This painting represented the breaking of the shackles of womanhood. The woman has just killed a missionary (if you look closely you can see the missionary’s skull sitting on a pole behind her). In addition, she has just taken a bite of a banana, even though women are forbidden to eat bananas on her island. She is waving the banana above her head to represent her new-found freedom. (Text from the artist of the painting)
In 1924, a LA-based novelist (Paul Jordan Smith) pulled a fast one on the art world by deliberately creating terrible art under a false (yet exotic and trendy) identity. He also created a fake art movement called "Disumbrationism" to give his works some sense of academic heft. He later revealed the hoax, but not after producing a few more paintings.
When your field of study or profession is based on abstract thinking and broad concepts, nobody really knows what they're doing. It's more about who has the strongest opinion about their own work. That's important because it keeps everyone honest and encourages you to call people out when you smell BS. But more importantly, if it's just about opinions, presentation and such, then anyone has the chance to be a thought leader as well. Maybe I'm devaluing this type of thinking too much. But it's exciting to think that something that we think of as almost exclusively upper class is actually not that exclusive and in fact, quite open to all.
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