U-G-L-Y

Have you ever strolled along in a flea market and saw a painting or picture that was extremely hideous that made you cringe? Well apparently, we learned that this kind of art is call Kitsch. What should and should not be accepted as art has been a hotly debated subject for millions and trillions of years and kitsch falls under one of those debatable categories. Some artists enjoy the tackiness and "out of the box" thinking while others think that artists needs to be abiding within certain principles of art.

On artist that I really liked learning about in class is named Wayne White. He takes old lanscape paintings you can find in thrift shops and incoporate text into it to send a message across. Here are some examples:







I really like the last painting alot because if you noticed in the other two paintings that the text is incorporated very well into the painting; in both other paintings there are shadows and reflections from the text painted into the painting. In the third painting "Fade Away" though, Wayne White created irony between what the text says and what the text does. The words Fade Away are not merged or "faded" into the landscape behind it-it visually pops out instead.

Another cool type of art that we talked about in class is called appropriation art. This type of art takes known/familiar objects and transforms it into art or uses found or natural objects in the same way.
One artist that I really liked was Jeff Koons!

Here are some pictures of his work. (the link takes you to the site I got the pictures from)







All those pictures are of stainless steel statues that Jeff Koons made that look like balloon animals. It would be awesome to see one of them in person!

Here is a different type of appropriation that Koons also did


I wonder how long it took him to make this puppy out of flowers....

One last picture that I really think is cool but I can't find the artist of it:



Appropriate looks really fun to make! When I was searching for things to blog about I found some other cool things. There was an artist that makes human skull sculptures out of different objects that ranged from candy sprinkles to diamonds. (Obviously, this artist did not fit the starving artist stereotype if he could afford to make a skull diamond. Just sayin)