I’m a fan of art. I’ve sculpted clay, burned wood, tooled leather, scraped the back of mirrors, drawn with pencil and ink, painted in oil and acrylic, and tried Sumi-e, which is Japanese painting and really difficult. I even have a couple of my artistic attempts hanging on my walls, oil from twenty-eight years ago and poster-paint from fifty-two years ago. But I am not an artist. However, I do consider myself an art critic, in my own right. I most emphatically demand that a picture of a can soup is boring. Pointillism is pointless. All other -isms might look good in a nightclub but should never hang in a home. And what Alexander and Bob Ross made on TV is nothing like what they created when they had several hours to paint in private. I also insist that what is promoted as great artwork from the past isn’t always. From an anthropologist’s point of view, the art of previous centuries might be informative, but little of it is noteworthy. Art experts must insist on greatness so they can make a living. And that’s impressive all by itself, persuading the wealthy that such and such drawings and paintings and sculptures are so remarkable that they must be preserved in a museum. Culture, you know.
I do recognize a few amazing artists. While it is impossible to know the painters’ names, cave art has always been one of my favorites. Not all of it, of course. The renderings of animals, even megafauna, are amazing for the time, even though they qualify as an -ism. But I don’t like that they never painted themselves like that. I want to see a few portraits on those rock walls, other than handprints. Well, maybe in caves not yet found. The movie “The Croods” kind of addressed that.
From more recent times, another of my favorites is Michelangelo, and his Pietà. But isn’t the reclining figure a little too flat? I think he accidentally chipped off the tip of the nose and had to re-carve the whole thing an inch lower. And his Sistine Chapel looks like illustrations by Family Guy’s cartoonists. I also admire Leonardo da Vinci, but his books of drawings are no better than what I drew when I was fourteen. And the painting that has so dominated the artworld, his Mona Lisa, which some say is the wife of a nobleman, and which has inspired extraterrestrial theorists because there is a balloon in the air behind her, and excited the gay community because her eyes and nose line up with a drawing thought to be of him, is really not so mysterious. Shadows in the cheeks make that smile. I think it’s a portrait of his mother, and he kept it and work on it for the rest of his life because he couldn’t remember what her eyebrows looked like.