"OK, Lisa - you can open your eyes now."
"Leo, I've been looking forward to this for weeks."
"So, Lisa - waddya think?"
"Erm... well it's not very like me, is it?"
"Listen, Lisa - I'm an artist - not a photographer."
"A photo-what?"
"Never mind - little project I'm working on. All I'm saying is, I can't just paint the scene in front of me. My job is to open a window into the soul."
"So, Leo - what you're sayin is, you've painted a representation of.... my soul?"
"That's right, Lisa."
"So if I've got this right - my soul has no eyebrows?"
"Look, that's how it looks to me."
"How can my soul look like me, but with no eye-brows? What sort of weird artist are you?"
"Lisa, forget the eyebrows. What about the smile?"
"I take it that's my soul's 'smile' is it?"
"That's it. I was aiming for 'enigmatic'."
"OK. Well, I think what you've hit, is 'trapped wind'. Still, that's closer to enigmatic than having no eyebrows is to having eyebrows."
"I can see why they call you 'Moaner'.
"'Mona. That's 'Mona'."
"I'm just glad all my clients aren't as fussy as you are."
"Leo, you're living in dream-land. John the Apostle's coming round in a while. He says you've made him look like a girl..."
The problem with Impressionist Artistry is that people's impressions are so different from each other. One man's dog is another's cat. One Woman's Corgi is another Woman's fur stole.
ReplyDeleteI've always been pragmatic about so called Classical Art, such as the Mona Lisa. I look at a woman laying about, scantily clothed and wonder how she coped without central heating.
I prefer graffitee, at least it's an honest statement of artistic literacy (or lack of it) and represents the height of my own artistic talent. I can 'graf' with the best of them.
It's the "what is it?" art that gets me stumped. There was once this sculpture at this museum that was a tricycle spinning with these bike tires stacked on top spinning in opposite directions and water coming out in all directions. The tour guide kept trying to convince us it was supposed to depict a naked woman. I peeked under my blouse quickly to reassure myself nothing weird had happened under there as I'm not accustomed to seeing myself in the mirror as a tricycle and bike tires. We eventually figured out the artist must have had a really unfortunate LSD trip. The tour guide, who was French, was heard mumbling something about Americans having no eye for art. My criteria is if a 2 year old can produce the same effect as the work in question, or if I have to say "what in the world is THAT supposed to be?" then it is clearly art that is beyond my pedestrian American brain.
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