A long, tough week

[hughferriss]

I've posted page 5 on my project blog. I hope this doesn't come across as self-promotional spam or anything. It just helps me stay focused if I imagine there are people out there who will frown when I dawdle. You are all my imaginary spotters.

I stayed up late last night talking with Jiyoung about art critics. The whole thing was triggered by this

Comments

[blchandler]

As you may or may not know, I am a teacher by trade and teach pre-school and art in a little parochial school outside of Chicago. For a long, long time (long before I started working there) there has been a lady who comes in about once a month and does an art history lecture for the whole school. (Well, not the whole school. The kindergartens and below don't go, as we feel an hour-long lecture is inappropriate for 4-year-olds.) Anyways, I have a lot of issues with her philosophies and teaching styles, but I'm only going to bring up one of them here

[blchandler]

As an artist, I know that my work needs to stand alone without anyone having to know what I was trying to do with it. If they know my artist statement, that of course can shed some light on what I was doing, but I know my work needs to stand without it. And it's up to me to communicate what I want the viewer to get by looking at (or reading) my work. It's up to me to give the viewer enough information so that my idea is communicated. (Or withhold information, too.) But I also know that once I put the work out there, it's no longer mine. It also belongs to the viewer and their experience of seeing the work. Everyone is going to have their own interpretation of the work, based on what they see and what connections they make to their own life/knowledge/feelings. (Which goes against one of this lady's philosophies where she claims there is just one meaning to a work-what the artist intended. That's bull

[hughferriss]

Wow, that was a prodigious post

[blchandler]

Vermeer is incredible. Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rothko and Joseph Cornell-if I ever had to pick artists I had to be restricted to viewing for the rest of my life, it'd be those four. (If I could get 5, maybe I'd go left-field and pick Doug Henderson.)

And, coïncidentally, I have the same birthday as Marcel Duchamp. It's true, the average viewer is not going to understand what Duchamp's urinal is doing in an art museum. I almost even think of that piece as a performance, not a product. Like the urinal itself is the artifact of something he did. That's an interesting piece to bring up. Because with Warhol you can at least talk about color or the cultural implications of a hundred Monroe faces on a wall. And there are clear meanings beyond that when you know about Warhol and Pop Art, &c. But, good call on the Duchamp and this line: Whether it's good that you need that background is another question entirely.(Another thing I hate is when people look at an abstract expressionist piece and say, "Well, I could do that." Well, you know what? You

[tormentedartist]

You were asking about my next comic...well this statement of yours pretty much sums up my thinking on funny books :Do we have to choose sides -- Chris Ware or Bill Stout, but not both? Is it really necessary to foist the false red-state/blue-state dichotomy on the world of comic art? I'm being naive, right? Is there really a life-or-death struggle raging somewhere out there in comic memespace?BTW you are just killing it. Dude your pages are sick as fuck. Sadly, I see you doing one or two comics and then getting a job offer from Pixar or Disney and never doing another comic again. Really. I liked your other work but this is soooo much better. Its like the stareater stuff but, with all of the rough edges taken away. Honestly I'm gonna stop looking at it until its done so that I can enjoy it the way that it should be enjoyed