The Art of the Birmingham Hotel
They say, or one guy I’ve read recently anyway, has talked about the artist becoming an irrelevant or at least outdated or misused title among most practitioners these days. To be an artist now is succinctly different than being an artist two hundred years ago when the term was still valid. An artist now can have nothing in common with his artisan ancestors; can be a mere manufacturer of intellectual counterfeit money so to speak; can operate in circles built up on layers of sediment and academic illusion; can create a great edifice of nothing and back it with steel black girder system substantiated cross-referenced text, make this edifice virtually unassailable by the virtue of their qualifications and title; and this is all true and is happening but the title of artist is either false or been so grossly mutated so as to render it basically necessary to reconstitute it for modern purpose.
There should be more of a dividing line in the nomenclature of titles but as of yet there isn’t. The art world is notorious for screwing itself up with language, for instance: the word ‘modern’ that I just used is understood to mean contemporary, whereas it is generally agreed that we’ve been fully postmodern for at least sixty years and have perhaps now moved into the hypermodern, or maybe again into the megamodern at time of writing.
To further illustrate this point: a Birmingham hotel was perhaps designed by an artist, who also could be considered an architect, but the gaudy oil paintings in the lobby of the Birmingham hotels, or more often the prints of these paintings was done by someone of a different classification, a different breed serving a different purpose. Birmingham hotels are also losing some relevance, but this is another topic that I haven’t time to get into here—I digress, it’s late, I apologize; of course a Birmingham hotel has nothing to do with art.
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