
How Alexander Calder Became America’s Most Beloved Sculptor - neonate
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/alexander-calder-became-americas-most-beloved-sculptor-180964773/
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kurthr
I far prefer his early mobiles and even simple but recognisable abstract wire
work to the later work described. He seemed to go from small carefree and
fluid to large heavy and crude/austere. I'm sure the latter made him more
money.

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ashark
Is there some well-trod path to being able to appreciate this sort of work?
I'm looking at the pictures in the article and _wow_ do I ever not "get" this,
to the point that I can't understand how one _might_ "get" it. That camel...

[EDIT] if it helps, the only one I kind of appreciate is Croisière, but even
that one seems like it'd be better if it were less shoddy and cheap looking.
It looks like a quickly-made scale mockup or model for some other, fully
finished work, and I don't follow how that (lack of?) quality contributes to
its value, in any sense, as sometimes such things can.

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grmarcil
Make a point of frequently going to art museums and sculpture gardens. Read
the placards and learn to recognize certain artists, spend time looking at the
pieces that grab your attention and think about them. Don't feel like you have
to enjoy every piece. This will build your appreciation/understanding for two
reasons:

1) Like all things, art depends on context. A piece is often in conversation
with other works by the same artist, contemporaries, predecessors, or
historical events.

2) Sculpture in particular depends on scale, perspective, and physical detail.
You'll never get to appreciate these qualities through a photograph - you have
to be there in person and walk around the sculpture. Look at it from different
distances, different angles.

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ashark
Yeah, maybe I just need to look at more of it, though the required travel to
do so makes that much more difficult than with most other art forms aside from
architecture. Maybe that's part of the appeal of state- and country-spanning
"conversations" of this sort? Most people are simply priced out of traveling
enough to appreciate it? Meanwhile traditional sculpture relies on more
general aesthetic principals and references other more-accessible media
sufficiently that you don't need to see tons of it to get at least _some_ of
the point or intended sense of a given piece.

This kinda junk-drawer-looking abstract sculpture stuff hits me the same way
the heavier, growlier kinds of heavy metal do, in that I can never tell
whether I'm supposed to be laughing with it, laughing at it, laughing with it
_at some target of ridicule of which I am unaware_ , or not laughing at all,
but they don't _seem_ like they could be anything other than some form of
comedy, even though their fans rarely act like it's the sort of low-brow fart-
joke-adjacent thing it appears to be/sounds like to me, and which I don't mind
in moderation but wears thin with me pretty quickly. Probably I just haven't
been exposed to enough of it.

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dsr_
The title doesn't have much to do with the article. Calder's popularity is, in
my opinion, largely due to the non-political, inoffensive nature. It is in a
conversation with other artists, but doesn't say anything about war, death,
love, governance; it does not stimulate strong emotion, but an abstracted air
of interesting-ness.

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dredmorbius
I'll give as a direct counterpoint Jo Davidson. I'd not heard of him, but
friends mentioned encountering him (or someone who'd had a bust made by him)
in Big Sur.

I started reading the commissions list, and the just burst out laughing.
Davidson simply did an increadible number of works on some of the most notable
names of the 20th century.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Davidson#Commissions](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Davidson#Commissions)

