December 23, 2011
’snot Funny! Humor And Art
It is tough to think about humor and intellect as going hand-in-hand: just like the divisions of thoughts and body, humor is considered base, and mutually exclusive to larger cognition. After all, humor may be very corporeal: laughter is the physical response to something funny. When you’ve got any doubts of this, just think about these questions: did Jesus chuckle? Can you imagine Muhammad telling a joke? Or Buddha, mid-meditation, passing gasoline and laughing?
This very concern has repercussions in art as well. The operate of art has, for a number of centuries now, been expected to satisfy some philosophical purpose. Artwork is meant to make us think. This particularly overwhelmed artwork within the wake of the Conceptual Artwork movement, as creative talent was thrown out the window, and the “idea” reigned supreme. It’s thus that we separate the high arts from the low arts: artwork that is “humorous” is just not respectable. (It is thus that art historians even have a repute for being a buttoned-up, humorless bunch. Ask your self the Buddha query in regards to your Artwork Historical past a hundred and one lecturer. See what I imply?) But, some may say, if the separation of high artwork and low artwork did not exist, art would be indistinguishable from mere “entertainment:” a peanuts cartoon would be as aesthetically invaluable as a Bruce Nauman; Will Ferrell can be extra of a mover-and-shaker than Sol LeWitt; Andy Samberg’s crude SNL digital shorts can be as artistically authentic as a Jean-Luc Godard film. I actually try to fight the elitist reputation of art historians, but all I’ve to say is: yikes.
And yet, there isn’t any denying that extra individuals today are familiar with “D*** in a Field” than they are with “Les plus belles escroqueries du monde.” The reality is the overall population gets extra out of Judd Apatow bromance than a minimalist sculpture. Is not there one thing to be stated for that? What’s the final value of the “I do not get it” aesthetic?
I’ve only seen a number of previous exhibitions to address artwork and humor, and they were pretty much limited to political caricatures and comics. That is all properly and good, but the inferiority of the humorous is implied within the medium: print media of mass culture is once more broadly considered a “low” artwork, in fixed battle for legitimacy. The actual fact that art historians only study humor in those media highlights their hesitation to combine “low” humor with excessive art.
I did lately came across one exhibition that more willingly explores humor in “excessive” art, and the title says it all: “Cut My Legs Off and Name Me Shorty!” Sadly, the exhibition is in Sweden, and the curators limited themselves to a small handful of Swedish artists. However no less than they embody a bit wider range of media: pictures, illustration, video and finally, portray! It is a present long overdue in the artwork world, and I hope not the primary of its sort–we are able to use a bit humor on this aspect of the puddle. The creators have taken a quote by American writer E.B. White as “good advice” for the present: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few individuals are interested and the frog dies of it.”
Okay, I am going to zip it.
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