Found another site last night that afforded me great amusement, first for the quality of the author's insights into modern art and architecture, and secondly for the truly abysmal html of his index page. If I had to guess, I'd say it was exported from Word, then brought back in for editing, saved as a Word doc, then re-exported, and that this may have happened more than once. And it still displays. I am stone impressed.
But I didn't bring it up just to dis his tagging, but to point out a couple of features in particular. The first is the Eyesore of the Month, an entertaining and spot-on look at architectural blunders, and the second an article on modern sensibilities as regards art, It's About Truth and Beauty, Stupid.
He writes about going house-hunting and being shown through expensive homes owned by wealthy, powerful people:
I was shocked, though, to see what they had on their walls: mostly nothing except, by order of frequency, airbrushed yearbook photos of their kids, copper wall "pieces" of sailboats, fabric "landscapes," and similar banalities, various "folk" art objects constructed twenty minutes before sale, and last, the desultory museum poster. I don't remember seeing a single real painting.
I was reading this right after having written yesterday's thing on branding, and it struck me that the same people whose homes were bare of anything much to look at are the ones who, in many cases, festoon packaging, objects, vehicles, with logos and excited lettering, who pay for billboard footage and broadcast minutes, all in an effort to keep their names and their marks imprinted on the backs of our eyelids.
It no longer surprises me that so many of those logos, etc., are so jarring to the senses, when I consider that they are the products of people to whom art is not simply unimportant, but counterproductive. What they want in the logos they put on their products is something that will force people to look at them, and to keep looking at them, all without in any way "giving back" in the form of enlightenment or insight or even a brief glimpse of another's mind, all of which we expect to receive, one way or another, when interacting with art.
We get none of this from the ads and the flashing legends, the New! Improved! marks stamped inside spikey red sunbursts, and yet we're forced to look, to pay attention, just as though truth and beauty might yet emerge, any second now.
