Art teaches us to insult artists

I have noticed that the end of religion as a public force
has left people with a lack of a system of living that
takes care of our morals and the needs of our "soul thing."

We need a sense of a community, a sense of self-awareness
and a cure for rampant logic and individualism. Most
secularists are very individualistic and very logic-driven.
They're really hard to tolerate as friends.

If you need proof that the strict use of logic as a way of life
is a quick path to a nut-house, then come to the UK. So many
people are so addled with their own thought processes that they
are unaware how much they are making themselves suffer.

Also being hedonistic and doing whatever the fuck you please
is, in the end, also not satisfying, because it makes you a
selfish pig. So, what to do?

In this first video, Alain de Botton covers this well. He has
understood what religion used to do for us. If we look at
it this way, it is amazing how religion grew to fill these
social needs. It's as if the Church Fathers were top-rank
sociologists of our times, not 2000 years ago.




at 10:00
The next issue is Art, in this new secular religion. Here's where my
ideas about art can really flourish. I think that art is over-priced
bullshit, or on a good day, a puzzle for us to appreciate and
understand, or at least try to.

It is a "visceral encounter", wherein you "love" and "hate"
works, especially those that experts tell you to like.
Despite that, I express my appreciation for Brian Sewell.
This guy died recently, prolly
critiquing his own decay and his lack of graciousness.
Anyway, he kicked the piss out a lot of pompous artists,
like the late 90s brats, like Tracey Emin and Damian Hirst.
Enjoy his art karate:


checkit: Guardian

Brian Sewell’s best cutting critiques – in quotes

Joel Gunter

Saturday 19 September 2015 18.10 BST
Last modified on Saturday 19 September 2015 18.31 BST


On David Hockney

“Hockney is not another Turner expressing, in high seriousness, his debt to the old master; Hockney is not another Picasso teasing Velázquez and Delacroix with not quite enough wit; here Hockney is a vulgar prankster, trivialising not only a painting that he is incapable of understanding and could never execute, but in involving him in the various parodies, demeaning Picasso too.”

On Damien Hirst

“Were Hirst’s canvases the work of a late teenager, we might take the random lines around the skulls as a clever allusion to the measuring-points of a sculptor of Canova’s generation, or as an illusion of cracked glass, and forgive the ugly clumsiness of inexperienced execution; but Hirst is nearing his half-century and should have a far higher level of skill than this rough daubing, with which he degrades his master, Bacon.”

On Banksy
Brian Sewell, ‘most controversial’ art critic, dies aged 84
Read more

“Any fool who can put paint on canvas or turn a cardboard box into a sculpture is lauded. Banksy should have been put down at birth. It’s no good as art, drawing or painting. His work has no virtue. It’s merely the sheer scale of his impudence that has given him so much publicity.”

On Banksy and Bristol

“The public doesn’t know good from bad. For this city to be guided by the opinion of people who don’t know anything about art is lunacy. It doesn’t matter if they [the public] like it.”

On Tracey Emin

“The sane man must ask whether he should give any of this pretentious stuff the time of day in aesthetic terms when it seems that this self-regarding exhibitionist is ignorant, inarticulate, talentless, loutish and now very rich.”

On female artists

“There has never been a first-rank woman artist. Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness. Women make up 50% or more of classes at art school. Yet they fade away in their late 20s or 30s. Maybe it’s something to do with bearing children.”