The Fine Art Blog of Daz and Holly

I wrote the following as a comment in the blog of Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn about the bravotv.com artist reality show "Work of art the next great artist".

Obviously you can’t manufacture a great artist, if you could then the Renaissance would have had even more masters than the ones we know. It takes something more than just the talent to render something realistically and juxtapose color with motifs to make great art.

You can be competent and popular like Michelangelo or competent and un-popular like the early days of ‘Modern art’ and still be considered great, but if what you do is so similar to what others have done before then you are probably not going to be ‘great’ in the long run.

There is only one Jackson Pollock, lets face it, as brilliant as you are, you will never reach the lofty heights of ‘great’ by splattering paint on a canvas, no matter how good your work is. Pollock has already defined the genre and you will be a follower.

You cannot be a follower and be ‘great’, you can be brilliant and a genius and beloved and rich and famous, but ‘great’ means that you have something unique.

Anyway, here’s the comment I left on the bravotv site. BTW Jeanne implied that the present times were vulgar in terms of art.

The show is pretty good for the medium it is in and should be fun to see what happens. I really hope you can get Yoko Ono to guest on a show and really have the artists think out of the box! As Gauguin said "Art is either plagiarism or revolution."

I agree with the conclusion on the death portrait, that was a piece of art I have never seen before, even though the elements were familiar, which is a good sign to me, and a good sign that the judges are competent.

Why would you define the present as "vulgar"? There has been almost a century of everything from Piero Manzoni’s cans of you-know-what, Duchamp’s "Fountain", "white on white" paintings etc. Heck it’s been over 30 years since punk rock changed the art world.

Vulgar really doesn’t define ‘the present’ in my opinion as vulgar implies that people are somehow less moral or educated than in the past and I would say that it is the opposite. At the very least, we have decades of defining obscenity behind us and I would say that we are actually just bored with ‘shock value’ art these days.

These are not vulgar times, heck, look at how tame most of the artists on the show are! I think we all know someone in a ceramics class that make a "titty tile" haha!

The present is also a time of exponential growth of real outsider art, not just people who don’t want to get a real job to support themselves and their art or even educate themselves like Erik but people generally not considered ‘serious artists’.

Look on art sites like Deviantart dot com or even etsy dot com to see art by people who often have no pretentions, millions of them!!! By getting feedback and attention from the internet a whole generation of fine artists have grown up leaving the art gallery scene on a parallel track.

I like the show but the idea that you can manufacture a ‘great artist’ is pretty hilarious, especially if some of those artists are already comfortable just striving for realistic portraits!

My guess is that Abdi and John will be bought out and will go commercial and will rarely stretch from this current level, the portrait people will just make a comfortable living on the side, Erik will make a decision to either work hard at art or quit it altogether, Nao will always find a way to not be commercially successful or accepted because that IS her art statement, Miles might stick with it as he was the only one who seemed to let go and trust in his ability to do something meaningful even when his conscious plans fell through, maybe Ryan will too but realism can be a curse as while it shows a skill it can also be dull if you have no narrative or flavor to back it up, and the rest will just settle in some comfortable job but never risk losing what they already have.

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