Performance Art Final

Student Art Show

While I have never been a huge fan of art shows, I liked a lot of what I saw in the Student Art Show in the Scarfone/Hartley gallery. Most of the pieces that I liked were painted or mixed media, but used paint in them. Painting has always been my favorite medium and I like the modernity of these pieces as compared to my favorite artist, Van Gogh.
One of the pieces that I liked the best at this show was one that was done to look like graffiti. I didn't take a picture of the namecard so I don't remember what the name, artist, or media was, but it looks like it was done mostly in spray paint. Graffiti was always one of my favorite parts of going into the city and seeing freight trains ride by. I saw the beauty in it that others didn't when all they believed it to be was vandalism. To see graffiti, or a semblance of graffiti, on the wall of an art gallery made me really happy to see others appreciating it in the same way that I do.
Another one of my favorites was the portrait of a girl, overlooking a city skyline. The piece itself was absolutely stunning. I like realism in art. I don't understand most abstractions. I can draw different colored squares on a piece of paper and call it art but I can't draw myself in anything more than a cartoon. The mixed media in the piece also gave it texture and color, and that made it more interesting than a plain 2-D charcoal drawing.
My favorite piece in the whole show was the Tim Burton one. When I walked past it at first, the first thing I saw was the striped snake coming out of the top of his head and my first thought was that it looked like the snake in Nightmare Before Christmas, my favorite movie. I almost walked past it without looking back when I realized that it was Tim Burton. Though they did not create anything new, and they really just redrew some of his designs, I still think that the idea of the piece is cool because the snake, bats, and hill from Nightmare Before Christmas, are all growing out of his hair and his head, showing that they are coming out of his brain and I've always thought that showing people's ideas this way was a cool representation of ideas spawning.

Performance Art

The idea behind this piece worked much better in my head than it was executed. The idea was to tear down the beauty standards that other put on us. This is why my friend is the one putting all of the makeup on me and I am the one to smear it all over my face. Obviously, if this were done again, I would have to frame it better, speed it up, cut audio, and overlay music. If I had done this well, I think that it would have been a performance art piece that more people my generation would have appreciated. A lot of performance art that we talk about today is old and outdated. It doesn't make sense and it usually just people hurting themselves or putting themselves in uncomfortable situations. I don't see the point in any of that. You can make beautiful art without being ridiculous.