I Hate Studying @westernsurvey - Tumblr Blog

Some lesser known Van Gogh paintings that I liked.

gloamglozerglam-deactivated2022

it’s funny how western art culture privileges naturalism. you see it in visual art too - people think african sculptors were/are “primitive” because they don’t sculpt anatomically-correct human figures, people laugh at medieval european paintings because the faces are so round and the eyes are so big and the cloth doesn’t drape right and why does baby jesus look like a tiny man. you’d think no one in any culture before 1600s italy had any idea what a human person looked like. but obviously they did; they were just making choices in the context of a different visual culture. you might as well make fun of cartoonists for making people’s heads and eyes so big and their mouths and bodies so tiny - but ofc we’ve got a blind spot to things in our own culture. same thing is true with acting, and singing. styles that were super popular in their day now seem overly schmalzy and affected to us, but that’s because, you know, we’re not capital-r Romantics, and we’re in a different artistic culture with different values

no artistic history is just an evolution of “artificial” to “naturalistic". maybe our current fixation on realism has to do with the advent and accessibility of photography, or western obsession with artistic techniques that are exceptionally difficult and time-consuming to cultivate (like pointe ballet or wagnerian opera singing, both of which also require a lot of time and money and other resources to learn how to do)

ulibeanzz

this was for a school project but also a power move and my favorite pic of me

lilbanili-deactivated20181129

listen i don’t know if this was the original point of the piece but this is literally one of the most powerful images I’ve seen in relation to female artists and sexuality

it is a HUGE issue to get modern art historians to recognize historical lgbtq+ artists, especially women. A female artist could have never married, spent time with other publicly lgbt figures, and been living with a female partner for most of their lives, and yet you still get art historians who will jokingly be like “I guess that makes them a lesbian right? haha!” um yeah, professor janet, it does, and it’s not a joke

with that context, this piece gains an incredible amount of depth. I could write a full ten page paper on this piece alone. This is a self portrait (which beautifully and ironically emulates classic Renaissance formula) saying “I am an artist, and I’m gay” in a way that by definition cannot be removed or questioned. Power move indeed, holy shit

tarathefeminist

My Twitter did a thing

kasael-deactivated20250929

tumblr meme culture is really just a form of neo dadaism

kasael-deactivated20250929

I’d like to clarify:

dada was a largely european art movement that took place after wwi. this time and place is not a coincidence. let me explain.

dada art made no sense. the artists who made dada lived in a world in which nothing made sense - in which conventional logic led to the senselessness of a world war. so, making art that made no sense, making - well, you can’t really call it art, so making ANTI-art that rejected the conventions that brought about that atrocity in the first place - it made total sense. (if that makes any sense.)

so the artists did weird things. new things! putting things that were already made together and calling it sculpture, cutting up bits of pictures and putting them together and calling that something to frame - this site has some nice examples.

but from my perspective - there’s serious intellectual continuity between the absurdity of attaching a bunch of tacks to the bottom of an iron, rendering it useless, and say…. bath bomb posts. Put a fucking macbook in a bath. it’s useless now. Nobody fucking cares anymore. you want something funny? you want a punchline? gun. that’s your punchline. Take it. I am laughing

in a way it could be a method of venting some of the frustration and hopelessness and dissatisfaction that tumblr’s userbase (largely, disenfranchised millennials) feels in the modern day. I can’t really speak for anyone else, but… at least from a US perspective, there’s plenty to be disillusioned about. growing up in a constant state of questionably justified war, income inequality, an economic recession caused by the actions of a handful of wealthy fucks who didn’t even get properly punished, growing awareness of police brutality, being called lazy and self-absorbed by the generations that gave us these problems in the first place… I can’t help but think that these factors (and more) could produce a similar mindset to the one that precipitated the first dada movement.

so of COURSE we make nonsense jokes. it’s a coping mechanism for a world which doesn’t make any sense.

related: this isn’t by tumblr but I have to plug UCLA’s atrocity of a virtual gallery once more. it really needs to be experienced, but… it’s definitely also millennial neo dada. from the presentation (like an unplayable video game) to the content (THE DOGS HAVE ARRIVED), it is exactly what I am talking about. it is a fucking shitpost. and it’s high art, too! I love this

tl;dr: my generation is fed up with this bullshit, and the best way that we can express that is by shitposting. alternatively, dada was an early precursor to modern shitposting and we should all thank duchamp for signing a fucking urinal

kasael-deactivated20250929

a dear friend has given a perfect update to some of my phrasing, courtesy of their word replace extension:

you see this? this is exactly what I’m fucking talking about. the thing that I’m talking about is:

gayasscommie-deactivated2017090

I’d also say that while Dadaism was obsessed with the technological aspects of Modernity, of newspapers, of industrial mechanics and factory made clocks, neo-dadaism (of which shitposting but also the increasingly broad reach of the New Aesthetic and net aesthetics) is obsessed with the technological aspects of our time, or at the beginning of our time.

As just a comparison, the Clock in Absurdist and Dadaist art is both a symbol of the uplifting beginning of industrial relations (as one of the first complicated machines made by manufacturers, as the symbol of mankind’s ability to triumph and analyze nature and better ourselves) and as the deified symbol of horrific modernity (of demarcated time, labor hours, the oppression of the working class via managerial time), Neo-Dadaism/Absurdism has a similar relationship with early computers, which both symbolizes the utopian attitudes which we entered the digital age with, and the horrifying period we live in now, where the Digital is ever present and semi-deified.

sam-keeper

My favorite dada satire is probably from Georges Grosz who takes the kind of robotic modernist tube people of folks like Leger:

and turns them into these mindlessly patriotic broken automatons chanting rote phrases:

And it’s so so funny to me that there’s all kinds of Gen X artists out there creating art about the millennials on their damn cellumar phones who think they’re the inheritors of this aesthetic but really it’s people who use the Madden gif generator to shitpost because they’re taking the technology meant for a coherent purpose for a particular narrative and they’re breaking it and turning it back on itself.

mizulyn

I think you might be onto something…

Aside from color palettes and materials used, I see literally zero difference.

blackwoolncrown

This is one of the top 3 best posts I’ve ever seen on tumblr and I’ve been here for years.

play-dolls

Love

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mustangsally78

STATUS: DAY MADE.

bebeocho

aint-that-kind-of-blog-bruv

This post has been on my mind constantly for ages.

amakthel-deactivated20180709

it got better

clockworkflea

@gogoblueberry @zomblequeen @archaicprospect

daughterofthestars

Putting my essay topics up here you guys can give me advice if you want but I don’t expect anything.

1. 10 page paper on Joseph Cornell - at least it’s ten pages on an artist I really like who’s art I understand and who was a genuinely great person

2. Essay on a different American artist and their unique contribution to the story of American Art. Dunno who I’m going to write this about yet. Feel free to suggest a favorite if you have any knowledge of American art whatsoever.

3. Essay: The Armory Show of 1913 is considered the most dramatic popular event in the history of American Art. How did this exhibition come about? How did it alter the direction of American Art?

4. Essay: Compare and contrast the works of Thomas Eakins and Albert Pinkham Ryder. How do these two artists represent different developments in American Art in the last quarter of the 19th century? Define these two traditions in late 19th century American Art.

5. Essay: Discuss the rise of American Scene painting in the years after the First World War. What were the reasons (cultural and otherwise) for this return to a depiction of American subjects? How was it a reaction to European Modernism?