teacher: write a 5 page essay analyzing this
me: it’s not that deep 🏊🏼
I swear to god they’re so dramatic. Even in art history they read into what an apple or fly means like BICH maybe they’re just in the painting chilling. Y DOES IT NEED A MEANING
Yo, makes me laugh that you say this. Because you’re actually right
At the time artists started painting still life (early renaissance), painters didn’t bother with meanings at all. It was a technical exercise. Seeing how good their techniques were
But painting is expensive as fuck and you gotta pay for pigments and shit, so you had to be able to sell your shitty still life, to the people who pay for your pigments and shit. But they didn’t want still life paintings, because it was… just food….. They wanted Jesus and bible scenes and such. Not apples and shit. Because rich people loved religion. And were pretentious as fuck. Why have an apple painting at home when you can have men freaking out over zombie Jesus
So artists were like ok, see, you don’t get it. The apple refers to the original sin, and all the fruits represent your wealth and such. But the skull’s there to remind you that your wealth doesn’t matter, you’ll die someday anyway
Because that was a popular thing at the time, being rich but having symbolic stuff that remind you that you’ll die someday despite being rich. Rich people were weird. And pretentious
So painters BULLSHITTED all that symbolic stuff around the things they put in their still life paintings to make the boring painting exercises appealing to the gullible (and pretentious) rich people that commissioned them. And rich people gobbled it aaaalllllll up
And that’s how we still have still life paintings from most famous renaissance artists today and that they’re in such good condition, because still life paintings became THE shit amongst rich people and they bought them and kept them at home. Instead of remaining stuck in a dusty, shitty painting workshop, to be forgotten beneath tons of other stuff and rot
And there was this whole lexicon and symbolism dictionary created around still life paintings at the time, like each object was meant to represent something and there began to be conventions and stuff
But they only ever were technical painting exercises
The show I was invited to was one of those snobby art events. Lots of young pretentious men in tight jeans and a smug grin, girlfriends hanging off their arms. No class. Downing shots from the bar like the world was ending. In times like these I wish I were in Marlinspike Hall, sipping a Loch Lomond and consuming my alcohol like a fucking adult.
The DHC/ART was packed with these poseurs! All of them supposed “an-artists.” They do stuff with light and “magic” to create ostentatious displays. Apparently some of these inscrutable, incomprehensible pieces even damage people as part of their artistic purpose. At which point, for me, the meaning of the art is lost. It’s a fucking joke at that point.
