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That Can’t Be Art

I forced myself to go to First Thursday after work last night even though I’m deathly ill. I can’t let a vulgar cough and nasty congestion keep me down! I started at 14 Geary, criss-crossing to various galleries, up through Union Square, and back home.

There is good art and there is bad art. I guess it’s all about your personal take on a piece. I was surprised to start my crawl viewing very detailed and well-priced watercolor paintings. Impressive how one of the paintings titled Broadway looked just like it. Pamela Wilson-Ryckman. Check out her stuff. She’s good.

In one of the subsequent galleries, there was a couch up front lined with pillows each with grainy pictures of JFK’s assassination. On the walls were similar framed pictures. Shocking! I was so turned off. But I left really wondering, what is art? Is art supposed to make you feel good? Is it supposed to make you think? I think the bottom line is that art should make you feel something, anything whether that’s good or bad. I can understand a museum curating a theme around guns or death, but one tiny gallery with everything in it depicting a horrific moment in time? To me, that’s distasteful. I felt sick by the experience.

There’s an artist named Michael Scoggins who does wall-sized renderings of what he would have doodled or written in a notebook as a child. A colorful drawing of Superman, a love letter to mom, what he wants to be when he grows up. They’re signed at the bottom in unrefined print Michael S. I think his stuff is cute, but for $10,000+? Really? Just ask a kid if you can borrow his journal for a day, take it to Kinko’s and blow it up, then voila. Art!

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02.02.11

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Welcome to my site, derived from an advice column I wrote while getting my MBA. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I give helpful, opinionated advice based on my own experience and from the expertise of my extensive network. For more, click here.

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