You don't really need to be "smart" or "well informed" to call an artist derivative or insist someone just likes a musician's art because they like the musician. Those are just vapid "hey look at me pretending I'm more
knowledgeable of the fine arts than you are" things to say.
Art is so subjective anyway that calling someone "derivative" is essentially meaningless unless you can show that they are derivative in a vacuous sense or so derivative of a particular artist as to constitute a "rip off." But of course Harnk or whatever will never come through with the goods because he doesn't actually know anything about "art" and even if he did who the hell cares? Art is as institutional and dogmatic as anything else. What does it even mean to be "derivative" in a field where you can throw a dead shark in a tank of Formaldehyde and literally call it
"The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" (with no sense of irony) and be a respected artist? You really think there's some objective standard that you can just summarily judge an artist like Will Cullen Hart as "derivative" based on? What would it be? Some nebulous criteria that Harnk is never actually going to outline but rather rely on his pompousness to make people infer that he's "well informed" even though he probably isn't? And even if he is, being "well informed" in art requires nothing more than 40 thousand dollars of your parents money and the patience to write bullshit critiques for four years on a bunch of paintings that you never would've heard of or cared about if some professor hadn't thrown it up on a power point in front of a bunch of apathetic twenty somethings who are probably too busy texting people and thinking about drugs to appreciate any of the supposed "artistic merit."
But go ahead, Harnk. Lay it on us. Let's hear your brilliant artistic analysis, because a guy like you who is "smart" enough to think that nobody's ever bought the work of Pollock or Picasso or Magritte or Warhol or Dali or Steadman or Klimpt or Klee or Glorp or Gloo just because of the name it was attached to probably has some real eye-opening shit to say about the work of Will Cullen Hart.
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