gateway posting

this recommendeering is going to use cory's recommendations as a catalyst for the theme. Cory Palmer gave us his list a long time ago... looong looooong time ago back when this blog was still in its infantile state... just learning to walk and spitting up cute things... ok...enough of that... (ireally overuse the "..." don't i?) anyway, i noticed a good theme in the arts section. Cory mentioned liking Dali and MC Escher.

I like to call these two artists "GATEWAY ARTISTS". And let me start off by saying that this in no way diminishes the role of these artists or the appreciation therein. But I find that there are some pretty universal artists that are responsible for getting people into a certain, albeit, harder-to-immediately-appreciate genre. Much in the same way that police officers who come to middle school assembly's and talk about the dangers of marijuana being a gateway drug, here we have two artists that are introduced to burgeoning middle schoolers at a pinnacle moment of their coming into art appreciation.. and later are responsible for leading them down the path of augmented and expanded appreciations. MC Escher and Dali, I feel, are specifically responsible for me becoming an artist as well as a majority of people who started their artmaking at that impressionable middle school age. the two were able to combine thought provoking and easily-engageable content with a superior craft.. and do so in a somewhat comical way. So as middle schoolers we mimicked their style and probably tried to draw hyper-realistic eyeballs and drippy telephones on trapper keepers and such. We watched cartoons such as ren and stimpy, and in some of the weirder close-up shots in the show, we saw the craft and detail in the weird illustrations and all of the sudden that craft, detail and weirdness extended into the fine art world. After a year or two of exploring these artists and their respective ouevres, we then stumbled across'd other artists who employ a similar quality in craft, but now the content is in a higher echelon... and so on and so forth down the road until we come to a macroscopic, well-versed appreciation on all levels.

For instance, I now love the work of pierre puvis de chavannes, a french romantic scene painter, But I could never get to an appreciation of him if it didn't follow a certain path laid out... in fact, i bet i can trace it almost like the 6 degrees of kevin bacon.

mc escher > pablo picasso > vincent van gogh > honore daumier > eduard manet > pierre puvis de chavannes

similarly, i could add jean-michel basquiat and picasso to these gateway artists. people can easily get obsessed with these two outspoken gents and later find themselves moving along the evolutionary path of a blossoming spectrum of appreciation to later possibly include george condo or cy twombly.

i think this analogy of gateway artists extends to other fields of expression as well. For instance (and again i am speaking from my own perspective as well as those who i watched grow up around me) Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix were gateway artists for those of us who later decided to be guitar players, and while I dont listen to them that often anymore, I could never get to appreciating people such as Nels Cline and Michio Kurihara without them. As for classical music, my gateway artists probably were both Frank Zappa and Mozart. Mozart being the obvious one... wrote some pretty influential works that people hear peripherally from a very young age. Be it at a doctors office, or a wedding/funeral... or in the Amadeus movie you have to watch in 7th grade music class.... anyway, the guy wrote great stuff... and without him i would've never even heard of brahms or bartok. The Frank Zappa is a more lateral approach... but coming from a 6th grader who liked guitars and rock music, my guitar teacher handed me frank zappa albums every so often and it was there that i first saw the appreciation of an orchestral approach to some non-orchestral music. i started to appreciate all sorts of instrumentations which i might've otherwise lept categorized to classical or soundtrack music at that age.

and on that same music front... as much as i hate to admit this... i used to like that band phish in high school... and while i am a bit ashamed of that fact, i do hold them responsible along with herbie hancock to get me into jazz and for that i am grateful. most directly, listening to those two got me coltrane's blue train for christmas one year (maybe 11th grade) and that album in turn led me to the appreciation i have for improvised music i now hold. those roots go back to phish and that makes me feel sheepish. but also... to comment on adam's seasonal albums... getting blue train for christmas has embedded that album as a christmas time album for the rest of my life.

lets seee... what else... i think kurt vonnegut is a great gateway author to remind you that reading can be enjoyable and weird... and it can open you up to a whole bunch of other novelists and short story folk.... hmm... that angle of the list is a bit limited (please feel free to expand it for me).

gateway films: (note here i am saying films as opposed to movies to assume a higher art factor than solely entertainment and boobs) i think amelie could be a good gateway film for people. It was entertaining, but the precision and nuance in the camera-work, reoccuring themes, post-production/ manipulation... all turne this movie into a cinematic art piece. i think wes andersons stuff also bridges that gap of entertainment and high art and gets people into liking fellini or seymour cassel's earlier films. im sure there's got to be other good examples i am not thinking of.

lastly, i am not saying that everyone will fall inline with the same steps of appreciation as i had in my formative / manipulative state... but it is nice to see that there are certain artists, who hold a special place in our hearts and are a vehicle for the apprecaition of other artists.... even if their limelight it sometimes short lived.... thanks cory for reminding me of this notion.... that being said... cory's selections also sat on the other end of the see-saw with respect to his Bartok String Quartets, Bach Cello Suites and Shostakovich Cello Concertos which have broadened my novice apprecation already.

no wait.... that wasn't lastly actually... it was preemptive to the reeeeal LASTLY... which is... if you adhere to this idea, i'd love to get a scope of what some of your gateway people might've been. or even if you think this ideas dumb... you can also comment and make some remark about how i smell funny or something.