chalmers

The End of An Era, And Why I Like Andy Warhol More Than Leonardo DaVinci

I hate writing things on here, but it’s the best option I have. I don’t have the time to write this by hand, and Microsoft Word has a really depressing interface. I find it much easier to write within the confines of a text box inside of a browser window.

Digital media is completely ubiquitous and the necessity for creative thinkers is decreasing exponentially. We will always need brilliant concepts, but the source of these concepts will one day simply be selected from a menu within an all-inclusive creative suite that will reside at the hands of the client and not the advertiser/design boutique.

So what is to be done? When we strip ourselves of ideas we are simply left with craft. And in a few decades, if you aren’t a digital craftsman/woman, you will be out of a job. Leonardo DaVinci might have been the most incredible craftsman in art history. His techniques on figure drawings will be relevant forever within the naturalist art community. If Andy Warhol made naturalist paintings he would have died an non-famous sap like the most of us. But Andy Warhol’s prowess was in his conceptual approach to a canvas rather than his craftsmanship. “Art for the sake of art” had existed since the first non-religious painting (possibly Clowns by Georges Rouault), however, Andy Warhol brought it furiously into pop culture. He was to Georges Rouault as Elvis was to Chuck Berry.

What happened to art movements? Everything since Pop Art has been called a part of the Contemporary Art movement, yet I see no unifying thread. When there are no brilliant craftsmen/women to follow, who can we look up to? What inspires us? Contemporary photography is a beautiful joke. Empty messages conveyed through brilliant aesthetic compositions. I couldn’t tell you the intentions of any of them. I can not extract any great meaning from a photo of a nude women puking onto an erect penis. I am surrounded by talented craftsman who have a knack for taking snap shots of youthful abandon, yet I’m left with the utter emptiness of having no relationship to the moment in any way. It’s advertising - it’s a glimpse of a life or lifestyle that I could only relate to by acquiring “stuff.”

A nervous breakdown occurs as an involuntary reaction to becoming overwhelmed with emotion. It’s a natural and unplanned form of expression, and often classified as the symptom of a social disorder. My opinion is that it occurs when people don’t have the means to express themselves often enough to maintain balance. As we become more autonomous as individuals, more distracted and apathetic, and more preoccupied with technology, we lose the ability to delve into simple areas of expression. I think art is the indicator, and also one of the first communal entities to suffer from this equation. When you cannot express yourself in an intelligent and sophisticated way, you ruin the experience of a work of art. You can always cry on someone’s shoulder, and they will probably understand that you are sad, but they might not know why. And a picture posted on the internet of this kind of expression is one of the most empty forms of expression I can think of. It allows for no relationship between the user and the experience whatsoever. It’s a blank stare.