Pissed off with dissers

Nowadays it seems to be the fashion to take a very cynical view of life. I opened up the papers and the general tone in every article seems almost blasé. Every reporter seems keen to show just how incredibly stupid and dull everything is to him, whether it's Sarah Palin or the Mona Lisa. Granted, Sarah Palin does seem to have it coming with some of the things she does, but the point I'm trying to make is that journalists seem insist on making every mistake a newsworthy one, just so they can diss it with a yawn.

This could be hasty generalisation based on the fact that I'm only actually exposed to a couple different papers; I don't know. But it seems like journalists' sense of humour lies almost exclusively in criticising other people.

Just today in, well, TODAY, there was an article on the top ten overrated works of art, and the writer references everything from Duchamp's urinal to Hirst's formaldehyde pieces as being so overrated as to not even be worth mentioning. Instead he chooses to attack the likes of Picasso, Vermeer, da Vinci, and van Gogh.

I'll start with his criticism of van Gogh's sunflowers - his problem with them was that he paints 'gazillions' of them in different quantities. Well, I've got a newsflash for you: it's normal. Many painters choose a particular subject and focus on developing their style and technique through the portrayal of that subject. There are just so many things that one can think about in painting still life - the play of light, the composition, the colouring. And if it's the acclaim that's bugging you, then what about Monet's water lilies? Van Gogh's sunflowers aren't even that famous.

As for Picasso not being able to paint properly, well if you want to talk about passe criticism, that has to be it. If his work is overrated, it's because it's been overcritiqued. Part of the point for Picasso was a deliberate shift away from traditional realism to his cubism. It's not like he couldn't paint well if he wanted. And that's the difference between him and the unnamed reporter.

Admittedly, compared to some of the other greats in art, Mona Lisa seems to have had more than her fair share of the limelight, but just because you happened to catch the movie based on The Girl with the Pearl Earring, doesn't mean that it's overrated. It just means you watched a movie about it done in your time. Want to bet that if you were a 60s baby you wouldn't have missed a chance to attack Claudel's Bronze Waltz, just because they did the movie on it? Like van Gogh's sunflowers, I wouldn't say it's more famous than say, Degas' dancers or Botero's fat people. It would seem more likely that the reporter was running out of art that he knew, which really doesn't speak much of his exposure to art, or he wasn't really thinking very much anyway.

Now I don't disagree that a lot of art is simply a way of making money. In fact I wrote something on that some time ago (ok, it wasn't very good, but you definitely aren't reading this blog for quality). But there are more interesting ways to expose that angle on art than dissing famous (or infamous) art pieces.

And while I'm definitely not blind to the irony of dissing dissers, or the value of criticism, I am rather peeved at the self-important way that it seems to be done. In essence, journalists seem to be saying, 'Oh, I'm so terribly unimpressed by the world and amused by its stupidities. Because I'm so terribly important, because I'm bored, you the reader, should be bored too.'

I don't know, but the only thing I get bored of is reading the papers.