A Look at Comics as an art form

[fullmoonsaloon00-migration]

Interesting & relaxing listening. Been a lurker but thought this would perhaps be of interest. Perhaps not.

 

Stephen Porchelli

 

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"Now is the right moment to say what happened in the 20th century. The Great American arts were Jazz, movies, and comics. Museums need to open up and be about Visual Culture. We need to be more sophisticated about how we view Visuals images."

 

http://www.wamu.org/audio/dr/05/12/r2051220-8078.ram

[The Brain]

HELLO AND WELCOME TO THE BOARDS!!!!!

 

 

 

TELL US MORE ABOUT YOU AND WHAT YOU COLLECT...... PLEASE.

[OldGuy]

Welcome to the boards!

[fullmoonsaloon00-migration]

Thanks for the warm welcome. I collect comics and comic art. Most of my collection is Silver Age books that I collected with my dad when I was a younger man. Weirdly I feel as if I grew up in the 50's and 60's because as a child I hunted with my father for his comic treasures. Strangely, all my fathers old treasures became mine too. He collected Avengers, Spider-man, Wonder Woman and the main super heroes. I grew up reading books like 'West Coast Avengers' & 'Vision & Scarlet Witch'. My fathers era seemed so long ago when I collected with him. How strange that the books I perceived as so so old were only 20 or 30 years old at the time. They seemed older to me when I was a kid. Time is a very funny thing.

 

I posted this in another forum: as I saw it last nite. I highly recommend it to anyone who has time and appreciates pop art:

 

 

Sat, Dec 31

2:00pm

Imagining America: Icons of 20th Century American Art

 

This documentary explores the work of Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and other notable American artists in the context of the cultural and social transformations that helped define 20th century America. Through the work, ideas and lives of more than 50 leading artists and scholars, the program explores the qualities that make our art and culture distinctly American. (Closed Captioning) (Stereo)

 

 

The last half-hour was the best segment to me. A brilliant quote caught my attention - "There is no separation of art from the mass media. This is what contemporary artists have come to realize and and find most fearful".

 

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"The Media Is the Message"--By the second half of the 20th century, artists found that it was not enough to channel their personal psychology into art. Artists became obsessed with the form and language of art itself and how that paralleled the way in which America had become a visual culture, one in which advertising, news, television, movies and celebrity had transformed America from a society based on making things into a society focused on consuming images and information.

 

"The Media Is the Message" shows how 20th-century American artists created a new visual language to represent this new image-laden consumer landscape. The change begins with the use of the "ready-made" in the work of artists such as Marcel Duchamp, whose Fountain (a common urinal) shattered conceptions about what could be art, as would Warhol's Brillo Box years later. The work of Stuart Davis, who represented the signs of mass media in art for the first time, paved the way for Warhol's use of pop iconography. The segment concludes with a look at how contemporary artists such as David Wojnarowicz turned Pop Art on its head. His idea that media culture was devastating the American spirit just as industry devastated nature in the earlier part of the 20th century continues to inform.