{"id":34628,"date":"2019-10-16T12:52:52","date_gmt":"2019-10-16T12:52:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artzealous.com\/?p=34628"},"modified":"2019-10-16T12:53:57","modified_gmt":"2019-10-16T12:53:57","slug":"ask-the-collector-with-holly-hager-collecting-101-art-beauty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/ask-the-collector-with-holly-hager-collecting-101-art-beauty\/","title":{"rendered":"Ask the Collector with Holly Hager Collecting 101\u2014Art & Beauty"},"content":{"rendered":"

David with Goliath’s Head<\/span><\/i> by Caravaggio at the <\/span>Kunsthistorisches Museum<\/span><\/a> in Vienna.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The fall art fairs are here again. For years, I\u2019ve powered through their endless stalls until I fell into the inevitable art coma. Like most fairgoers, at first, I was amazed by everything I saw. The fairs are a great way to expand the image bank inside your head. By seeing such an enormous amount of art in a very short time, your eye improves exponentially. You start to separate the gems from the dross. That\u2019s the point.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Unfortunately, the proportion of dross to gems has gotten overpowering. “Art-fair art” has become a thing\u2014beautiful, expensive objects that pack no emotional punch. There are tons of boring reasons for this shift, like mega-galleries eating their own ecosystem\u2026blah, blah, blah. But the fall fairs got me thinking about a much more fundamental reason for the rise of “art-fair art:” a drastic change in the relationship between art and beauty.<\/span><\/p>\n

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From antiquity until about a hundred years ago, beauty was a constant in fine art. Even when the subject was especially grisly, like Caravaggio\u2019s <\/span>David with Goliath\u2019s Head<\/span><\/em> (above), it was so beautifully represented that you couldn\u2019t help but marvel at it. The light that illuminates David is rapturous. His simple shepherd\u2019s garments drape majestically, and the righteous determination on his young face is palpable. Although Goliath\u2019s head, grasped pitilessly by the hair, is in the forefront, the artist downplayed its gruesomeness. No bloodstains David\u2019s sword, and the gore of the flesh he just severed dissolves into the shadows. Renaissance painting might not be your jam, but there\u2019s no denying that this painting is sublime.<\/span><\/p>\n

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It\u2019s magical when an artist renders something horrific so gorgeous that we\u2019re drawn to it rather than repulsed. Billy Eilish\u2019s new pop song, <\/span>Bad Guy<\/span><\/a><\/em> (which I\u2019m completely obsessed with), does this flawlessly. The hypnotic beat and incredible vocals wrap chilling lyrics into an exquisite package. Eilish even admits it in the song:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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My mommy likes to sing along with me<\/span>
\n<\/span>But she won’t sing this song<\/span>
\n<\/span>If she reads all the lyrics<\/span>
\n<\/span>She’ll pity the men I know<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

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If Eilish\u2019s song wasn\u2019t so yummy, none of us would listen to it. In music, appealing aesthetics are still a must. (The exceptions, like punk, death metal, and John Cage, just prove the rule.) The marriage of art and beauty still holds for all the other arts, too. Only visual art has divorced them. If a contemporary artist wants to draw attention to something ugly, they very often make something just as repugnant.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Tracey<\/span><\/i> by Sarah Lucas at the <\/span>Leopold Museum<\/span><\/a> in Vienna.<\/span><\/p>\n

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YBA (Young British Artist), Sarah Lucas\u2019 work is a perfect example. You likely saw some of it on social media this past summer while Lucas was having a big retrospective at the <\/span>Hammer Museum<\/span><\/a> in LA. She\u2019s most known for her grotesque, anthropomorphic figures. They\u2019re often aesthetically hideous because Lucas is questioning traditional thinking about gender, sexuality, and identity. She makes bawdy, irreverent images out of found and everyday objects. In <\/span>Tracey<\/span><\/em>, the sculpture above, she confronts us with a misshapen female nude\/chair. In addition to the sexual trappings that can objectify women (red f*ck-me stilettos, black thigh-high stockings, and prominently displayed breasts), she literally turns the nude into an object you could sit on and use. Oh, yeah, and it\u2019s headless\u2026yikes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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It\u2019s hard to imagine how Lucas could communicate the same complicated feelings that <\/span>Tracey<\/span><\/em> evokes if she\u2019d made a beautiful image. The ugliness of this work is intrinsic to its power. She\u2019s saying that, as a woman, she refuses to be just a sexual object. In the Trump\/#metoo era, her work is more relevant than ever.<\/span><\/p>\n

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How can Lucas, who\u2019s recognized as one of the most important contemporary artists, get away with divorcing art and beauty, while Eilish can\u2019t? Blame it on, or better yet, thank the influence of Marcel Duchamp.<\/span><\/p>\n

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One of several authorized replicas of the<\/span> Fountain <\/span><\/em>attributed to Marcel Duchamp, but possibly originally made by a female artist in his circle<\/span>. <\/span><\/i>Moderna Museet<\/span><\/i><\/a> in Stockholm.<\/span><\/p>\n

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In visual art, the constant of beautifully representing even the terrible began to erode in the early 20<\/span>th<\/span> century. Artists like Marcel Duchamp started exhibiting works that completely defied the requirement of appealing aesthetics. In fact, they were often purposefully downright unsavory. In 1917, Duchamp, (or one of the women artists in his circle\u2014nobody knows for sure) first tried to exhibit the <\/span>Fountain <\/span><\/em>under the pseudonym R. Mutt in a New York show. The original wasn\u2019t a sculpture in the traditional sense. It was what has become known as a readymade\u2014an ordinary mass-produced urinal turned onto its side and exhibited on the floor (instead on hung on a wall). Yep, a urinal.<\/span><\/p>\n

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In the <\/span>Fountain<\/span><\/em>, as described by Beatrice Wood in a contemporaneous art journal, the artist \u201ctook an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view\u201d and in so doing \u201ccreated a new thought for that object.\u201d The <\/span>Fountain<\/span><\/em> redefined art as a concept instead of just an object. That brilliant broadening of what art could be made it the single most influential work of art in the 20<\/span>th<\/span>-century.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Yep, a urinal is the single most influential work of 20<\/span>th<\/span>-century art. This is why my mother is so baffled by contemporary art. The <\/span>Fountain<\/span><\/em>\u2019s<\/em> legacy blew the idea of what art could be wide open. Artists, like Sarah Lucas, were freed from any of beauty\u2019s constraints, allowing them to communicate the whole range of human emotions.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The problem, of course, is that most of us don\u2019t want to live with ugly stuff. Neither urinals nor disturbing nudes. We want our homes to make us feel good. There\u2019s nothing wrong with that. I\u2019m a huge advocate of using art to create the mood you want to be in. (See my column <\/span>Why Art? Part II<\/span><\/a>.) But the divorce of art and beauty means there\u2019s a growing chasm between the aesthetics of important art and the art that people want to live with. “Art-fair art,” with its empty beauty and exorbitant price tags that suggest high value, has rushed in to fill that gap.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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My point isn\u2019t to demonize the love of beautiful art or art fairs. If you only want beautiful things\u2014go for it. But if you want to bring home real art, not just decoration, don\u2019t be swayed by the brush strokes alone. Look for beautiful art that still packs an emotional gut punch\u2014even if that punch is such beauty that it truly takes your breath away. It\u2019s out there. You just have to work harder to find it.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Holly<\/span>\u00a0Hager<\/span>\u00a0is an art collector and patron. Previously an author and a professor, she now dedicates herself full-time to help artists make a living from their art by making the joys of art more accessible to everyone.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The fall art fairs are here again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":34634,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,23,11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34628"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34628\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}