Be Excellent To Each Other

The Rape Tunnel?

It's almost art... but not quite. I think people's reactions to it are the real creation, rather than the construction or "performance" itself, so it is art at one remove.

C'nest pas une pipe

If you walk down a 'rape tunnel' knowing that you'll be 'raped' at the other end, then surely that's consent, and it's not rape?

Also, I really hope a 7 foot 25-stone brickie walks down it.

It's a hoax, is what it is.

You go first then, Parm.

This is very mush like my GCSE art project 'The wank bin'.

Gnk.

I appreciate I'm railing against the tide of cultural movement here, but I do regret that art has moved away from being a combination of having an idea, and having the technical ability to render and convey that idea by the medium of what one, for the want of a better term, would call "traditional art", to merely having an idea and either getting someone else to do it for you or not needing to do anything other than plonk an object or situation down and say "there! look at that!".

Damian Hirst's recent attempts at painting highlight this loss rather well.

Modern art is the equivalent of an Oscar Wilde quote - at first thought it seems to be clever and meaningful, but when you look into it nothing's actually been said or done.

Modern Art - a definition by EoaE:

An insurance scam first developed by wealthy socialites who, upon realising that the Emperor was in fact naked, crammed all the worthless shit they'd bought into the nearest available warehouse and, with the aid of a small box of matches, were able to claim massively on the policy covering all of the "art".

Send fucking Jet Li down this tunnel. What a cunt.

Indeed.

"Yes, I'm going to be at this address, at this time, committing crimes. I hope the police don't know how or where to find me"

Whilst cuntish, I don't think it's illegal as you're effectively giving consent.

I'm pretty sure consent can be withdrawn at any point though. So if someone enters the tunnel and he has sex with them against their will then it's still rape.

You could easily trick him by pretending your mouth is your bumhole.

No, you're not.

They should dress people up as an Ape beforehand.

Heh. I like that. A friend (I forget which, because I'm so amazing I have like a million friends) once called modern art a "bullshit tolerance tax".



Oi. Oscar Wilde wrote and said some very wise and perceptive things. Many of his quips fall into the category you describe, but he never claimed they were supposed to be taken seriously.

It would be quite funny if they turned up and he sodomised them, though.

If you're underage then you can never legally give consent...

This is true... I always place "proper" artists above this kind of artist simply because they paint/draw/sculpt things I don't have the skill to ever conceive of doing, and I can marvel at them for that. I could easily have a daft idea like this "tunnel" and get it built though, so there is no sense of awe and wonder in it. Not that it isn't without merit or doesn't have its place though mind.

Heh. However, I wouldn't mind so much if PUBLIC GALLERIES didn't pay so much for them.



Aaaah, that's just what he *wants* you to think, see.



Not explicitly, no, but he didn't make them just for the sake of arranging some words in a pretty order. That was part of it, of course, but I think he very much wanted people to be all like "wow, he's, like, sooo clever and that".

What if you burst into the room and shout 'Let's get it on! I'm up for anything!'

I fully expect the artiste to grumble that you've ruined his plan, as agreeing to do anything means he can't rape you, and you've DESTROYED HIS ART.

Or, send someone with AIDS down the tunnel or something. Yes.

I vaguely remember a story about an artist whose exhibit consisted of a few goldfish swimming about in a blender. Inevitably, a member of the public gave into the temptation and pressed the 'go' button.

A funny prank, but not really as morally uplifting or moving as one of the great masters. But then I'm a philistine who stopped going to art galleries a couple of years ago when I realised they bored me.

Of course the counter argument from the modernists is that even people like Michaelangelo or whoever had a studio full of people who did most of the actual painting for them. The counter-counter argument is that, unlike Tracy Emin or Damian Hirst or that bloke with the elephant dung, Michaelangelo could still actually paint.



Oh, indeed, but I just wish that people didn't lump it in with "art". It's no different to a carefully crafted soundbite. It's, I don't know, conceptualism.

No one got done for that, i don't think.

50p says some gigantic ape of a man enters the tunnel thinking "heh, like taking candy from a baby" and rapes him.

Eh, it's been done.

Yeah, I was just thinking that we used to go through one of those tunnels on the way home from school. Between that, the Gob Staircase and Paedo Park, it's a wonder we ever bothered.

I'm not sure 50p's enough for Grim....

See this, and to a lesser extent the 'rape tunnel', seems to classify as a sort of 'sociology/psychology as art', which is a premise I quite like the idea of. It's much more worthwhile than a bed you've pooed on, for example.

You'd rather have a goldfish smoothie than shit the bed?

Deep.

Maybe they should mix the two 'pieces' and have a food processor in the tunnel.

"The Gender Blender"

I'm in the wrong job.

Could we claim to being Artists if we covered the entire thing in petrol and set fire to the tunnel knowing that he's in there and let him decide if he'd like to burn to death?

to an astonishing degree.

If you look at the great traditional works of art, really analyse it, pretty much every time there's something quite staggering being said or conveyed. Plus the actual execution is bordering on miraculous sometimes. Just look at Thomas Lawrence's oil portraits for one, utterly amazing.

There is concern that the old master techniques that can only be learnt through apprenticeship are dying, and I share it. Modern art IS largely rubbish. Which is interesting, as it is the only medium which seems so completely inferior to its ancestor. (See old vs new books, classical vs Motown, etc.)

Disagree. Strongly.

Yeah, but no really, hoax.

ETA: Or satire, or "meta-art", or something. Whatever, nobody got bumfucked, except metaphorically.

Not really sure I agree much with that. The execution, absolutely. People got skillz. But a massive amount of the grandmasters' work is at it's heart just observational, despite what generations of post-mortem art historians have decided to invent.

I think there is room in art for more thinking, more exploration, and more questioning. Doing things just for shock value is where it becomes worthless.

If that's your approach to debate you're going to fail advocacy, you know.

I was going to write some stuff, but then the phone rang, and I got busy doing something else and lost interest in arguing the point.

If that's your approach to debate you're going to fail advocacy, you know.

Be my muse.

I'm writing my stuff for that now. We've been told to be able to jump around it, so don't learn it like a speech. I say "writing my stuff" I actually mean "thinking about watching Reservoir Dogs" as Tim Roth done OK.

On more sober reflection, you've got a point. A lot of it was guff that hasn't lasted. And there have been some great works in the 20th, I just can't think of one single artist out there who's exciting me at the moment, outside of comics/picturebooks Kevin O'Neill and Shawn Tam. (Dave McKean's treading water a bit, I fear.) Yet I have to stand by a significant chunk of the old stuff being pretty mind-bendingly awesome. I'm especially fond of the symbolism and pre-raphelite movements, which do indeed have lots of clues and meanings. And some of the straight forward stuff is just beautiful.

But it would be a shame if some of the skillz were lost, would it not?

D you mean "modern art" as in the style of modern art, or works that have been done in the late 20th and early 21st century?

*Thinks hard*

Works. Art is art.

(I'm not really actually sure what I'm talking about.)

If I were to paint something in a pre-raphelite style, would it be pre-raphelite or modern?

There's actually a gallery ad around London at the moment for "The World's Only Modern Pre-Raphaelite". Just to confuse matters.

Is it just me who finds the phrase "post-modern" teeth-gnashingly irritating?

No, as it relates to the phase after modernism, where the high concepts of modernism were subverted and twisted.

In everyday use, yes, I suppose it does.

Yes.