John Murray classes week of Dec.10, 2012

Last full week of classes for the term.

How about a final exam?

How do you feel about these questions?

See you next week, john.

ART AS PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY

(questions for an artist)

1. Rather than making art why not turn to the study of philosophy or theology for ones inquiry into the meaning of life?

2. What would Freud, Nietzsche and others say about the commodity paradox that traditional painting and sculpture present?

3. When an object works as leverage for the mind does the making of such a thing necessarily grant the maker the title “artist”?

4. Is the process of making the art object any longer a valid pursuit now that it’s separate

from information dispersal, and traditional political and theological goals; or is it more valid than ever in view of this.

5. Did Marcel Duchamp destroy art by introducing conceptual reference over retinal authority?

6. Would Duchamp’s “Fountain” been more interesting as an object, if instead of appropriating a ready-made urinal, he had made a plaster version and hand-painted it with glossy white oil paint?

7. Would you prefer to show your work in a slick, white-box gallery in a cultural metropolis, or would you consider the idea of exhibiting it as a billboard on a desolate Nebraska highway as superior?

8. What quality would the Nebraska location add to the work?

9. Do you believe in the “presence” in the art object?

10. If you answered yes to question 9, how do you feel about reproductions of art objects? Can a reproduction retain any of the original’s qualities?

11. Has serious contemporary art become a collectible for the very rich and an irrelevancy for the middle class?

12. Has painting lost its importance in the western world’s intellectual dialogue?

13. If you are a painter, what role would you like to have your work seen in?

14. Does your painting sometimes feel stuck between a concept and a frozen object?

15. Is “new” art primarily fashion driven?

16. Is art today too vulnerable to both nostalgia and and stylistic pressure?

17. If one considers art essentially reductive, is the arena for expression rapidly disappearing?

18. Is attaining a transcendental paint surface enough to make a painting successful?

19. Does the idea of figure/ground intrigue you, irritate you or bore you?

20. If you had the resources would you hire a studio assistant?

21. Which do you feel best expresses what moves artistic vision: tapping the collective unconscious or the individual eccentric vision?

22. Which more inspires your work, the exotic or the banal?

23. Nature or the works humans?

24. Is there life behind the picture plane or is painting primarily an accumulation of pigment and binder on a surface?

25. How would you rate the importance of your materials to your work?

26. Is the familiar viable in art?

27. Can art be a process of defamiliarization?

28. What does power have to do with art?

29. How much does exuberance have to do with it?

30. Can an artist ignore the work of others?