Boring Like A Drill.

That Donald Judd stack is really biffed about: did someone drop it, or did the Pomp get it cheap off the back of a truck?

The Los Angeles Times, 3 August:

The world-renowned Pompidou Center of Paris, which set out in March to celebrate the work of Los Angeles artists, has accidentally destroyed two of their works — which fell from museum walls. A third piece was slightly damaged.

Yes, it turns out the Centre has form in trashing art works loaned to it.

“It’s no secret in the museum business that handling can be very sketchy at Pompidou,” said John Walsh, director emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

(Links found via Modern Art Notes.)

Much too dark exposure and not sharp. I suppose you may say that you tried to make it unsharp but what the hell’s the point in that. I like things sharp. Maybe you should study some other peoples’ photographs here on this forum and get an idea of what a good photograph should look like.

Taking a photograph in complete ignorance of the “rules” hurts no one, costs nothing, and might even be more fun.

You can read those posts and laugh at the silly nerdboys (there may be a girl or two in there) with their techincal hairsplitting, valuing process over results. But as you do, please spare a thought for those of us who tried to learn music composition at university. I doubt there is any other artform taken so seriously, which is so dependent on the same type of pointless nitpicking as which these internet kibitzers thrive on.
At about the same time as the Online Photographer was making his point, Kyle Gann at PostClassic had finished teaching another semester:

I’ve been becoming aware that, even among the Downtowners, there is a standard academic position regarding electronic music, and am learning how to articulate it. I’ve long known that, though much of my music emanates from computers and loudspeakers, I am not considered an electronic composer by the “real electronic composers.” Why not? I use MIDI and commercial synthesizers and samplers, which are disallowed, and relegate my music to an ontological no-man’s genre. But more and more students have been telling me lately that their music is disallowed by their professors, and some fantastic composers outside academia have been explaining why academia will have nothing to do with them.

Two generations ago, composition professors would promote the careers of unlistenably dull, academic composers who would say approvingly, in all seriousness, that a piece of music was “better than it sounds.” Today, those same fossils are still taking up space in most music schools, but now a whole new exciting branch of electronic music has opened up, so that a fresh batch of careerists can stifle it all over again; and refuse to state whether or not a piece of music they have heard is any good, until they know what technical equipment was used to make it.

In the dimness the paintings appear at first fuzzy, and move inside themselves in eerie stealth: dark pillars shimmer, apertures seem to slide open, shadowed doorways gape, giving on to depthless interiors. Gradually, as the eye adjusts to the space’s greyish lighting – itself a kind of masterwork – the colours seep up through the canvas like new blood through a bandage in which old blood has already dried.

“I accepted this assignment as a challenge, with strictly malicious intentions. I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room. If the restaurant would refuse to put up my murals, that would be the ultimate compliment.”

Who knows what the avant garde would have created if there had been no assassination in Sarajevo and no first world war? Or did the very extremism of cubist art somehow bring about the ensuing chaos?

“Has there ever been a more overrated painter? The figurative works are among the ugliest, most visually unpleasant canvases you’ll ever see in a major museum.”

At first it’s nice that you can walk amongst it, but then you realise it’s killing the mystery. It feels like a timid sop to populism, like the way that tourists visiting the Big Pineapple (or Uluru for that matter) are granted the opportunity to climb to the top. Part of House‘s impact was that it was impossible to enter: her earlier works were spaces with no insides.

Of course, it is forbidden to climb the boxes. Could you sneak off with one? Has anyone tried? Like any major, sort-of-public exhibit these days, there has been much pi-jaw about all the plastic in the boxes being biodegradeable and recycled; but I would preferred another type of degredation to have occurred, with the stock of boxes steadily depleted during the exhibition by people walking off with them. Rather like House, it could be another one of her works laid low by the people’s will.

“It was a most unfortunate and regrettable accident but we are glad that the visitor involved was able to leave the museum unharmed.”

“They are in very, very small pieces, but we are determined to put them back together.”