Comments on Currently Hanging

What the hell has happened to art? This looks like a shitty heater filter.

Sigh...

U usually like these posts, but I have to say..

That is the biggest pile of crap I have ever seen. This is not art, this is an asshole who throws tin foil and plastic webbing together and calls it "contemporary".

It isn't the least bit inspired. I have found more interesting things in the garbage behind apartments complexes at the end of the month.

Well done eek it's a homo

Hmmmmmmmm, every time, and no matter how I parse it, I try to post a couple excerpts from Dan Savage's pro-war piece from October 2002, or link to it, the spam filter blocks it. The Slog spam filter seems to be rejecting the title and quotes from the article and link as spam. How amusing that Dan Savage is afraid to have his own words posted to Slog. Words that are probably the most important that he ever wrote. Or at least words that he used flippantly to address the most important issue he ever wrote about. Words that supported a Bush policy of war crimes and imperialism. Here's a tiny url to Dan's article:

http://tinyurl.com/63rfxd

"Currently hanging" - oh, I thought you were referring to what happens to people who disagree with the fucking Chink goons and thugs.

I'm rather loathe to admit it, but for once ecce homo is actually correct. This is just some stuff salvaged from a construction site and repackaged as "art".

Law of Averages is bound to kick in once in a while, I suppose.

And yeah, @4, too bad Dan has like, apologized about 200 fucking times for being wrong about what he wrote. I hope the people who know you are more forgiving every time you're proven wrong after shooting your big, fat mouth off.

@6 When I shoot my big fat mouth off I am not supporting behavior that maims and kills people. When the dead return to life and the maimed are made whole BY Dan then his apology will mean something. In the meantime I will continue to remind new sloggers just what type of people they are dealing with here. People who think everything is fair game for entertainment and amusement.

If Dan Savage was really sorry about supporting the war he would be actively opposing it now.

He prefers to make fun of the accidental killing of children by fat people. Yes newbies-he has done that!

Hey Comte, I just checked out your blog. It looks like you are military age. Why don't you join up and fight in Dan's glorious war of liberation. Or are you a chickenshit?

Your glorious leader Dan the mighty warrior Savage is afraid to have his own words posted in Slog.

Oh, go fuck a picnic table.

@4 - Granted, this is just a shot in the dark, but the spam filter might be blocking you because you post, er, spam.

@9 You know I'm never going to be able to look at a picnic table again without wondering if someone has, well you know gotten happy with it.

Art is so weirdly subjective, I mean I agree with what all of you are saying about this piece, yet I like this one better than some of the other ones posted recently (plastic bags on a plywood board??)

PopTart, you can fuck my picnic table anytime. And you know where I live.

@11 -- I hear you about picnic tables...I think from now on, I shall dine on a blanket spread atop the grass, instead.

As for art...and subjectivity...ah, well.

Yes, art's value (as "Art," as an investment, as a statement, etc., is and always has been subjective. Sometimes that subjective approval is broad (Rembrandt) and sometimes it is much more narrow ("Look, mom -- Jeff Koons' pink glass cunnilingus sculpture!").

I'd like to think that I have developed an appreciation for art that allows me to see great value in non-representational images, non-traditional media, and other aspects of fine art that go beyond the norm.

But when someone tapes a toothpick to an index card and calls it "The Triumph of Good Over Evil in the Mekong Delta" or some such clap-trap, it's all just too much of an inside joke. It's the artist basically saying, "I don't give a good goddamn what reaction, if any, you get from this work."

All well and good. Artists are not required to satisfy my needs. But when I call it impenetrable and pretentious, they need to take that opinion as (one of many potential) valid opinion. And that goes double for critics, who perpetuate this inside baseball folderol.

It doesn't need to be American Gothic, for god's sake, to be good art. But it would help if the intellectual idea behind the work was at least plumbable outright (or understandable through the writing of good criticism). Otherwise, when confronted with plastic netting and tinfoil, I'm just going to call bullshit on it.

Jen, this is where you come in -- putting these images up is all well and good and provocative. But I'd rather see a third as many of them if it meant you had the time to try and give a critical explanation to the value (or not) of the work in question.

Fucking tinfoil and plastic netting...my god.

Time for a picnic!

it's like a little clique in here isn't it.

so where are all the other posts? why do we always get stuck with art and reading on the weekends? who do they think we are? new yorkers? ... oh right.

I love how Dan apparently has the power of life and death, the power to prevent wars or to start them.

How may I acquire such powers, Oh Mighty One?

Fifty-Two-eighty

Top or bottom you can fuck me on the picnic table of your choice.

You don't understand keshmeshi. It isn't that Dan has such powers, it is that Dan and many others with their open support for this war made it possible for Bush to do it. But then you are just a dumb fucking slogger whose crir=tical thinking sj=kills are limited to choosing which end of the dildo to shove up your ass.

Yep, we'd be lost without those crir=tical thinking sj=kills.

@17,

If you had any critical thinking skills, you'd realize that Bush has always done what he pleases, no matter what other people think.

Don't argue with it, Keshmeshi. It's not sentient. It can't hear you.

Ditto.

Oh, wait a minute. I'm in fucking New England. Yay, go Red Sox, point me to the nearest Dunkin' Donuts. Here for the next couple weeks, then on to Louisville, then home.

@22 So you were just teasing me about fucking your picnic table you aren't even home. Oh well, I don't have the right body parts to fuck a picnic table anyway.

@13, I really liked your comments. have you read "The Shock of the New" by Robert Hughes?

Moat's art...

@PopTart, I return to the Big D 5/25, I know, more travel between now and then than Savage, but will be here waiting for you then.

TYPO ALERT: Will be *T*here. Unless you feel like getting on a plane to Boston, in which case I'll be here.

There is more humanity in the broken slab of concrete (unframed and not represented by a gallery and with no attribution) in my backyard than in that contrived mess.

@8:

Been, there, done that, have the medical discharge - and all probably before your putrid little mouth was weaned off your Mom.

Read you 5x5, good buddy.

Does anybody know how much this piece of art sells for? 'Cuz there's a dumpster behind my building just full of art supplies and I'm not too proud to go dumpster diving for gas money.

@23 -- I bought it, first edition, in 1991. An important, but by no means definitive, criticism.

Ah, the beauty of the internet.
Uneducated teenagers can mouth off at length about stuff they know nothing about.
Must be a slow day at the YouTube Comments section, eh?

I have known this artist, Weldon Butler, since the late 70's.
He is a serious, thoughtful guy, who has never tried to bamboozle anybody with artspeak or smoke and mirrors.
I havent seen this piece in person, so I cant say much about it- I tend to withold judgement based only on mini-pixel views.But I can tell any of you guys whose moms actually let you out of the basement now and then, that this show is undoubtedly interesting, and worth seeing.

I'm sure they have the art covered to protect it while they remodel the room. Once the work is done they'll remove the plastic and hazard fence and we can all have a look at it.

Can someone who thinks this *is* art pipe up and explain the piece a little more? I'm willing to hear the argument, but my first reaction was pretty negative.

@34, for me it has to do with the title, "Silver Train" because when I read that title and then look at the piece (and I'm thinking the photograph maybe isn't doing it justice) I can conjure up images of a train. I'm not even sure if that's what the artist meant but that's what I get when I look at it. Whether it is art or not, well I fall back on my weak "art is subjective" defense.

Art is subjective. Subjectively, this is trash. Stupid trash, at that. But I feel that way about most of what Ms. Graves posts. So I am apparently not appreciative of art.

See, I can't even buy the "conceptual" argument in this case - the piece is thrown together from a few already existing elements: some sort of plastic or mylar sheeting, construction webbing, "framed" by duct tape - ! - but the recontextualization of these elements doesn't appear to be making any sort of statement, either aesthetic, political, social, nothing.

Butler doesn't do anything new or essentially different with the materials he's using, other than displaying them in an unconventional setting (which, I suppose, could be considered sort of dada-esque if one wants to stretch the point), but otherwise, there's nothing in this particular piece that says anything, to me at least, other than that the artist himself doesn't seem to have either much vision, or, purpose.

@37 -- FTW