Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Gary Panter on Modern Painting



Love this lecture by Gary Panter. Anyone who is interested in the interplay between comics and modern art will probably already be familiar with the artists that Panter discusses. (And he does get some minor art history facts wrong--as he warns at the beginning.)

He mentions that many of his cartooning peers have a really low opinion of modern art. This lecture is, in a way, a way to counter this distrust. Part (but only part) of the bad feelings cartoonists have towards contemporary art has to do with the condescension that the art world has expressed for comics. This condescension is expressed in many ways--artists who appropriate the work of comics artists, and in doing so deny the cartoonists the personhood that is implied by being a creator of a piece of art; museums and galleries that display art inspired by comics, but never display comics art; art critics who are unwilling to take the effort to distinguish between artistically interesting comics and commercial hackwork (after all, it's all just spectacle, just precession of simulacra).

That is one reason I do this blog--I want to consider art (primarily contemporary art) and to consider comics as a subset of art. I want the two worlds to overlap. Gary Panter is an exemplar of what I'm talking about.

(Hat tip Gene Kannenberg.)

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