Two abstract paintings

[MikeW]

I hate criticizing as I love your posts but I always think these kinds of pictures can be done with by a 5 year old at school.. I remember there was a similar picture of a house in similar paint style and it went for a few hundred grand at auction - a news tv station got a class of children to draw the exact same picture and the put them all up on a board and asked experts to pic the expensive one out and they all failed - art is deffo in the eye of the beholder I believe

Don't worry about critisising me [MENTION=19211]Matt[/MENTION]y, I can take it and I don't claim to be infallible.

Some, I agree with you but definitey not all. What about my avatar for instance? Also, it is the original idea that is important, the original act of creation. Asking schoolchildren to make a copy is not creative. I will agree with you that some even well known "painters" who are worth millions, are absolute rubbish. Damien Hirst for instance. He just employs a lot of people to work out his ideas for him. That is definitely not art in my opinion. Another one is Tracy Enim who won the Turner Prize for displaying her unmade bed complete with used condom. I don't care if intellecuals rave about it, to me it is still a dirty, unmade bed.

[MENTION=18997]matty7[/MENTION]: It begs the question, "what is art?" All meaning is in the brain of the one who perceives the meaning. It is not external to ourselves. Even if the meaning is agreed upon collectively, it remains in the brains of those who perceive and agree upon that meaning.
[MENTION=18457]LONDONER[/MENTION]: How is it that if someone employs others to execute a concept, that executed concept is 'not art'? "Conceptual" is an umbrella art movement that has its roots in dada: That is, art that is intentionally and systematically juxtaposed to the elitist burgeois aesthetic. The irony, of course, being that such anti-art, in turn, becomes accepted and collected by the elite art establishment. It IS actually a kind of joke: Cf., for example, Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain," (1917) signed "R.MUTT".

So far as monetary value is concerned: All monetary systems are based on "perceived value". Take this:



for example. The paper and ink are certainly not worth one million pounds, yet that is its perceived value.

A FEW WORDS ABOUT "ABSTRACTION"

All paintings are abstract in the sense that no representational painting IS the thing it represents:



In fact, it could be argued that many paintings commonly labeled "abstract" are in fact realistic because they represent nothing other than themselves.

To give you an idea of where I'm coming from as a painter THIS LINK should take you to an archived set of paintings I've executed over the years that are currently in private, corporate and museum collections.