Thursday 23 September 2010

30,000 Years of Absurdity




According to experts these French cave drawings are between 30.000 and 32,000 years old. Not bad for their time, are they? As we can see from here in 2010, it has taken man over 30,000 millenniums to learn how to draw like Jean-Michel Basquiat.

And it would seem from The Good Book, that men (or women) made these images some 27,000 years before Adam and Eve. Hard to believe it, (or Adam and Eve it, as Damian would say). Makes one wonder what was going on all that time.
Nothing, it seems. Just people being born, living, making art and making more people and then dying. And not paying income tax, or watching Mel Gibson movies.

An absurd world, then and now. Though possibly a little less absurd now, without Basquiat.
(But Mel is still around. Bit quiet, though, recently, is he not?)

4 comments:

Caroline said...

"A little less absurd now...." Forgetting about Damien Hirst, aren't you?

Actually absurd is far too kind a word for Hirst. And for the people who buy his "work."

The relationship between patrons and artists is one that has always fascinated me. And the power that curators wield these days....

http://www.american.com/archive/2010/september/artists-and-the-market

Caroline said...

The web address got cut off. Supposed to read /artists-and-the-market.

An interesting short historical overview of artists and the marketplace.

Patrick O'Gara said...

Well Caroline, I was going to make it Bernard Buffet, but it dated me a bit.
Still, nobody twists people's arms to buy stuff. If it's no good, well..

Tracy Saunders. said...

Aparently, upon seeing the cave paintings at Lascaux, Picasso said: "We have learned nothing". It is debatable whether Picasso was merely talking about himself.
I am no great lover of Picasso.
I am currently introducing my full time student, who has been kept out of school for way too long, to the facinations of Our Ancestors. This morning he drew an absolutely brilliant "cave painting" just such as you have here. He wanted to know why the animals rarely have feet. Most likely it was because the painters couldn´t see them because they (the animals) were up to their knees in grass. In fact, coming up with this simple explanation was hard for me without giving a full blown lecture on the development of perspective, realism vs impressionism and etc.
When did we stray so far away from childhood logic an the Simple Answer?
Nicolas, of course, accepted the simple solution: What you can´t see, you don´t paint!