I would post about class but...

I happened to be at the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade and I just happened to notice that Takashi Murakami had two balloons in the parade. Not only that but he himself was decked out in a costume of his own design.  He was one of his psychedelic happy flower pictures personified, including matching bling.  It was quite surreal in between the ice cream cone balloon and the smurfs.  Couldn't have asked for a better thanksgiving experience.

not about exploitation

My son Josh is home for Thanksgiving, so we came downtown and visited the Art Institute today.  On the way to the Modern Wing, I noticed that there is a new Fiber exhibit, on the lower floor and we went to see that. I LOVED it.  One of the pieces by Claire Zeiss, who lived in Chicago and did these tall sculptural macrame things, was I think, responsible for the start of my love affair with fiber. I lived with my grandmother when I was in 4th grade, and my uncle gave her a book on Macrame, which was just beginning to be a fad back in the 60's.She didn't really want to bother with it, she knitted. But I loved the book and started tying up the furniture. My grandmother was short and had a footstool. I used it for a frame for macrame when she wasn't using it to hold up her feet.  The book, which I initially lost track of but bought a new one on ebay a decade or so ago, had many examples of Claire's work. I had never seen it in person before.

After we did the fiber, it was fun to walk around the Contemporary gallery.  I knew a lot of the artists and if I didn't remember their name, I knew a fun fact about each one, or the work. Josh is working on an MFA at the University of Iowa, in Intermedia, so he had a lot to say too.

Josh took a picture of me standing in front of the picture of someone standing in front of the picture of the people in Paris on a rainy day. And it was a rainy day!  too bad I didn't have an umbrella.

Appropriation and Exploitation

I think appropriation is not really a new topic in art at all. Since artists are also living in the real world,( not on an isolate planet and such) we abserve and we absorb, and the art we make  is very much affected by that.  However, I guess the general agreement is that as long as you are not copying it entirely, it is alright. Somehow the artist either mix something different new in it or there is another meaning or direction it might go, then it is OK. I just find it usually hard to appreciate those artwork that appropriate too obviously.

About Exploitation, I think it is hard to argue that it does not exist in the art world, just search the word art and exploitation, you will be able to find a lot of examples.  Exploitation in general really has existed in the world everywhere else we live in, so why not the art world? If according to the nature of art that it suppose to reflect the human culture and society itimately, I say that whatever is easily found in the culture and the society should not be hard to find in art. However, as an artist, you should think about where is your stand in this matter. Just like what other artists did in their work. I personally will try not to do it.

I might as well not even blog because I have nothing to say.
I guess a lot of art that is seen as exploitative is originally intended as critique and in order to properly critique something or to critique from an informed position the maker must, to an extent, be involved in the very thing they are critiquing. So one can't deny exploitation based purely on intention to critique because quite frequently the critique involves participation. That's all.

Exploitation.

I think the word exploitation seems to be what everyone is wrestling with, which is an issue of semantics, and is also why the question in the first place is difficult to answer. "What artists utilize exploitation," is a subjective question, with no concrete or certain terms. My point that I was trying to make in class was simply to "break" the word, pushing it to its extreme limits to try to better understand the question. The line between polemic referentiality or exploitation and constructive appropriation is a very murky channel to wade through. I think that it is impossible to do art without getting some enjoyment out of what you do, and it is impossible to receive no reward for it unless done completely anonymously. If nothing else, I think you can argue that we are exploiting the idea of "culture," selling one-of-a-kind culture goods to the rich so they have something that they feel comments on their relevancy and trendiness-(this being my answer to the question "what about abstract or conceptual work?")

I just think we all need to call a spade a spade here. We're artists. We're all taking a lot of time, energy, and money, to better perfect our craft that serves little or no need in the world. What we do (although important in many ways) doesn't help to clothe, feed, or shelter anyone. Can it do that? Of course. Does it? Better question, does any of our work do that?

I don't know about your work, but I paint and collage and do non-edible, non-sheltering works on paper or canvas. I don't think this is a bad thing and I don't lose any sleep over it. We're creating commodity goods and it makes us and other people feel better about themselves to a certain extent (even though we are exploiting those good feelings out of them, haha). Anyone who wants to make the world a better place and doesn't want to receive notoriety, fame, fortune, success, or accolade at it should probably drop out of this school immediately and begin volunteering somewhere, like a soup kitchen maybe, I don't know, instead of creating images that beg to be looked at by people (exploiting their time, acute vision, depth perception, cones AND rods). But for me, I think art can be used for good and I can benefit from it too and I don't think there's anything wrong in it. I'd argue that the best artist, in theory, would exploit or sell-out in any way possible to reach the top. That's what the best artist would do. Not the best human. Most of us, myself included, have a maybe misguided sense of morality and justice that keeps us from "might is right" and taking from whatever and whoever we want because at the end of the day we have to live with ourselves.

However, to not acknowledge that the simple act of image creation isn't a basically "me" activity, is to create a whole "us versus them" mentality, that we're some kind of high priests of art and would never sink so low as to use our work for corrupt things such as money, or fame-only "they" do that, and I'm sure we all have our ever-growing lists of bad "they"s. Also, I'm sure Jeff Koons is on most of them.

Good job Jeff.

exploit/appropriation

To exploit: to take advantage or to make the best use of .

To appropriate: to legislate or to take without consent.

Without getting too involved in dictionary meanings, I feel that both words can be interchangeable. Regardless, people are constantly learning from their surroundings by taking things and ideas. In some cases, even selfish acts of taking may contribute to a larger whole, society, country or world.

However, I find offensive and exploitative in the negative sense, when an artist emphasizes a community or peoples’ “otherness” as shown in the Vanessa Beecroft’s video. There is something so wrong about going somewhere to “document” solely to show others your own self-realization of the world around you. On the other hand, I felt that the photos shown in class proved much more genuine and sincere. The images prove that the photographer has substantial relationship with the subject and a message to be told.

exploitation and art

Is art exploitative by nature? Must an artist necessarily use his subjects and materials to their disadvantage--for purely selfish reasons? When one phrases the question this way, the answer is clearly no. The subject of a work is not always disadvantaged as a symptom of involvement in the work. And the artist does not always gain something from doing a work, unless one views the work itself, whether or not it is successful, as some sort of positive acquisition.

It is true that an artist always uses things in the process of making a work. Maybe the things are materials and some image from the world. Often images from the world include people. If an artist uses an image containing a person, then he would also use the person in the image. However, the product does not necessarily disadvantage the person in the image, nor must it yield gain for the artist. So, art is not exploitative by nature, though it can be and often is.