Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Friday, May 21, 2010

Thieves Strike Artwork!

How very enterprising. How utterly lacking in personal aesthetics. Of course, so many people are, in point of fact.

Reputations are made on the basis of some academics and art scholars concluding that minimalist or non-representational art represents the finest expression of human originality. Where once the artistic masters of the art world produced work of surpassing beauty and elegance that actually bore a fine resemblance to what we see around us, more latterly practitioners of the art of producing fine art have deduced that anything sells, once a reputation is made.

And that reputation is made on the basis of singularly slight originality and talent. Of course if the viewer cannot recognize the value of the work of art being touted this is simply because they lack the artistic flair, the requisite sense of aesthetic to do so. In short, most people are simply incapable of recognizing fine art because they are art-uneducated dolts. A canvass with several lines is highly acclaimed, another with a dimly and finely-stencilled mass of dots is a marvellous rendition of a desert.

Art truly is in the eye of the beholder; alternately in the mind of those who are informed what art should represent and how it should appear. Some of the most valuable artwork in the world are held in many of the capital museums of the world. Some of the galleries do indeed contain art of outstanding value, commemorating human events and divinely-inspired events alike, and also reflecting natural landscapes and creatures of the world in fabulous mastery of the craft.

Original art can be awe-inspiring in the hands of a master. And it can be dispiritingly awful in the hands of one who has been acclaimed by the art community as a master. The money goes where the reputations are. Now, news that art worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars has been stolen from the Musee d'art Moderne de la ville de Paris. Works by Fernand Leger and Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Amadeo Modigliani.

All acclaimed masters, and every one of whom produced absolute crap. But worth millions. Because people will believe what they are told to believe. If Edvard Munch's The Scream was never recovered, would the world have been any the poorer? It was certainly an original work of art. Imagine all this abstract junk located within one museum dedicated to precisely this type of art. With state-of-the-art alarm systems and watchmen on duty to ensure nothing untoward occurs.

Despite which it does. And, tch, tch, one of the alarms was malfunctioning. Who might know this other than someone with inside knowledge? And of the three watchmen on duty none of them ever suspected anything doubtful occurring in the wee hours of the morning...? "These objects are, to our knowledge, not insured", serenely informed the managing director of an art-insurer company.

The art world mourns.

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