sad art is an inclusive line of postmodern sculptures

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I use the term “Sad Art” to describe a spectrum of postmodern sculptures. This inclusive notion of sad art is not a new thing, but I hope to give it a little more definition than it has previously been given.

In the past, there have been artists who were labeled as “sad artists.” One example is Chris Burden, who did many pieces involving his own pain and suffering, such as the piece he did in 1971 called “Shoot”. Another example is Marina Abramovic, known for her performance piece “The Artist Is Present”, where she sat still for 7 hours a day for three months in 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, allowing people to sit across from her and stare into her eyes. While these are obviously two different types of sad art (one involving physical pain and one involving emotional pain), they can be linked together by the common thread that they both seek to elicit an emotional response in the viewer. For instance, Marina Abramovic’s piece was said to have brought some viewers to tears.

Another type of sad art is well represented by Damien Hirst’s infamous installation piece The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. This piece is more conceptual than either Burden’s shooting himself or Abram

Since the early 2000s, a small but growing number of artists have been creating sculptures that appear to be sad. Sad art is sometimes described as “postmodern” or even “conceptual,” and it is often made by artists who are otherwise considered part of the art world’s left wing.

The most prominent example is Michael Landy’s Break Down, a 2001 installation in which the artist destroyed all his possessions and arranged the remnants in a pile, including family photos, clothes, and furniture. The artwork was eventually sold to a museum for $2.2 million; Landy donated half the proceeds to charity but kept enough money to buy a flat-screen television.

The artist Mark Wallinger has also made work that appears sad. In 2007 he exhibited on London’s South Bank an empty space where, a year later, he placed an empty plinth with nothing on it. The sculpture was called State Britain; it included a sign reading “This site is not vacant.”

In 2011 Wallinger received £15,000 from the Arts Council for A Disappearing Monument, in which he nailed a wooden plaque to a tree in the Forest of Dean that read: “Here stood the statue of Queen Victoria.” The plaque was removed by local authorities after just two days.

“Postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism,” said Fredric Jameson, and he was right. The problem is that it sounds like a put-down.

And in fact there is something a little sneery about postmodernism. It’s not just that it’s hard to take someone seriously when they keep telling you how playful they are. It’s hard to take them seriously because they don’t trust their own seriousness. They are forever flirting with their own irrelevance, as if expecting that any moment now we will realize that what they’re doing isn’t really art at all but just high-concept kitsch. Their playfulness is not the wholesome playfulness of a child but the desperate playfulness of an aging rock star who can’t remember how old he is.

The one thing you can say for sad art is that it never doubts its own seriousness. It doesn’t flirt with irrelevance; it doesn’t flirt at all. And this helps explain why it has been out of fashion for so long. We live in a culture where nothing seems more uncool than sincerity – except maybe sincerity about being uncool.*

Sad art isn’t nostalgic, and it isn’t ironic either; irony is only nostalgia for the present,

Sculpture has always been a genre friendly to artists who want to do something more than make statues. The medium is a good place for experimentation, because the sculptures are big and expensive enough that it’s worth making experiments with them.

A good contemporary sculptor will typically be doing at least three different things: making “traditional” figurative pieces, doing weird stuff that hasn’t been done before, and making conceptual art.

But what exactly is conceptual art? It’s hard to say. In general, conceptual art is art that doesn’t just try to be pretty or convey some emotion; it tries to express an idea as well. Conceptual art can be any kind of visual art: painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture, video or installation art.

The most famous example of conceptual art is probably Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, which he called “Fountain.” It was a standard urinal from an automated factory, signed “R. Mutt” (for Richard Mutt) and submitted in 1917 to the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York City as artwork. He got away with it by saying his intention was to exhibit the very notion of what a work of art was — he had replaced the original function of

Modern art was created by artists in the early 20th century who wanted to break away from the styles of the past. They wanted to create modern art.

In particular, they wanted to create an art that was not just realistic, but reflected what they considered the basic truth of all art, which is that it’s all made up. Art is not a description of the world, but a way of seeing it.

The problem with realism is that it’s too easy. Anyone can paint a realistic picture if he wants to. What’s hard is painting something that looks like nothing you’ve ever seen before and still looks real.

This explains why Picasso, Manet and their friends painted pictures that looked very unlike what anyone had painted in previous centuries: because realism was too easy for them. In order to create modern art, they had to do something harder than realism.

They called this new kind of art “postmodernism.” The name wasn’t meant to say that it came after modernism; it was meant to say that it came after realism. It was also meant as a challenge: postmodern artists dared you not to be fooled by how realistic their work looked, because they were making fun of realism by creating something that didn’t look realistic at all

In her book Art and Its Significance, the philosopher Susanne Langer argues that works of art can be divided into three categories: useful things, like tables and chairs; the means to sensual pleasure, like good food or music; and pure art. She calls the last category “aesthetic objects.” These are things we have no use for but choose to surround ourselves with anyway. The reason we do it is that aesthetic objects deliver an experience of what Langer calls “the beautiful.”

Langer distinguishes two kinds of beauty. One is “visual,” and the other is “emotional” or “expressive.” The difference between them is just what you would guess: visual beauty you can see, and expressive beauty you have to feel. Visual beauty is what most people mean when they talk about “beauty” in art, but Langer argues that visual beauty is not the only kind there is. She says we enjoy watching a sunset, but we also enjoy listening to a symphony — even though a sunset can be seen but a symphony cannot be seen.

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