scruffy said 

 … i think you oughtta take a deeper look at all that ‘classic’ ‘high’ ‘art’.  ya know, the stuff that you said was stale, or whatever…
 

Caravaggio’s art is a good example of classical freshness. His work is intense and modern, full of fear, violence, sex, and self-awareness. He was a criminal sentenced to death and a fugitive from the law whose life was described as a ‘low-life opera,’ but he always painted. He was the irreverent, authentic, subversive, ‘punk rock in your face’ artist of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and his technical mastery of light and dark made the beautiful and the grotesque glow from within.

I like modern art, except for modern art that’s intended as a commentary on art itself, which is unfortunately quite a lot of it.  Ai Wei Wei has some really awesome stuff, there’s a great documentary about him called Never Sorry.  I love folk art also, there’s a big folk art museum in Baltimore that’s I’m dying to go to.  

The only non-modern art that really grabs my attention is Dutch painting, painters like Vermeer, Van Eyck, Rembrandt.  It’s hard to say exactly why, but I guess to me there’s a sense in these paintings of a lot going on beneath the surface- many of the objects in the background have some kind of signficance, and just looking at a lot of the peoples’ faces they seem very human and not one-dimensional like a lot of other genres.  I also just like the visual style, especially of Vermeer, where it’s dark with lots of glowy shit.

I can easily spend an hour or more at the National Gallery looking at the Dutch paintings even though I’ve seen them all before, but I get bored quickly with about 90% of the rest of what’s in there.  Impressionism in particular is completely not interesting at all to me.

Mr. Tidwell said

DrFreshness said
I like modern art, except for modern art that’s intended as a commentary on art itself, which is unfortunately quite a lot of it.  Ai Wei Wei has some really awesome stuff, there’s a great documentary about him called Never Sorry.  I love folk art also, there’s a big folk art museum in Baltimore that’s I’m dying to go to.  

The only non-modern art that really grabs my attention is Dutch painting, painters like Vermeer, Van Eyck, Rembrandt.  It’s hard to say exactly why, but I guess to me there’s a sense in these paintings of a lot going on beneath the surface- many of the objects in the background have some kind of signficance, and just looking at a lot of the peoples’ faces they seem very human and not one-dimensional like a lot of other genres.  I also just like the visual style, especially of Vermeer, where it’s dark with lots of glowy shit.

I can easily spend an hour or more at the National Gallery looking at the Dutch paintings even though I’ve seen them all before, but I get bored quickly with about 90% of the rest of what’s in there.  Impressionism in particular is completely not interesting at all to me.

I’m not familiar with Ai Wei Wei. I’ll look them and the documentary up. Thanks.

I’m not big on impressionism either. 

The description of the dutch realists helps a lot. thanks.

I didn’t the like the first couple of things of Ai Wei Wei’s that I saw, but then somebody talked me into going to a big exhibition he had here.  Once I spent a few hours looking at all his different stuff and thinking about what he was doing it flipped my wig.  Just as an example, he’s always pissing off the Chinese government and one time the police came and beat the shit out of him, causing swelling in his brain and almost killing him.  He took the CAT scan images of his swollen brain and turned them into art.  

I would almost guarauntee that you would find the documentary interesting, if you do watch it let me know what you thought.