SSA, where do you draw the line between art and crap? Is it a difference between realism versus abstraction? Because personally, I love some abstract works, Van Gogh being my favorite painter ever. He had a command of composition, aesthetic, and palette, yet you could easily describe his works as possessing "movement" and "feeling." Is something wrong with this? Further, while Picasso is known for Cubism and his abstract works, few people know that he was a very skilled realist, but chose to go a different route with his works. Pollack is another artist that I find fascinating, but many would decry as just a painter "flinging oil onto canvas." He invested so much emotion into his work. In recent years, through X-ray and other scanning techniques, they have actually discovered objects imbedded within the layers of paint. A professor of art history at my school taught modern art and conducted much of his research on Pollack.
Dada was a commentary on the art world itself, thus it is a very ironic period. That said, I think Dada is a bunch of shit...I say this having written a report on DuChamp's famous toilet. The art world is a very pretentious club, full of cliques and ass patting. This is one reason that I became very cynical and disillusioned with art after going through art school. I never was part of the right clique. Then again, I seldom went to class because I preferred to do my art at 3:00 AM instead of 9:00 AM. Half of the critiques were merely exercises in mental masturbation, because nobody wanted their feelings hurt. I guess this sort of slackard approach is what you get when you model your department after the Bauhaus. Our program emphasized feeling and intuition more than technique, a fatal flaw in my estimation. I just wasn't willing to suck enough dick to ever make a tangible contribution to the organized world of art. Anyone curious about the pretension of art/art school should watch the film "Art School Confidential." A very good watch.
