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Most Overrated Artists...

Sefarst

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Feb 27, 2007
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I'm certainly no expert and maybe a bit of a Philistine, but I do see paintings and sculptures that I like from time to time and have even bought two original paintings from a local artist. I've been to museums and galleries and usually enjoy myself.

That said, I'm currently reading The Art of the Steal, a book about the price-fixing scandal of the 90's between Sotheby's and Christie's auction houses. Throughout the book, prices from various auctions are recorded for certain pieces. Seeing some of the huge price tags on these paintings got me to googling, expecting to be blown away by the top pieces. I was very disappointed.

Anyway, this thread is for art that people rant and rave about, but when you go see it, you're surprised anyone would even give a passing mention to that piece of crap.

My vote goes for Jackson Pollock and his painting Number 22, which apparently sold for $1.7 million at auction.

Num_22.jpg


Total crap...
 
I dunno... the problem is that the only artists for whom I've studied extensive examples of have been artists I like, and therefore don't think are overrated.

Although I do recall being disappointed at some of Van Gogh's stuff when I went to the Chicago Institute of Art. But that's not the same as thinking the guy's overrated; I can only say that a few of his works just didn't lift me. Then again, I was spending most of my time in that area grokking on the few Chagalls that were there, so it's not like I really studied his stuff.

Moving outside of painting: Who's that guy who's art is to cover everything in cloth? There's an example for ya.

Another example of a specific piece, and not an artist's entire range of work, but I've always wondered what the hell the big deal was behind Serrano's "Piss Christ". One fan tried to defend it to me by gushing about the saturation of the colors he achieved, but achieving a certain level of piss yellow in a photograph is just not an accomplishment in my mind. Anyway, I've never seen the piece as being anything more than an agitprop piece, nothing more. But that may not be an adequate reply to the OP, since again, this was my take on one specific piece, and not the whole "canon" from that photographer.

Do we want to move outside visual arts? If composers count: I've always thought that Mozart operas were overrated. As a lighting jockey in my undergrad days, I had to suffer through some examples of his stuff. Marriage of Figaro really stands out in my mind, since it was the opera we openly brought pillows backstage and to the spotlight enclaves for; the deal was we'd be canned if we missed the very few lighting queues we had, and someone had to stay awake to answer the tech and the lighting director. But the management didn't even try to maintain any fiction that many of us, for a show with so few real queues, would actually not drop off.

But again, I've not sampled all of Mozart's operas. I'm told that specifically, I'd need to see Magic Flute and Cosi fan Tutte before passing judgement. And I did end up liking Don Giovanni when we did that show.

I can think of a few pieces of "modern" sculpture I've seen advertised in magazines and on the web as inducing a "what's the big deal" reaction in me. But I can't recall the artists responsible for those off the top of my head here.

Scattershot response, I know.
 
I'm been an artist for as long as I can remember. I don't collect art though, I just produce it, and I do not consider myself to be an art critic. I don't want to name any artists or their works in particular, but I do want to mention a trend I've noticed.

Anyway, one trend I've noticed among artists here in New York and elsewhere, and I honestly do not know how long this has been going on, is to use the word "quantum" to describe their works. This seems to be related in part to what we skeptics discuss here, how "quantum" is so often abused and misused to support woo beliefs. When it comes to art though, the word "quantum" is used in a manner to suggest a piece of art has some kind of depth and modernity that "non-quantum" art is lacking in. While I've seen some half-way decent "quantum" art, I've studied the "quantum" art of a local, successful painter who claims he combines quantum physics with Islamic Sufi inspiration to make his bold artistic works. This artist is of Pakistani heritage. In the very least I found I could not "understand" this man's works, but I hated the idea of to jumping to conclusions and dismissing his work as "garbage" being sold at inflated prices.

So I consulted a very talented artist friend of mine, who is of Pakistani heritage, and asked her what she thought of his works. She told me he is lacking in talent and his work is nothing but "garbage". She told me not to believe the quantum nonsense or anything about the Islamic influence. Even before talking to her I knew I would never buy his artwork.

Art can often be so subjective that it can never be rated "good" or "bad" in any absolute sense. However, most people can recognize talent when they see it. If I don't understand a piece of art or I think it is bad, I don't deny that it may be due to my own shortcomings.

My belief though is that most "quantum" art usually has very little, if anything to do with quantum physics. There is often no more depth to quantum inspired art than non-quantum inspired art. I'm sure maybe there are some artists who do find inspiration for great art in quantum mechanics(some of the ideas can be "mind-expanding" or "consciousness-raising" or "surreal"), but I've encountered very few of them. It just seems like a way to help get your art more noticed, by using a buzzword to hype it, and perhaps the less talented the artist is, the more they cling to words like "quantum"(note: I haven't seen the new James Bond movie. The use of "quantum" in this movie's title may or may not be related to what I am talking about.)

This use of "quantum" though is quite harmless when compared to how it is used by some alternative medicine practitioners.

As for the Pollock work, I agree with your sentiments.
 
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Sefarst said:
My vote goes for Jackson Pollock and his painting Number 22, which apparently sold for $1.7 million at auction.

Total crap...
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Oh Sefarst, don't you know? All art is crap!

Well, all art that people pay millions of dollars for, anyway. And by that I mean that there is nothing inherent in art that makes it worth that much money.

There is one reason and one reason only that some art pieces are traded for millions; the speculation that someone in the future might pay more. It has nothing to do with any 'artistic' merit of the piece in question.

There, I've said it.
 
logical muse said:
Oh Sefarst, don't you know? All art is crap!

Well, all art that people pay millions of dollars for, anyway. And by that I mean that there is nothing inherent in art that makes it worth that much money.

There is one reason and one reason only that some art pieces are traded for millions; the speculation that someone in the future might pay more. It has nothing to do with any 'artistic' merit of the piece in question.

There, I've said it.
Click to expand...

Or, because someone really, really wants to possess it.
 
I agree completely with a previous post that judgements of good and bad are subjective. However, itseems sometimes people place high value on art because it demonstrates an original concept. I just would not place high monetary value on something that is original that anyone could do. I think Pollacks paintings are a good example. I remember in the 90s a guy who defacated in a tin can. Perhaps original but any 4 year old can do.
 
I haven't really paid much attention for some years now, but I must say that I have never seen any abstract-expressionist items that I thought were even interesting.
My favorite "over-rated" genre is minimalism. Covering a canvas with say, red paint and then saying clever things like "it's about the paint, not the image" is neither art nor is it clever or original.

As to what sells for what....Obviously determined by the market, rather than any intrinsic value of the work itself. Like all collector's markets, items greatly rise or fall in price due to fads, trends, availability, notoriety of the artist, and that sort of thing.
 
Aha! I just remembered an artist for whom I managed to see a fair amount of his works and walked away openly irritated. Not just disappointed, not just unimpressed, but actually aggravated.

Ed Ruscha.

The day my friends and I went to the Art Institute of Chicago (I need to stop calling it the Chicago Institute of Art, even though I somehow managed to remember it that way... CIA, chuckle chuckle...), we took in his exhibit. And I remember looking at this B&W studies, like his "Twentysix Gasoline Stations" or "Some Los Angeles Apartments" and thinking "WTF?? These are not only not interesting, they're worse than some of my first year attempts at photography!". For someone like me who's made a study of Cartier-Bresson, I cannot stand that he has such a static, stiff, dead feel to his work. His stuff looked like a mise-en-place assembled by a 5 year old. And for someone like me who's worshipped at the altar of Ansel Adams, I despise people who cannot control their exposures to the point that their shadow detail consistently washes out WITHOUT getting interesting highlights. It's as if he found a way to lose both ends of the exposure curve. If that's expertise, I'd rather be an amateur for the rest of my life. And if that's art, I'd rather be pedestrian in my own photography.

I also took in some of his other stuff - like his paintings - and remembered thinking "Wow... Warhol lite".

I know I'm coming off as harsh, but it's an honest reaction to his work. I remember really being aggravated that I spent time looking at his work. It's a very rare thing to happen to me, but I was distincly upset that I 1. Was at first excited to see the AIC have a photography exhibit, and 2. Ended up wasting time I could've spent looking at other stuff. Because like most museums, the Art Institute in Chicago can't exactly be taken in in just a single, abbreviated afternoon.

Yeah, harsh, I know... but that's what I walked away thinking. Across the works that were displayed there that day he was, in my eyes, vastly and terribly overrated.
 
Sefarst said:
...

[qimg]http://www.uwgb.edu/malloyk/Num_22.jpg[/qimg]

Total crap...
Click to expand...

Looks good to me. Color combinations handsome. Squiggles are musical--not all squiggles seem musical to me. suggestion of a vortex, with black dot near center...

a_unique_person said:
[qimg]http://rawartint.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/koons.jpg[/qimg]

:confused:
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kittnh...? sorry name misspell, I think, said Koons is her favorite artist...
 
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seayakin said:
I agree completely with a previous post that judgements of good and bad are subjective. However, itseems sometimes people place high value on art because it demonstrates an original concept. I just would not place high monetary value on something that is original that anyone could do. I think Pollacks paintings are a good example. I remember in the 90s a guy who defacated in a tin can. Perhaps original but any 4 year old can do.
Click to expand...

I assume you're thinking of Piero Manzoni's 1961 Artist's ****.

In that case, that's really a parody and critique of the very art market that's baffling people in this thread. He sold his supposed excrement (it's unknown whether that's actually what's in the cans) at the gram-for-gram price of gold. And the museums bought it.
 
"Which artists are the most overrated?"

Based on what?

An objective scale?

A subjective scale?

The latter is rather pointless. Some like apples, other like oranges. The former is much more interesting.
 
Professor Yaffle said:
Tracy Emin.
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Oh god. Words cannot express how much I loathe this talentless hack. Crawl back under the rock you came from, you vile, waste of space artist that makes me sick to my stomach that people like you can get rich from something they have absolutely no ability in.
 
The vast majority of "abstract art" artists peddling works that could have just as easily been painted by a pig w/a paintbrush. :rolleyes:
 
Years back I was dragged around a huge exhibition of paintings by a bunch of Russians who had followed where Kandinsky led. For me the most interesting part of the exhibition was reading the biographies of the artists: "arrested by the NKVD and shot, 1935"... "arrested by the NKVD and shot, 1937"... I left the place unmoved by the paintings on display, but having a much higher appreciation of Beria as an art critic.
 
In my limited experience, the more in depth and elaborate the artists' statement are and the more they emphasize their creative process, the more likely it is they're compensating for a lack of quality.
 
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