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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  2417 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: An ad for Job Cigarette Papers by Alphonse Mucha

From what I understand (which isn't a lot), Art Noveue style and mass printing techniques both heavily influenced each other. It's amazing how artists are able to understand the strong and weak points of such a medium and really capitalize on it (the evolution of printing and comic books is another good example).

For a guy who's similar (similar style, same time period, similar geographic location) but also different, you should check out Ivan Bilibin. I stumbled on Bilibin one night after clicking one Wikipedia link after another. Someone recommended I check out Mucha after I told them how much I liked Bilibin.





tacocat  ·  2417 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I went to art school and I doubt anyone can understand the complexities and subtleties of the act of being paid to make art. Those first five words I hesitate to even use in that sequence. I'm kinda not sure where to go here because I fear seeming pretentious.

The idea that art is special or that being an artist is any different than being a bricklayer or a plumber. For most of history it's been a trade and people like Mucha or Toulouse la Trec exist in a period of significant flux. So things that we maybe don't realize about art were overlapping and it afforded certain artists the opportunity to truly stand out and it's particularly noticeable to me for commercial artists with a legacy because it's not a highly thought of field now and just understanding the level of work put out consistently since advertising was invented, the fact that a few people working within those constraints can be held up among fine artists without notice by a great deal of viewers today that the basic difference in their goals and even vocation was not much like a painting down the hall by a Monet for example, that things like that exist comfortably at all in a similar space to something closer to a work where the end goal is maybe being in a museum at all, that's just a very long winded attempt to explain the subtlety you can pay a lot of money to appreciate going to art school. I'm now not very confident that what I just wrote is an actual sentence or a very complex fragment of one.

As long as I'm spewing about art school, spending 6 figures in school to learn a thing you don't need to go to school for and is not very important can create a hard to explain perspective. Most people in art school know it's a waste of time and waiting tables is a possibility and even a joke because no one thinks it will happen to them. Art's kinda important but not like medicine is and with some time to think about a big decision to make at 18, to try to make a living off of a hobby, comes an acceptance for what was probably a mistake but there's still an appreciation for the entire thing and also the field as a whole. I guess it would be kinda like losing a ton of money gambling and still having had fun at the time but not being very proud of it in the end

Devac  ·  2417 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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