Some people are born to create, others to destroy !
It seems as if the puritans are on the up.
Anthony Roe
6 months ago
A lot of the problems with someone like Kasuma arise from her not being an artist at all. She is a mentally ill woman with a compulsion to make marks and images. These are both closed and repetitive (in some circles doing the same works for 70 years is considered a mark of authenticity, like Lowry). It was fortunate or unfortunate that she came to prominence when her work aligned with the most fashionable art movement of the time Op and KInetics. The best art is always a dialogue between an artist and something or someone else, the closed off world of the ‘Outsider’ artist never makes that connection.
Hear, hear. The professional artists I trained with and worked along side for 40+ years create beautiful paintings and sculptures that grace cathedrals and the homes of private collectors, commercial book, magazine, and album covers, animation studios, and permanent collections in the worlds great galleries and museums. They have spouses and children and mortgages, serve on school board committees and are active in local service organizations. They coach their kids’ basketball teams and don’t wear ludicrous neon costumes to call attention to themselves; quite the contrary: the work they create speaks on their behalf. You wouldn’t have recognized the late Frank Frazetta in line at a supermarket.
Elevating nuts and charlatans in the art world is nothing new – remember Basquiat, whose hideous, talent-free dawbings were all the rage until the guy faded away after he OD’d on heroine? That some attention-seeking race w***e is attempting to make his bones off a mentally ill little old lady makes me wonder why anyone would help him on his way with articles like this.
Agree with this excellent comment on the 20th/21st Century’s tragic elevation of pseudo artists who merely “push boundaries” and “surface” subjective “oppression” without ever finding or creating beauty—but I appreciate articles like this because race-baiting, myopic frauds deserve to be called out.
Yes. Other replies to your comment have said much that i’d have wished to say, so i’ll just add that what she produces is the equivalent of the fashionable “history paintings” that dominated the walls of institutions until Impressionism came along as the proverbial “breath of fresh air”.
Some might find her output and an analogy with history painting odd, but it’s the way in which the prevailing institutions fawned upon the ultimate sterility and lack of vision beyond a very narrow bandwidth.
Nell Clover
6 months ago
It seems the rise of communication technologies has given our poison pens more space to write and a larger audience to read. First this destroyed the community, then the family, and now this will destroy each and everyone one of us.
In our modern, inclusive, tolerant age we will judge you, we will judge you by the sins of your father, we will judge you by your words and not your actions, we will judge you harshly, we will exclude you, and we will offer you no forgiveness without first humiliating you.
I think it’s possible that people were kind of judgey in the past too. Sometimes to the point of literal-excommunication, death, imprisonment, war, banishment; rather than cancellation or a twitter-kreig.
Just as the Boomers, contrary to their self-belief, did not actually invent sex, Millenials did not discover the concepts of judgement, shaming and ideological purity.
The point of “cancellation” and “twitter-krieg” (also described as ‘spectral rape’) is to inflict real-life suffering by denying the target a living and relationships with people in the real world. Do you think people who use a hammer & sickle in their Twitter profile and laud the actions of Hamas aren’t serious about “death, imprisonment, war”? The West is currently slouching in a very strange but not unfamiliar direction and any attempt to pretend this is just ‘business as usual’ is wishful thinking at best.
As to your first point – I know.
Second point – dunno about that, seems to me that a cursory look at the last two centuries throws up any number of very serious, strange, potentially civilisation-destroying ideas and movements. The novelty right now probably has to do with the internet, phone, social media – unleashing freedoms and challenges (and fails) – as did the printing press, the threshing machine, the spinning jenny, the ‘Death of God’, Das Capital, Mein Kampf, Human Rights Movement, The Pill, Rock n Roll LSD, MDMA…’. None of them ‘destroyed community…family’ and ‘each and everyone one of us’. I would have thought that NC to welcome a bit of historical perspective amidst all the millennial hype.
If the printing press gave us protestantism (witch-mania, Biblical literalism, unprecedented civilizational vandalism, religious wars etc.) then Clover’s fear of what communication technology is doing is justified.
Richard Craven
6 months ago
Dexter Thomas is a stupid woke t**d who badly needs to be told to do one.
Michelle Johnston
6 months ago
“Often, the defence of this or that elderly or deceased artist is a plea for context: people must be understood as a product of their time, their culture, their unique and often immense personal struggles. Yayoi Kusama, who grew up in a famously insular and non-diverse country, who has spent most of her life institutionalised, and who is literally older than Scotch tape, has arguably earned a pass for being less than perfectly enlightened on the issues of 2023 — and anyway, she’s already made the standard-issue apology for her “hurtful and offensive language”. Her critics can hardly ask for more.”
I am no fan of Kat but given I have a growing understanding of Japan from the inside and I have been close to mental health issues through my parents being mental health professionals all of my life (art created by the mentally ill is fascinating in its insights of the mind) this is spot on.
I went to Kusima’s exhibition in Matsumoto in April. Good art tells you more about the world in which we live, her art tells you about the compensations she uses to manage her way through, just as every single member of humanity has compensations.
One of the fascinating qualities of a country that has managed to hold on better than many to its cultural template is how very counter-intuitive its disruptive art is but oddly in a way that still seems to be routed in its past, there is a continuity even in rebellion.
Finally, I much prefer any of her compensation art to the strange and bizarre disruptive art I have witnessed in the Tate Modern or the Guggenheim in New York.
Last edited 6 months ago by Michelle Johnston
Julian Farrows
6 months ago
There are certain aspects of leftist thought that remind me of the fairy-tale the Snow Queen wherein a child gets a shard of ice in his eye which distorts his vision and makes appear ugly to him.
R Wright
6 months ago
TL;DR Vice News hacks are Buzzfeed levels of journalistic integrity
Vice, Buzzfeed and lately The Onion all became mouthpieces for the trans ideology in their dying years, so that Vice would be used for point-scoring on race wouldn’t be surprising.
Some people are born to create, others to destroy !
It seems as if the puritans are on the up.
A lot of the problems with someone like Kasuma arise from her not being an artist at all. She is a mentally ill woman with a compulsion to make marks and images. These are both closed and repetitive (in some circles doing the same works for 70 years is considered a mark of authenticity, like Lowry). It was fortunate or unfortunate that she came to prominence when her work aligned with the most fashionable art movement of the time Op and KInetics. The best art is always a dialogue between an artist and something or someone else, the closed off world of the ‘Outsider’ artist never makes that connection.
Interesting comment. Thanks.
Hear, hear. The professional artists I trained with and worked along side for 40+ years create beautiful paintings and sculptures that grace cathedrals and the homes of private collectors, commercial book, magazine, and album covers, animation studios, and permanent collections in the worlds great galleries and museums. They have spouses and children and mortgages, serve on school board committees and are active in local service organizations. They coach their kids’ basketball teams and don’t wear ludicrous neon costumes to call attention to themselves; quite the contrary: the work they create speaks on their behalf. You wouldn’t have recognized the late Frank Frazetta in line at a supermarket.
Elevating nuts and charlatans in the art world is nothing new – remember Basquiat, whose hideous, talent-free dawbings were all the rage until the guy faded away after he OD’d on heroine? That some attention-seeking race w***e is attempting to make his bones off a mentally ill little old lady makes me wonder why anyone would help him on his way with articles like this.
Agree with this excellent comment on the 20th/21st Century’s tragic elevation of pseudo artists who merely “push boundaries” and “surface” subjective “oppression” without ever finding or creating beauty—but I appreciate articles like this because race-baiting, myopic frauds deserve to be called out.
Yes. Other replies to your comment have said much that i’d have wished to say, so i’ll just add that what she produces is the equivalent of the fashionable “history paintings” that dominated the walls of institutions until Impressionism came along as the proverbial “breath of fresh air”.
Some might find her output and an analogy with history painting odd, but it’s the way in which the prevailing institutions fawned upon the ultimate sterility and lack of vision beyond a very narrow bandwidth.
It seems the rise of communication technologies has given our poison pens more space to write and a larger audience to read. First this destroyed the community, then the family, and now this will destroy each and everyone one of us.
In our modern, inclusive, tolerant age we will judge you, we will judge you by the sins of your father, we will judge you by your words and not your actions, we will judge you harshly, we will exclude you, and we will offer you no forgiveness without first humiliating you.
What an enlightened time to be alive.
I think it’s possible that people were kind of judgey in the past too. Sometimes to the point of literal-excommunication, death, imprisonment, war, banishment; rather than cancellation or a twitter-kreig.
Just as the Boomers, contrary to their self-belief, did not actually invent sex, Millenials did not discover the concepts of judgement, shaming and ideological purity.
The point of “cancellation” and “twitter-krieg” (also described as ‘spectral rape’) is to inflict real-life suffering by denying the target a living and relationships with people in the real world. Do you think people who use a hammer & sickle in their Twitter profile and laud the actions of Hamas aren’t serious about “death, imprisonment, war”? The West is currently slouching in a very strange but not unfamiliar direction and any attempt to pretend this is just ‘business as usual’ is wishful thinking at best.
As to your first point – I know.
Second point – dunno about that, seems to me that a cursory look at the last two centuries throws up any number of very serious, strange, potentially civilisation-destroying ideas and movements. The novelty right now probably has to do with the internet, phone, social media – unleashing freedoms and challenges (and fails) – as did the printing press, the threshing machine, the spinning jenny, the ‘Death of God’, Das Capital, Mein Kampf, Human Rights Movement, The Pill, Rock n Roll LSD, MDMA…’. None of them ‘destroyed community…family’ and ‘each and everyone one of us’. I would have thought that NC to welcome a bit of historical perspective amidst all the millennial hype.
If the printing press gave us protestantism (witch-mania, Biblical literalism, unprecedented civilizational vandalism, religious wars etc.) then Clover’s fear of what communication technology is doing is justified.
Dexter Thomas is a stupid woke t**d who badly needs to be told to do one.
“Often, the defence of this or that elderly or deceased artist is a plea for context: people must be understood as a product of their time, their culture, their unique and often immense personal struggles. Yayoi Kusama, who grew up in a famously insular and non-diverse country, who has spent most of her life institutionalised, and who is literally older than Scotch tape, has arguably earned a pass for being less than perfectly enlightened on the issues of 2023 — and anyway, she’s already made the standard-issue apology for her “hurtful and offensive language”. Her critics can hardly ask for more.”
I am no fan of Kat but given I have a growing understanding of Japan from the inside and I have been close to mental health issues through my parents being mental health professionals all of my life (art created by the mentally ill is fascinating in its insights of the mind) this is spot on.
I went to Kusima’s exhibition in Matsumoto in April. Good art tells you more about the world in which we live, her art tells you about the compensations she uses to manage her way through, just as every single member of humanity has compensations.
One of the fascinating qualities of a country that has managed to hold on better than many to its cultural template is how very counter-intuitive its disruptive art is but oddly in a way that still seems to be routed in its past, there is a continuity even in rebellion.
Finally, I much prefer any of her compensation art to the strange and bizarre disruptive art I have witnessed in the Tate Modern or the Guggenheim in New York.
There are certain aspects of leftist thought that remind me of the fairy-tale the Snow Queen wherein a child gets a shard of ice in his eye which distorts his vision and makes appear ugly to him.
TL;DR Vice News hacks are Buzzfeed levels of journalistic integrity
Vice, Buzzfeed and lately The Onion all became mouthpieces for the trans ideology in their dying years, so that Vice would be used for point-scoring on race wouldn’t be surprising.