One wants to see the artifice of the thing as well as the subject

One wants to see the artifice of the thing as well as the subject.

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no one seems to be coming over to this thread dude.

It is very early in the morning.

True

What are you doing here?

I liked the conversations in the last thread even though they were sparse.

It seems I'm one of the few that actually speaks to others in these threads. For the most part it's either very sparse or nonexistent.

The avatar fags usually like to spark conversation though.

I am one of them. For the most part they talk to one another. I'll talk to anybody who wants to talk depending on what they want to talk about.

They've always talked to me when I commented on one of their posts though. I've talked to you before as well.

They will sometimes talk to others, but many of them are sort of exclusive. There's at least one I know that will not talk to people he doesn't already know even if they're avataring.

I need to update the names of most of these to make it say they are all privately owned. I only retained maybe five of them.

I do like your paintings, I'm not a huge fan of the heads, although I know they have a different sort of meaning to you.

First it was hideous looking heads...
Now its "art"

What is this shit even

The heads are a bit difficult for a lot of people to grasp. They think that for the most part the heads are creepy. My latest paintings are also a bit difficult for a lot of people since they're so sparse.

I don't know what you are talking about.

I'm so fucking bored.

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I am too.

What made you decide to be an artist?

I couldn't do anything else. I couldn't write, I wasn't interested in science, I've always been bad at math, and I've always drawn since I was a child. When I entered college and tried my hand at other things it just wasn't right. Art was the only thing that made sense to me. When I am working the buzzing of existence stops and I'm overwhelmed with a sense of calm.

I find the heads interesting, but they aren't for me.
I was the opposite, I'm terrible at art, but I was always at the very least average in mathematics, the sciences, and writing.

I envy that.
I still don't know what to do with myself. I'm working and this line of work could carry me through life but it's just not satisfying.

I was always good at history, and I was interested in it. But I was never really happy in those courses and showed up only half the time. The classes for my art major I never missed or was late for. I felt comfortable and honest in those classes and they fascinated me more than anything else. I was never able to think for too long about history, but I always think about art.

Do only what satisfies you, that's why I am an artist. It was the only thing that made me feel real, feel alive. I can breathe when I am in art or surrounded by it.

I understand where you're coming from. I was never happy in any of my courses so after I graduated I joined the military and was unhappy there too. I'm still trying to find a career field or study that satisfies me.

What do you like to do for fun?

I wish I knew what satisfies me. It was a huge mistake leaving high school to get high with my friends. College would have at the least been a good opportunity to find out about myself.
The only things I get enjoyment from is playing video games and jerking off but lately I've been desperate for a real person to be with and it's putting me off porn.

That's the main reason I don't jerk off. I like it when I am being satisfied by another person. If video games are your interest there are careers in that, though they are very difficult to get. I happen to know several people who do that. This city has several HQs for various game companies including Blizzard.

I don't really have any hobbies. The jobs I've had were interesting until I figured out whatever there was to it and then I got bored. I like hanging out with friends, but most of my friends here are people I knew even before high school. None of them went to college and most of them are ex heroine addicts. I will always support them and I care about them, but I'm missing something.

Probably personal fulfillment. If you like helping people perhaps you should think of social work or even being a therapist.

I've always heard awful things about that industry.
I guess I've enjoyed writing. I haven't done it in a few years. The problem was I would look back at my half completed stories and think they were trash and give up on them, so I gave up writing all together.
Maybe I should get back into that.

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Those career fields don't make a lot of money though. I kind of want obscene amounts of money because with enough of it you can do almost anything you want.

I have too. I am friends with a person who was a concept artist for a video game company. He quit within six months of getting the job and stopped doing art altogether.

If you want a lot of money you're looking at either wall street jobs, becoming famous, starting a popular website and then selling it, or inventing something.

So you got tired of taking pictures of your dick for other men did you

Wow, that is bad. I had always assumed that concept artists had one of the less demanding jobs.

I don't ever take pictures of my dick.

I know, but I don't think I'm capable of that. I'm a bit too meek. I'm also not creative enough for that. I'm good at manipulating/using people, but it isn't the right way to go about things.

It's all office politics. It would seem especially bad in an industry that requires creativity. Artists can be some of the biggest babies you'll ever meet.

Then you're not going to be obscenely rich. The world doesn't reward the average person.

I took pictures of my dick for another man once. He made me feel special.

If I manipulate enough people and steal their ides I could be another Edison though.

You've never really come off as a baby to me. Then again I don't know many artists and only recently started coming here regularly.

Yes, but now people are much more wary these days. And if a person can prove you stole from them you will have to payout.

I'm a fine artist. It is a bit different for us. Fine artists are all solitary animals that don't work well with others and so we don't.

All you need to do is change one tiny thing and they can't do anything about it. Especially if its not patented. In fact patenting something opens you up to legal idea theft.

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That's not how patents work. Even if you make the change if it's a change that would seem obvious then they will not rule in your favor. There was a case in the Supreme Court where they overturned all patents on human genes.

Well it was nice chatting to you. I like that there's usually someone willing to have a conversation with me in fur threads. Hopefully in the future I will have other things to talk about than my regrets
Time I hit the hay.

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I am always willing to talk about most things.

On the surface of it impressionist iconography is a deeper level of engagement, but this fails to recognize that representations are *already* imbued with subtext simply by existing. What we recognize as "reality" is actually a fiction we use to make sense of raw sensory perception, applying memory, meaning, and expectation through the schema of our perception to create a narrative which we recognize as identity. For instance, it's not some objective Platonic quality of doorness which makes something a door; it's our application of a narrative to a particular object of its function which makes it a door.

This is why I love Lucien Freud; he's able to show both the surface *and* the subtext beneath it without resorting to pure symbolism.

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Then just use subterfuge and convoluted ideas to confuse them enough.

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I was never fond of Freud's work. I get it, I'm just not overly fond of it. It's too academic for me. Too formal.

Confusion won't get them to rule in your favor because they will ask for clarity.

You should see his work in person before you make up your mind. I had the opportunity to see one of his travelling exhibitions, and was totally blown away when I could see them up close. For instance, there's a painting where you can see how he savagely attacked the canvas while painting a penis, building up these jagged cliffs of angry reds and oranges, which gives the painting a sort of emotional spectrum which changes from spot to spot depending on where you look. It really is amazing.

As far as 20th century portraiture goes I am absolutely involved with the work of Alberto Giacometti. His paintings and sculptures are so far beyond creating just a likeness. His work is wholly about not creating just an avatar of the person, a sort of stand in as it were, but in actually remaking the person in their entirety.

I grew up in the 70s, and half the public artwork on display was a pastiche of Giacometti, so I'm a bit biased. To me it feels soulless and derivative, the kind of stuff you see in mall fountains. Safe art for suburban soccer moms. There's none of the kind of raw emotional wounds on display like Freud's work. What do you think of Mueck?

See, a Giacometti and a something that is supposed to look like a Giacometti are entirely different. Giacometti's work is wholly its own thing, its haunting and fills you with anxiety. Mueck bores me, as do people like Chuck Close. Most Postmodern work is very boring to me, there is some fantastic and exciting work that comes from Postmodernists, but people involved in traditional modes of painting, as in portraiture and the like, put me to sleep. I am very much a Modernist.

You didn't address the subterfuge. Add on some bribes and you've got whatever you want.

If you can afford to bribe a judge. And then you've got the possibility of going to prison.

You realize that the rise of postmodernism was a direct result of the recognition that the modernists were a sham,. right? Picasso would spend 10 minutes doodling a sketch any time he wanted to buy a loaf of bread because there was always some crass, cultureless clod with too much money who'd buy used toilet paper as long as Picasso had wiped his ass with it.

That's why money is everything.

Modernism is by no means a sham. Postmodernism comes from a rebellion of the younger generation to the older generation. You had American and other Modernists working post war filling their work with anxiety and despair over things like the atom bomb. The Postmodernists saw how they acted and decided to go against it. They decided art didn't have to be filled with anxiety and despair.

Not for me.

I highly prefer this one over the rest.

Now, the Dadaists weren't exactly rejecting the idea of art altogether, instead they were demanding a definition of art. Ducham's ready mades were entirely about upturning this idea that art is only objects in the context of the gallery or museum. He was demanding a clarity of that definition, could it be any object? Why not these objects? Why those objects? Dada was so Postmodern they existed before Postmodern theory even existed.

Interesting.

I'm genuinely happy for you. I think money is the only thing that can make me happy though. Nothing else has worked, so maybe money will.

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Well, you're entitled to your opinion I suppose, but it's ironic that you criticize Freud as being too "formal," but support an art movement based on crass commercialization designed to convince rich people that they were sophisticated because the painting on their wall didn't look like a bowl of apples.

I'm not interested in feeling happy. I'm interested in feeling alive. Art gives me that feeling.

Who is it that you're talking about exactly when you say an art movement based on crass yada yada yada? Do you mean the Cubists? As far as crass commercialization goes what about Pop art? That is entirely about commercialization.

Pop art is commercial but not crass. The whole point of pop art is that it's both a send-up of itself as a commercial product, but also a commercial product. It's mocking itself for not being deep, which gives it a kind of raw honesty. Not my cup of tea, but respectable. And when I think of modernism, I'm generally referring to the impressionists, people like Picasso, Gaugin, Degas, and Chagall. If they were alive today, they'd all have man-buns and ride fixies barefoot on their way to Starbucks to buy organic, artisinal moustache wax.

Picasso was a Cubist, Chagall was an Expressionist. The Cubists were quite extraordinary in their heyday as were the Expressionists. When I think of early Modernists though, I think of people like Mondrian, Cezzane, Matisse, and van Gogh. Warhol and those along his lines are not for me, though Lichtenstein and Theibaud are absolutely brilliant.

The extension of Pop art in the 1980s, dubbed by some as The Branding Movement was entirely crass commercialization. The whole point of that group was that their work was literally a product. Jeff Koons was a commodities trader before becoming a sculptor. Kostabi sells his art by the yard. Neither Koons nor Kostabi actually make their own work. They just sign their name to it. There is a video of Kostabi talking to a person at a gallery showing of his work. In the video he asks if the person minds that he didn't make the work that he signed his name to. The woman answers that it doesn't bother her at all.

These drawings and paintings I did several years ago while still living in California while searching for a mode that I could work in and feel good about. It wasn't until after I moved to Texas and lost interest in both structure and concealment that my work has become something worth looking at.

You might think it pedantic of me to insist on the distinction of the different schools, but it's really a requirement when it comes to discussing art. To lump them all together is to ignore the specific reasoning behind their works. Gauguin had as much to do with Cubism and Expressionism as Pollock did to Pop Art and Minimalism.

Gauguin is closer in temperament to the "Wild Beasts" and than he is to the Cubists. Especially since the Cubists were interested in the exploding of the picture frame to allow multiple views of the same object to exist concurrently.

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Is it just myself and a lone furry left?

I'm lurking cos I read the posts about pop-art and thought you may have something to say about Banksy.

But the whole site if acting up so I was thinking of closing it and having a fap.

But what do your paintings *mean* my man???

Banksy is a phony. All the famous guerilla artists are.

What do you think they mean?

Shephard Fairy is the most disgusting of them though.

How are they phony? What does that mean? They're creating something that people want to own.

People look at it and interpret it, which is what artists want (you just asked what he thinks your paintings mean).

Plus they're making their own art. You just said that Koons nor Kostabi didn't. So are they more or less phony than that?

Not trying to argue. Just trying to get the opinion of someone who knows more about art than I do.

They are phony because they espouse this sort of anticapitalist message in their work, but turn around and sell their work for thousands, if not millions of dollars. They bought into the very system they are supposed to be fighting against. Koons and Kostbi don't create their work, but that's the point. They are making art, but they are treating it only as a commodity. Koons even goes so far as to have his sculptures made at workshops that specialize in making souvenir porcelain bric-a-brac. Kostabi works in a large factory he dubbed Kostabi world to highlight the fact that his work is only worth the price people are willing to buy it for.

And I asked that person because I feel like their intentions are to mock me, which is fine. They can not like my work if they want. This is my old stuff, so what it means to me is just an exploration of material, composition, working methods, and the like.

What do you guys think of my drawing

I don't understand this meemay.

It's a drawing I did. Here's another. It's a WIP I still gotta completely redo her face

Forgot pic

I mean, if you're being sincere, they remind me of the tamer works of Expressionists like Beckmann.

And another

Huh. Would've thought you'd have more to say considering how much you've been talking this whole thread

I love this

Okay, I'd say study the works of the Expressionists and learn how they compose their images.

Thanks, boo