I chose to include this article as it touches on sentimentality which is an aspect of art that I am very familiar with. Much like kitsch with Jeff Koons its an area of art that can be very hard to exist in validly. By this I mean that it is very interrogated, to be an artist who leans into the almost commercialism of kitsch as embrace it is difficult at best. You are always questioned as to how you can do that- and what makes it art? With this project I have attempted a navigation by allowing the sculptures to be a bit creepy, they are not cutesy figures you could find in a charity shop- they are unsettling and I think that was important in distinguishing them from say a garden centre decoration. They have pores and simulated bodily fluids and a cleft palette and very expressive faces (and not in a wholesome cute way) But I think its important to acknowledge my lingering in this area, and I make things that I enjoy looking at and I am fully aware they are weird and not comforting, and I like the way this looks. I enjoy the realistic skin textures and shading, I like that they look a little too humanoid to be comfortable around. I think this balances the over saturated and cynical aesthetics well, and the level of detail I put into them sets them apart from a commercial figure. A lot of time and effort was put into each sculpture, the expressions were changed countless times to not pour sickly emotion into them they needed to look around neutral, not like an evil goblin that would scare kids and not like a john lewis cherub figure. I am in general happy with where I landed on this. See excerpts from the article below https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/sentimentality-in-art-and-business/
"The basic thing that happens in sentimental art, is that the negative aspects of life or a situation are repressed; and something is instead presented as wholly nice and lovely. Problem One: It leads to disappointment In an essay, De Profundis – written in prison – Oscar Wilde defines sentimentality as the desire to feed off an emotion ‘without paying for it’. He says: ‘We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for.’ Problem Two: Sentimentality breeds cynicism Wilde also argued: ‘The sentimentalist is a cynic at heart. Indeed, sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism.’ It’s initially quite a surprising idea, because surely these attitudes are poles apart. In the middle – between sentimentality and cynicism – is the mature assessment, which usually means acknowledging that things have good and bad aspects that are unfortunately deeply intertwined. Maturity involves giving up on the attractions of a clearer, simpler (but actually unfair) assessment, whether totally negative or totally positive. Maturity means realising for instance that a single person might be both kindly and generous sometimes and quite greedy at other points. Or that a nation might be really quite admirable in some ways and rather horrific in others.
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Author24 year old student from Nottingham, United Kingdom. Archives
June 2020
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