Gerhard Richter at Tate Modern London
Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2011 11:15 am
Massively well received exhibition with rave reviews all over the place. If you go see it, you might realise that Richter is not very good and appeals to philistines and people who don't really like art because:
1: He paints like photos (he mayhave invented this idea, but it's not that amazing, and I am pretty sure other pop artists, surrealists etc did it too). So he does a dead sort of painting of a vaguely interesting photo and gets a big brush and blurs it. And wow it looks a bit like a blurry photo. Philistines enjoy this cos it's skillful in their eyes (it looks like a photo!!!), and art critics like it cos it seems to say something about history or the end of paintings. Ah, actually after years of it, you just end up with a bunch of grubby boring paintings of flat things. The much lauded ones of his daughter or gf turning her head is frankly rubbish, they reproduce well because they go back to looking like photographs and you can't see their dull surfaces. They are so far from Vermeer as to be comical.
2: He does abstract AND figurative. Ah ha, the philistine likes this because it shows the whole art thing's a load of nonsense, confirming their suspicions that abstract painting is meaningless ie they dont understand it. Others like this because it shows variety. He gets a load of expensive oil paint and blurs it with a squeegee, and sometimes you get a vaguely nice pattern. Critics can yack on it about the end of gesture, history, yada yada.
3. He does some mirrors. Painting is a mirror. Gettit.
The richterheads will tell me that all this is deliberate. The paintings are boring and repetitive cos he wants them like that, because images and stuff are like that after the holocaust. Hmm. It's neither true, paintings can still be really beautiful, emotive, varied, exciting. These aren't and they don't so much at all. And so Richter is now OFFICially the most overrated living painter on earth after death of freud, twomby et al.
1: He paints like photos (he mayhave invented this idea, but it's not that amazing, and I am pretty sure other pop artists, surrealists etc did it too). So he does a dead sort of painting of a vaguely interesting photo and gets a big brush and blurs it. And wow it looks a bit like a blurry photo. Philistines enjoy this cos it's skillful in their eyes (it looks like a photo!!!), and art critics like it cos it seems to say something about history or the end of paintings. Ah, actually after years of it, you just end up with a bunch of grubby boring paintings of flat things. The much lauded ones of his daughter or gf turning her head is frankly rubbish, they reproduce well because they go back to looking like photographs and you can't see their dull surfaces. They are so far from Vermeer as to be comical.
2: He does abstract AND figurative. Ah ha, the philistine likes this because it shows the whole art thing's a load of nonsense, confirming their suspicions that abstract painting is meaningless ie they dont understand it. Others like this because it shows variety. He gets a load of expensive oil paint and blurs it with a squeegee, and sometimes you get a vaguely nice pattern. Critics can yack on it about the end of gesture, history, yada yada.
3. He does some mirrors. Painting is a mirror. Gettit.
The richterheads will tell me that all this is deliberate. The paintings are boring and repetitive cos he wants them like that, because images and stuff are like that after the holocaust. Hmm. It's neither true, paintings can still be really beautiful, emotive, varied, exciting. These aren't and they don't so much at all. And so Richter is now OFFICially the most overrated living painter on earth after death of freud, twomby et al.