Making it Small in Hollywood

Mike Birbiglia’s 6 Tips for Making It Small in Hollywood. Or Anywhere.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/movies/mike-birbiglias-6-tips-for-making-it-small-in-hollywood-or-anywhere.html

Ira Glass the Gap

https://vimeo.com/groups/filmschool/videos/85040589

https://vimeo.com/groups/filmschool/videos/85040589

Being an Artist: Katharina Grosse

Katharina Grosse

https://art21.org/read/katharina-grosse-contending-with-the-history-of-painting/

I don’t know anything about art but I know what I like.

From Barrett: When people talk about art, they tend, unthinkingly, that everyone’s opinion is as good as everyone else’s.  To dismiss a carefully thought out, backed by evidence statement with “That’s just your opinion” is intellectually irresponsible. (not that it should be accepted, but that it deserves a reasoned response.)

It doesn’t matter what you say because it is all subjective anyway. When discussing art. An extreme relativism that does not allow for truth or falsity, or plausibility and reasonability, or for knowledge and experience either

Critics are knowledgeable, passionate, political, opinionated, enlightened, connoisseurs, art does not speak for itself. A good critic makes arguments, not pronouncements. Critics can also be about resistance, freedom, social justice, rebellion, interpretation and promotion.

There are many models of art criticism.  Every time we, as critics (connoisseurs, lovers of art), confront a work of art, I am looking for something way beyond a simple pronouncement “I like it”, I am looking for a vivid description, merging into an interpretation (including how it moved you), an informed judgment, and some theory….how is it art? This means you are going to be building a chair of your theory of art.

Mark Bradford "So I wanted to do a video of me playing basketball, but I wanted to create a condition-a struggle...But politically, culturally, I'm being very iconoclastic. You don't just put a hoop dress on a black male body and go play basketball...And for me, it was really about roadblocks on every level-cultural, gender, racial...

Modern and Postmodern

The Devil Wears Prada: Cerulean Blue

Modernism

1. THEORY: Formalism (purity, content dissolved, subject matter, content to be avoided) 2. Expressionism

3. Primitivism (equating child art innocent expression with the purposes of art)

4. Discovery of child art

5. Abstraction, Formalism

6. The function? Pure aesthetic experience, therapeutic, freedom from bourgeoisie middle class values, art for art’s sake.

7.  Trivilization and disdain  of popular culture.

8. True art transcends ordinary life, beyond kitsch.

9. Creativity, Originality is important.

10. Individuality, lone artistic genius, the Big Story.

11. Self referential, non-narrative.

12. the idea of Progress, there is universal truth, in art a march toward purity.

Postmodernism

1. Social and cultural issues are paramount:  art critique is also cultural critique

2. Time/space flux: Progress? Is time linear?

3. Reflects strong ethical positions, like environmentalism or feminism

4. Form? Pastiche, collage, eclecticism

5. Concern for otherness: women as other, other groups,  power, knowledge, control (like feminism). =Pluralism: many viewpoints possible, Multiculturalism

6. Appropriation, Simulations, Copying,  including popular art

7. Multiple readings possible; contradictions, irony, metaphor ambiguity, double coding.

8. Escape the confines of the museum

9. Collapsing boundaries between high and low art, embrace kitsch.

10. Originality is impossible, art is a “text”, a collection of citations, references, and correspondences.

11. Use of narratives, celebration of small stories.

12. Confronting the “gaze”.  The male gaze and the female gaze.

13. Recontextualizing images and signifiers, putting the familiar into new and unexpected relationships. 

14. Layering.

15. Mixing codes, signs, conventions, signifiers.

16. Hybridization, mixing of culture.

17. Mixing media.

18. Working collaboratively

19. Deconstruction: Deconstruction refers to an approach that focuses on usually –not-noticed aspects of languages, images, ideas, and practices that orient, shape and enable perception and conception. A goal of deconstruction is to sponsor new possibilities for thinking and acting.  Thus, deconstruction isn’t really about taking things apart; it’s about bringing forward what is excluded, concealed implied or otherwise unsaid or unsayable. 
What is a modernist Mormon?
What is a postmodernist Mormon?
What does modernist teaching look like?
What does postmodernist teaching look like?

Modern Art

Modern Art

Pollack and DeKooning