one sings a song you like take it home, it won’t cost millions.
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