I saw more art in the week I was in Spain than I have in my entire lifetime. I paced through numerous hallways filled with paintings from Picasso, Renoir, Dalí, Goya, and other famous artists of the last few centuries. There were galleries with paintings from ‘nobodies’ that caught my eye and intrigued me. There were also some that were not only jaw-dropping, but called for a well deserved slap to the artist’s face and a punch to the gallery owner’s junk for permitting it!
If you look at the image above, you will see some black ink in a half-assed brush stroke on who gives a care kind of paper. I tried capturing a better photo of this so called art piece, but there was no way to get a front-shot of this painting without the lighting or the reflection of my body showing up to taint such “perfection”. But seriously, what the hell is this! You can’t frame this and call it art! Maybe what the artist was aiming for was “shock”, for that is the only way to get publicity and attention for this piece of shut-yo-mouth! If that is the case, then I would consider the strategy more artistic than that brush stroke itself. All I’m saying is that if it took you longer to frame your art piece than to make it, then we’re definitely operating under different definitions of art.
Then there was this piece:
Trust me, the image makes it look much cooler than it actually is. My point and shoot camera was not the best equipment to capture the actual ambiance and emptiness of the room as well as the emptiness you feel from standing there to view it. I walked around those three walls waiting to find something engraved, painted, written, scratched, smeared… anything but found nada. It was just long fluorescent tube light bulbs drilled into the wall. It was the perfect setting for a scene in the horror movie Saw. I asked the security dude if there were paintings still waiting to come fill in the space and he said that was the art piece. Fair enough. I was not satisfied, so I decided to make my own art:
Not original, I know. But definitely more creative than that half-assed brush stroke from that nobody that will remain a nobody.