Comments on: Sunset in Arcadia

By: Stefan V

Stefan V — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 08:52:33 +0000

As someone with an artistic background when I look at a painting I look for something more than the usual lighting and “illusionism” it more about, at least now and at least in Europe, the concept, the idea the means of expression, like the trail of the brush, the patterns all you showed and talked here I would put it under Kitch. People who go to an art exhibition have to have a certain taste and a cultural background. I remember going to a exhibition called “Renascence Masters” and there was a 7 year old kid with her grandma telling her all this nonsense about a painting that made my hair stand up straight, I mean you don’t go with you nice to a art museum and expect her to get a lot out of it.
Really i love Klimt and the Austrian secesionism, even Schiele and I don’t see porn looking at it, I mean what grade are you in? It;s just not right comparing Rodin with Klimt, different eras, different ways of expression.
Probably people should leave the art criticism to actual artists and not people who think they can. Even our Aesthetics teacher refuses to be in the Teacher evaluation committee just because it wouldn’t be fair, it’s not in his jurisdiction to do so.

By: Ann

Ann — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 03:31:07 +0000

Larry, I was thinking of the same thing (Rodin, not Klimt.) I was being snotty. It’s what I do best, I’m afraid.

By: William Morris

William Morris — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 17:17:51 +0000

Ah, that makes more sense Larry.

I much prefer Rodin to Klimt.

By: Larry Ogan

Larry Ogan — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 15:50:55 +0000

Ann when you said The Kiss, I thought of Rodin’s sculpture not Klimt’s painting and certianly not the example you submitted. Could a Mormon create Rodin’s kiss?

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/R/rodin/kiss.jpg.html

By: Anneke Majors

Anneke Majors — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 00:32:42 +0000

And please do not worry about seeming severe. Someone has to be, for heaven’s sake.

By: Anneke Majors

Anneke Majors — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 00:31:14 +0000

Thanks for the replies and expoundings. This post was originally much longer, but I abridged for politeness. :)

Patricia asks: “Also, you refrained from using the word “sentimentality” to describe illusionist LDS art. Is it because you think the word is overused, because you don’t think it a useful word for describing art (after all, some patrons of art think sentimentality in their art is a good thing), or because …?”

I didn’t purposely exclude the word “sentimentality,” but I do think it is a bit overused and has a bit of a condescending overtone and thus don’t use it much. I’m accustomed to hearing it used in diatribes against Thomas Kinkade, and though I typically agree wholeheartedly, I try not to come across as a diatribe.

I don’t think that sentimentality in art is necessarily a bad thing either; it depends on context. For instance, one of my undergraduate papers was a comparison of 19th century American painter Lilly Martin Spencer and contemporary commercial artist Mary Engelbreit and their commentaries on sentimentality as an essential part of femininity. There is a very large segment of humanity that enjoys sentimental art, and I don’t think it needs to be dismissed as a low sort of endeavor.

Personally, I don’t find sentimentality very appropriate in art dealing with the life of the Savior, (or Joseph Smith, one of my largest issues with Swindle’s work) but that’s an issue of personal preference. What I do think merits censure, however, is the intentional reliance on sentimentality to sell prints to a middle-class market, something that I will explain more in my forthcoming “Mormon art economics” post.

By: William Morris

William Morris — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 23:45:53 +0000

That’s hilarious, Ann.

Of course, I think Klimt isn’t as far from that as he or his admirers would like to think, but that’s just my taste in art.

By: Ann

Ann — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 23:10:45 +0000

I think a Mormon "The Kiss" would look like this: Sealed with a kiss

By: ed42

ed42 — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 22:14:16 +0000

Is is possible to make a Mormon “The Kiss”?

By: greenfrog

greenfrog — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 04:55:43 +0000

Interesting articulation of what happens more viscerally for me when I see LDS art. It seems to aspire to iconography, but doesn’t accomplish even that.

As things work out, an hour ago, my wife and I returned from a gallery where we just (gulp) spent more than we’d planned on a landscape. It was in an odd gallery, and the artist was working on several more in the back. We looked at it, thought it would be irrational to buy it. Chatted with the artist for a while. My wife loved most the landscape that originally caught both of our attentions — evening sky reflected in an irrigation ditch in the foreground, a homestead surrounded by the inevitable elms and cottonwoods in the back. I loved a darker one of a dirt road through brush in the evening. Took a business card. Wandered some more galleries and streets, and returned at the end of the evening.

The artist gave us a decent price on the one my wife loved, and he threw in the one that I loved for the price of the frame. His reasoning: to make the dark one I liked sell, he’d have to paint in something else — maybe a little girl walking a dog along the road — and he couldn’t bring himself to do that to a painting that worked the way that one did.

That experience followed by my read of your post left me with a couple of related thoughts:

First, most artists need to sell art, so there are relatively few who can stray too far from commercial demand. I suspect the demand for images of a short, fat, hirsute Christ with a receding hairline and bad skin isn’t all that high (despite Isaiah’s promise that he had no beauty that we should desire him). And second, what we find on the walls of a home may say more about the homeowners than the artist, but it still says something about the artist.

Displaying art, like making it, is a strange combination of desire and expression.