This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative; and have been painted in a scale of normal living rather than an institutional scale.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Images in the 20th century had a unique power where image became divorced from reality, and often more important than reality... Buildings were judged - at least by members of our own profession - more by the way they looked in magazines than by the satisfaction people felt when using them.
Think of an abstract painting as very, very low relief - a thing, not a picture.
Sometimes magnificent visual art takes root in the humblest of soils. Advertisements painted on old barns, tattoos, fruit crate labels, hot rod embellishments - all these media and many other non-galleried forms have hosted and fostered esthetic delights that satisfy any rigorous definition of art.
When works of art are presented like rare butterflies on the walls, they're decontextualized. We admire their beauty, and I have nothing against that, per se. But there is more to art than that.
Our culture now wonderfully, alchemically transforms images and history into artistic material. The possibilities seem endless and wide open.
There can be nothing exclusive about substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of the experience of life and thinking about life and living life.
The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.
Image means a lot. It is everything in the business that we are in.
Cultures render their icons in their own image. Which comes down to vanity, in some sense.
Our photographs are filthier and our stories are more disgusting. We make no effort to be artistic.