Dali at the High
We are in Atlanta for the Christmas holiday. My son and I went to see the Salvador Dali exhibit at the High Museum, not for any particular love of Dali, but we just wanted an outing. The exhibit was packed and it cost $36 for the two of us to get in which is always shocking when you are used to the free museums of Washington. Shuffling through a crowded exhibit squinting at the signs is not my favorite way to see art, but sometimes it's all you've got.
I'm always amazed at how small the "Persistence of Memory" really is (about 9" x 12"). I think almost every reproduction beyond a postcard is larger. Some of his paintings are very large, and you've got to wonder how long it took him to make them since you can't see a single brushstroke. I also liked the lithographs he did of Don Quixote. They were the right combination of good drawing and expressionist splatters. He called his technique "bullettism" because he would fireballs of paint (or probably litho crayons) from an antique musket at the litho stone. He was fond of science, all of which he learned from reading Scientific American. He was fascinated with nuclear physics so he would paint the Virgin Mary's assumption to heaven as a fragmented mess. Somehow I don't think that's what science had in mind.
All in all, though, I don't really like his work. I don't know if it's because his painting is so academic that it all looks like reproductions. Or maybe it's that he is so wildly imitated and emulated that even his own work looks derivative. Maybe I just don't like the compositions or the subject matter. Half of it looks like bad album cover art and the other half looks like the work of the talented church elder.
In the end, I feel like Dali himself was his best work of art, I mean look at that mustache. He was a shameless self-promoter, he must have appeared on every magazine cover at some time in his life. He may even have appeared on Hollywood Squares, but I'll have to research that.
So in a roundabout way, this brings me back to why I am starting a blog. I want a place to talk about art and show my own work, but unlike Dali, I am not a shameless self-promoter. In fact, I'm pretty much incapable of promoting myself. For god's sake, I've needed new business cards for the last five years. Anyway, who cares, this internal monologue has got to go somewhere.
Tomorrow, I ponder Jeff Koons.
