Art critics suck...

[Figuremod73]

Most people evaluate art based on these three things:

1. the esthetics - Does it look good? Did it take skill to make?

2. the concept - What does the piece say? How does the execution of the piece add to the meaning?

3. the monetary value - the higher a pieces financial value, the more people appreciate it.

Lets remember these rules. They are on the mark. It usually takes a great deal of knowledge of both art history and concepts to understand the second rule but still I think the galleries and critics can more often than not use it to there advantage.

Personally I appreciate actual skill. Kirby had oodles of it yet most critics bashed him. The same for Kinkade.

[Brazoo]

I think you are confusing history and criticism. I go to a museum to learn history and observe art for myself. I do not want or need it filtered through someone else. If I want to learn about a person's favorite toy or collection I go to their website. If I want to learn about Mego history I come to the museum. You could say, a museum is there to teach you history about a given subject. But not to interpret it for you and tell you what to think or how to feel about it.

I'm not confusing the two - discussing history is a big part of art criticism - I'm probably just not being clear.

Here's a sample from the Wikipedia entry on Art Criticism to help me out:

Art criticism is the discussion or evaluation of visual art.

Art critics usually criticize art in the context of aesthetics or the theory of beauty.

That's what you're talking about - then...

The variety of artistic movements has resulted in a division of art criticism into different disciplines, each using vastly different criteria for their judgements. The most common division in the field of criticism is between historical criticism and evaluation, a form of art history, and contemporary criticism of work by living artists.

That is what I'm talking about - so we keep discussing criticism as two different things.

[kingdom warrior]

Personally I appreciate actual skill. Kirby had oodles of it yet most critics bashed him. The same for Kinkade.

The critics who bashed Kirby were complete morons, and I'm sure they could never ever knockout 3 fully drawn pages a day.....or even put out the amount of work he did.

[Figuremod73]

One thing about Kirby though was he never thought of it as high art (if im wrong, please correct me), it was about "getting it done", so he could get to the next job.

Looking at a nice Thor page you could never see that. Its just one fantastic looking page after another.

[Brazoo]

I would EASILY consider Kirby a conceptual artist for a lot of his work.

Some of his stuff was just taking care of business though - which I find zero fault with. And I say this a guy who would probably rank Kirby as my favorite artist - if I was forced to rank my favorite artists.