Is Painting Dead? (Very pretentious, lol, read at your own peril)

The word art usually conjures up the idea of the visual arts, and visual art is usually taken to mean painting. So to most people, the artist is a painter, and painting equals art. Sculpture, drawing, and other media and inventions do not command the same level of respect. Art history, which favors painting over other art forms, is one source for this tendency. Pulp biographies, novels, and movies are another, as they romanticize or sentimentalize the artist in his atelier, alone with paint and brushes, shut off from the outside world. Alone is the key word.

It has been more than 150 years since French history painter Paul Delaroche declared, "From today painting is dead." Like many artists of the mid-1800s, he was responding to the advent of photography. He saw it as a powerful new medium that could replace painting in representing and documenting the world much more precisely and in much less time than could be done with brush and pigments. But Western painting used photography to further its own ends and went on to be reinvented and transformed from the last third of the 19th century to well into the 20th.

But painting had another brand of critical spokesmen. The most noted of them, Clement Greenberg, who wrote for Partisan Review, The Nation, Commentary, and Arts in the '40s, '50s, and '60s, argued on behalf of a highly twisted idea of modernism, self-referential painting that spoke only about paint itself in a quest for flatness, with a lack of illusion of figures and narrative. He forcefully championed Jackson Pollock and lauded other abstract expressionists. His narrow idea of painting became associated with convoluted philosophical arguments, as well as with connoisseurship. Coupled with cynical secret funding from the CIA to combat "unamerican" realisms such as social-realism, painting limped on as an interesting but miniscule parody of it's former glory.

Painting is on the defensive. It is an exhausted medium, creating attention by revering the handmade and the one-off, by romanticizing the artist and pretending that art is a heroic enterprise. The physical endeavour to paint is a solitary one, a hermetic existence to a certain extent. Modern society does not tolerate such things with grace. There is no room for co-operation, collaboration or convergence that we see in all other serious media. Art itself is under threat from pornography, hollywood, mass-media advertisement vanity obsessed vacuous cultural-non-culture hypocricy that permeates our every waking hour in our consumerist society. (Ignore)

Ever since the invention of the photograph, the eye has ceased to be the center of the visible universe, images can exist in infinte places at infinite moments, the inherent preciousness of an image was fatally damaged, but still there exists the oringinal, more valuable, historically significant, beautiful for it's uniqueness. Now the computer shows us that it can ignore the orthodoxy of the unique and even destroy it, offering us a teaser about what constitutes value in art. Now we can ask new questions of art and artists, redefine art, and create spaces for other kinds of art making. To declare "painting is dead" frees us to do this.

AND GOOD RIDDANCE TOO!

I give that a 6 on the pretentious-o-meter, oh wait there's a French guy with a statement... I make that a 7...nevermind he's not a philosopher, back down to 6 with you!

Photography to me is just a better way of portraying things as they actually are, though of course you can always choose how you edit the photographs, what is not shown that is happening outside the picture etc. Paintings to me will forever be the most visually appealing though and allow more room for imagination; outlandish and fantastical ways of portrayal like in Dali and Picasso.

oh hi what's going on here

Originally Posted by CescPistols

I give that a 6 on the pretentious-o-meter, oh wait there's a French guy with a statement... I make that a 7...nevermind he's not a philosopher, back down to 6 with you!

Aww thanks.

Originally Posted by CescPistols

Photography to me is just a better way of portraying things as they actually are, though of course you can always choose how you edit the photographs, what is not shown that is happening outside the picture etc. Paintings to me will forever be the most visually appealing though and allow more room for imagination; outlandish and fantastical ways of portrayal like in Dali and Picasso.

I'm not just talking about photography as a medium to depict the world, but the photograph as also a means to reproduce everything. Authenticity of an image is literally meaningless today, I know national galleries advertise themselves as the providers of authentic works of great artistic masters, but would the regular person know the difference if they were just pohotographs of the paintings on the walls?

Originally Posted by the_mango55

AND GOOD RIDDANCE TOO!

Why do you say that?

Originally Posted by Yosemite

oh hi what's going on here

Bob Ross has been dead for fifteen years.