If you like art...

[Koryh]

I like to run around this site like a giddy school girl.

http://www.artrenewal.org/museum/contents.html

[JoshuaTheJames]

ahh dont we all...I remember the day I stumbled upon that site.

-Joshua

[Fipse]

Hmh, maybe I´m alone here but I really don´t like this site ... I don´t like dogmatic philosophies and I don´t like many of the featured artists.

Maybe this is because I can´t find anything interesting with many of the artmovements at the end of the 19th cent. There seems to me so much craftsmanship wasted on historistic stuff without any real feelings behind. We´ve got a german word for it, I really find no translation for: "Kitsch". This is meant for things just touching the surface, working with cheap emotionality.

But - as so much - this is all a matter of personal taste ;)

[Blind]

Yeah, Fipse... here in the US we call that Kitsch :cool:

[gekitsu]

but still is more skill involved in this kitsch than in next to every modern painting.

there was a lot of knowledge lost over the times. only a few people are trying to dig it out again...

[Koryh]

While I completely agree that the rhetoric of the site can be heavy handed and annoying. I do Enjoy much of the art. I don't think I would ever have a print of any of the artists in my living room, but I can appreciate the skill envoled. Little girl paintings are NOT my taste. But I do love some of those Hudson landscapes. I have had the opportunity to see quite a few of those paintings in my travels so maybe it is my memory of them in person that makes me overlook the prapaganda of the site.
All said and done. those images beat out a Patrick Neagle any day.

[Pigeon]

Artrenewal comes up every so often on these illustration boards, and folks usually go into a drool fest, and righteous tirade about the loss of true skill in art, and death to modernism.

Ironically, modernism is a series of art movements that died twenty years ago, and today is a bit of a misnomer, not to be confused with "contemporary." Anyhow, what the modernists lacked in painting skills, they more than made up for in communication, political, design, and social skills. It's just different art, with a different purpose. It's not any more or less valid.

Every art is persecuted at one time or another, by one group of people or another. As artists, we should try harder than other people to be understanding and openminded of everyone's art, from cavemen to post-modern men, 3-year olds to 103 year olds. (Although I still have problems swallowing Thomas Kinkade).

[MindCandyMan]

Kinkade isn't an artist...he is a businessman. (I have problems with him too....heheheh)

[Pigeon]

A businessman. Damn straight! We got a local mall with a whole Thomas Kinkade storefront.

Makes me wonder how many historical artists have been businessmen more than artists - from artrenewal.org or not.

[gekitsu]

a lot of the old masters made comission work, no discussion...

but besides all that, "in the old days", painting was a form of art and there were years of practise, observation, knowledge and sh*tloads of skill involved.
some time later, art was kinda made accessible to the public. everyone can make art. art is what an artist touches. no need to develop anything special, no need to practise no need to learn. art is what moves me inside, even if it is throwing around paint like a 5-year-old on crack, filling an old bathtub with overgone butter or let a dead cow fall off a helicopter.

okay, i am biased. :)

still, may we defend modern art or not, there should be a certain amount of respect towards the skills and passion of the old masters.
who today has the passion to learn a whole life to master the human figure? who wants to learn to have an eye for color like sargent, who put color in fat splotches on his canvas, still having the translucent look of glazes?

lots of skill is lost over this period of art-for-everybody. no need to like old art but the respect should be there, that is what i think.

[I.was.ink]

Yeah, I agree with you gekitsu. Although i really wanted to say that I don't think kinkade is a real artist. Not that hes not an artist, but hes more of a businessman than anything else. So thats why I say that.

Just my 2 cents