Comments on Disgust and Martin Creed

Call me what you will but Martin Creed's work does sort of have some satirical allure to it. In this world of art=whatever we call art, it's nice to have someone fully conscious of this and willing to see how far he can push it. Do I agree with it being "art"? Not really...but these two pieces do seem rather boring. Especially in contrast to Roberta Smith's review of *THIS* show...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/arts/design/13cree.html?fta=y

Do I need an artist to tell me that if you place all of the responsibility for creating meaning from art on the viewer, we don't need art?

i love that one of his works was called "balls".

do you think in the uk it was called "bollocks"?

it certainly takes balls to make something as bad as that last thing in the nyt slideshow. but the other pieces were great.

From my perspective his work smacks of a Jr High Student waking up at 8am on the day book report is due and slapping something together.

In the "artist's" case, the grant money was used up and he had to haul ass to Home Depot.

Did you know that the Henry has one of the biggest, and coolest public illuminated performance art pieces that YOU can operate! All the time! Day or night! And no, I'm not telling what, in case they take it away! Hahahaha!

There's a metric that can be applied to this sort of art, the work::wank ratio.

Computing the ratio is straightforward. One simply takes the number of hours the artist spends executing the work, and divides it by the number of words full-time art critics use to comment on the piece within one year of its first exhibition, plus ten times the number of words the artist has used to explain and/or promote it up to that same date. So, concisely, the work-wank ratio is rendered hE / (wC + 10wA).

The w/w does not tell you anything about whether or not a particular work is any good, of course, but it does help when one is trying to compare different works of art that have received critical attention (artwork that has not been reviewed by critics, or promoted or explained by the artist, has an undefined w/w ratio).

In this particular case, it seems that Johnson is suggesting that the Creed piece doesn't do much for him compared to other works in the same w/w range.

This reminds me of being in the Tate Modern. I was walking around and ended up in a room full of Rothko paintings done for the walls of a restaurant. The lights were off in gallery because of a technical problem. I was looking at the pieces for the interaction between glossy and matte rather than the colors, as Rothko is usually viewed. If the lights had been on, I would never have even noticed and something that could never really be shown in photos.

That being said, the lamps do seem lame, but trying to be profound.

@6, you make me wish I'd stuck with math longer. I used to have a similar equation in mind that would divide an artwork's value (price) by the amount of time an artist spent on it, to figure an hourly rate for the artist's attention to his or her materials or ideas.

Warhol would by that measure rate the highest hourly rate of any 20th century artist. James Rosenquist or Marcel Duchamp would be much further down the scale.

But then I started to care much less about art as a product of labor, and more about art as "what is this work doing now in this context." (Is that use-value instead of exchange-value, Charles?)

I have to admit it, I don't get modern art. Classical art, sure. Sculpture old or new, no problem. Totem poles, fantastic. I'll gaze in awe at bentwood boxes and happily expound at length on the stitching on 18th-century gowns... but someone putting a flickering lamp in the middle of the floor? The only reaction it illicits from me is "You've got to be kidding." Is there any good explanation of the artistic value of modern art for people who just don't get it?

Wow.. what a genius. and to think that before I bought a clapper, I had to use my hand to turn the lights on and off. I think Creed needs to expand his body of work and perhaps start exploring other ideas, such as turning a blender or a toaster oven off and on.

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