And I cannot stress this enough: bury their bones in an unmarked ditch.
Those are original Warhol boxes. Two Brillos, a Motts and a Campbells tomato soup. Multiple millions worth of original art, set on the floor by the front door.
Theres a regular customer whom i do plumbing work for, for the last 3 or 4 years. These belong to her. She also has Cherub Riding a Stag, and a couple other Warhols that i cannot identify, along with other originals by other artists that i also cannot identify. I have to go back to her house this coming Monday, i might get photos of the rest of her art, just so i can figure out what it is.
Even though i dont have an artistic bone in my entire body, i can appreciate art. I have negative feelings on private art like this that im too dumb to elucidate on.
eat the fucking rich. they are good for nothing.
So firstly, each individual box is a Warhol, the stacking is incidental and arguably funny because the point Warhol was making, very explicitly, with this stuff is that effort put in =/= art. All this said I will echo what others have said in the thread: Warhol would be super stoked to see these boxes like this, because stacking them haphazardly like cheap boxes renders them closer to the original.
Between photography, easy mass color printing etc. the whole movement of modern art is basically a reaction to artists realizing that the stuff they used to do, which is draw realistic images with huge effort and time investments, no longer had the same demand. This realization predates Warhol, of course, but instead of trying to invent new ways to do art like for example Picasso had done, Warhol pointed out that using the same techniques used by industry and print media to mark their products or mass produce comics could be art if presented as such.
It’s also a statement on the rising mass consumer culture of the time. This really is the enduring part of his ideas today, because that culture has only become more ubiquitous since then.
Is that a grift? Sure. But all art done in order for the artist to survive is kind of a grift if you think about it. You convince someone else that what you are making is worth their money and they pay you to make it. Artists used to all work for kings and churches because they had money. Did they want to paint angels and Habsburg chins all their careers? Probably not. In fact, drawing/painting normal people doing normal people things was a fresh counter-culture movement in art at one point.
The thing most people take offense with when it comes to modern art is that there is a lack of effort. But those boxes aren’t just cardboard boxes from a store Warhol displayed. They are made out of wood and the company logo is recreated by hand from reference, not just printed on. The fact that it is an expensively made copy of a cheap original is the point. Be that as it may though, the amount of effort is never indicative of art in the first place. The act of creating it is. Like, take an artist with 10.000 hours of practice and a complete newbie and tell them to draw the same thing over the course of one hour: One result will look a lot better then the other. Both are art though.
And arguably the practiced artist will have expended much less effort to make their better-looking piece then the novice has. The act of creation is art, not the effort expended.
I appreciate your enjoyment but I don’t think you’re going to be able to explain your way into me liking this art. I prefer the medieval style paintings of landscapes, realism, or art that looks goofy in some way
beauty is in the eye of the beholder and to this beholder it just looks like boxes and is pretty boring
I don’t want you to enjoy this art. I entirely agree that your preferences are your preferences and arguing pro and con of taste is pointless.
I just want to point out that it’s art, which you said it isn’t.
Ok fair enough I agree there is art here but I think the art I am looking at here was done by someone working at campbells soup company.
I genuinely can’t see what artistically differenciates this from having actual boxes of soup and hair jell stacked. if the point is that it’s commercial and day to day then Warhol has done that worse than the people he’s copying as actually selling soup would be the height of making that point
Heck, I agree with you about that. He should have just sold soup cans. And that is what other artists in modern art have basically done after him, in part because Warhol pushed the boundary towards that first. A lot of modern art is showing off commercialization. Like that Banksy piece that shredded itself after being auctioned off.
And also I wanna say: Warhol himself fucking sucks. I am not defending him I am just defending his work as being influential.
The fact that someone is willing to pay so much money for these boxes and what that says is part of the art. I think you are using the term art to refer to the physical objects on display, but the object itself isn’t the art - the relationships that the object facilitates are. The relationship between the viewer and the object, the relationship between the artist and the object, the relationship between the viewer and the artist through the object, etc.
Some paint on a canvas is just that: paint on a canvas. It only becomes art through our engagement with it.
Then literally everything is art. Life is art. Death is art. Existence is art and oblivion is art. This position makes discussing art pointless and arbitrary. If the purpose of Warhol’s work was to make fun of bullshit art by being bullshit art, then it’s definitionally bullshit art.
By definition, anything made using a skill is art. So life is art so long as you create things in your life. Death isn’t art unless your body gets used to make something, like those bodies sliced into very thin sheets or whatever.
You like the fine arts. Beautiful things made by someone who honed their skill to a high level. That’s fine and something most people, including me, share as a preference. But art is a broader field then that and I don’t see where the problem is with that. It’s not pretty? Cave paintings usually aren’t very pretty or skilled, by today’s standards, but they are still art. That giant blue canvas? Art. In that case in part because the artist mixed the blue himself and it was a statement about industrial processes and modern chemistry making it possible to have huge amounts of blue, something that wasn’t possible for most of history.
As for these boxes: they depict reality and they are a statement about industrial processes and the distinction, or lack thereof, between a mass-printed labeled box and a piece of hand-made art indistinguishable (by looks) from such mass-printed products. Like, where is the distinction between a sculpture of something and a box painted to look like a different box?
The only pure art is made by children, adults are merely making a crude approximation of it. A scribble of a 2 year old is more a more profound expression of humanity than the entirety of modern art.
If that sounds stupid, it’s because assigning meaning to art is stupid. Art is nice, art is pleasing, art can have meaning, but meaning doesn’t make something art.
This was kind of a deliberate point made by early modern artists. Picasso was making beautifully realistic paintings as a teenager, and he, as an adult, (and others) deliberately painted with the perspective of a child.
I think you understand modern art more than you let yourself realize. There is an undertone of reaction against modern art that runs through our society and gets into our thoughts, beliefs, and ideologies that we’re not all consciously aware of. I had a similar perspective to you on it, then I started spending more time looking at art, thinking about art, and eventually creating art frankly as a way to stop getting into unproductive online arguments all the time. For me, developing an understanding of modern art and architecture led to an appreciation of it (obviously not all of it). I’m not saying you have to like it or even will like it, but I think you could come to an understanding of it if you tried (and I’m also not saying you have to try).
I mean I get it, I just don’t like the commercialization and pretentiousness of a lot of it. Everything that we experience is art. From the vastness of the universe down to the smallest particles, all of existence is incredibly beautiful and mind-blowing. Your art as an expression of who you are is beautiful and valid, but saying “this incredibly financially successful ‘art’ that I’m having others crank out in my workshop is a statement on the absurdity of commercial art” isn’t.
Banksy was super cool conceptually at first, it was basically a modern Western sand mandala. If you got a chance to see it and experience it then you were lucky but eventually it was going to be covered over. That’s really cool and meaningful. Now there are thousands of framed Banksy pieces that rich people keep in their living rooms as shows and stores of wealth. That’s meaningless, it’s nothing. So much of modern art is J.K. Rowling coming in after the fact and saying “oh by the way Dumbledore is gay.” The piece should speak for itself and so much modern art doesn’t.
Edit: I thought about it a little bit and I was kind of hedging on the child thing, but that’s pretty much how I actually feel. Expression of the artist’s humanity is artistic but it’s harder to actually accomplish, and a huge amount of popular modern art fails at that in my eyes.
A potentially more accessible example of this comes from Mike Shinoda’s live streams during quarantine. In an hour and a half he writes a full Hybrid Theory style song from scratch and he explains how it works at every single step. Without the explaining he could have done it way faster. It wasn’t a ton of effort, which is presumably why Linkin Park stopped sounding like that after a certain point. But it’s still a popular form of art that people from less high brow circles have widely recognized as such.