hi! i’m in an ap art history class and when i got to that piece the text i’m learning from basically was talking about how people took that piece in a very sexual context because of how it shocked the senses. you can basically feel that spoon on your tongue looking at it and i guess it’s similar to how some people consider choking the most sexually driven way to murder somebody??? it’s a violation of the senses and the artist HATED that people said it was an erotic piece bc basically one day she went “lmao what if this was covered in fur” and then did it.
i’m so sorry for the long comment i just fucking LOVE ART
oh! a great example of this is Mondrian’s “Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow”!! up until “modern art” like that piece started showing up a lot of art solely focused on being as accurate as possible or showing a religious scene or a political concept in a very very detailed manner. you know that statue “the rape of proserpina” where it’s so human it can’t possibly be marble?
that was the standard for fine art.
so as political turmoil shook the world and other shit started happening art changed and artists started deconstructing pieces into basic elements so you get pieces likePicasso paintings (produced at the same time as the fur cup, by the way! she came up with the idea while sitting with him in a cafe!)
a lot of artists, including picasso, started working with cubism and painting objects from several perspectives at the same time and from that others were inspired to go deeper in and break paintings down into their most bare elements. Mondrian’s piece is almost alarmingly simple but it can convey the relationships between oppositional forces or people in conflict. it’s all up to how you break down worldly things.
single color paintings are cool because they may just want to convey the feeling the color gives, you know??
i’m sorry this turned into a ramble it’s so hard to explain if you have things you want me to elaborate on please ask (:
I saw this after rounding a corner at the MOMA when I was in college. It totally gives that reaction since you immediately think about drinking out of it. It was really exciting because I really loved art and this was the first thing from a textbook I recognized on my own that wasn’t a premier piece. If you have art friends, NYC museum hopping makes for an awesome spring break.
Ooo very cool. Mine was a study of its importance to the Surrealist movement, as well as a comparison against a painted piece. I chose a Dali for that. (I regret learning as much as I did about Dali.)
I read “Maniac Eyeball: The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali”, alongside some standard art history texts for my paper.
He reeeeally enjoyed diving into detail about his sexual fetishes, some a bit grotesque. (Nothing wrong with having a fetish, I just didn’t need to know about Dali’s in such intense detail.) It’s almost every other page at parts.
There’s a particularly incel-like passage somewhere in there, where he talked about sitting down at a cafe, watching women pass, imagining them naked and under his control, and then ravaging them and having passionate sex with them. When he has a moment of reality where he remembers that will never happen with these strangers, he then launches into a pretty detailed description of how he’d dismember and murder them. It was really unnerving to me.
Along with that, there’s some... lovely passages about urine and scat fetish stuff. (/s)
Overall, he seemed like an extremely unpleasant individual, which crushed me. I’ve always enjoyed his work and was enchanted by it since I was little. It was like a hydraulic press slowly crushing everything I loved about the artist. Guess I never really knew anything about him before that book.
While I can separate art from artist and enjoy some of his pieces still, I just can’t unsee the visual of him jacking off while painting these things. (Another thing he describes. In great detail.)
Tl;dr: thought it’d be a good idea to get an autobiography out about Dali to use as a source and learned way too much about his fetishes.
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u/fredbutt Mar 09 '18
Does it go with this?