Art with a capital A

Not to toot my horn too much but changing my major from marketing to art history was a bold but brilliant decision on my part. I am taking a class where we discuss the emergence of modern art in the 20th century and why we should take it seriously. One of the more recent pieces we looked at is called Erased de Kooning by Robert Rauscheberg. This piece has created sooo much controversy like most modern art but this one is different because the artist instead of adding marks to a canvas erased a portrait created by one of the most celebrated modern artists of the early 1900's.

I know most of you will say to yourself "this is so goofball, Krystal is nuts to think that this is art." To be honest I thought it was pretty stupid myself when I first saw it but after talking about it in class for about an hour straight I have a great appreciation for this piece. If you look close you can still see smudges that Rauschenberg couldn't get completely off the paper.

Our subject today was pop art. Seriously, in what other major do you sit around and talk about Andy Warhol all day? I spaced out in the middle of class and had a flashback of 2 years ago when I was still a marketing major. Every Tuesday night I would go to my Accounting 1010 class, sit in the back with my laptop and look at Nordstrom's shoe department and check Facebook for about 3 hours wishing I had a blunt object to knock myself unconscious with. To this day it still gives me shivers just thinking about it...some people have the smarts for that stuff but not this girl! So I stick to modern art where you can pretty much interpret art in any way you see fit, you just have to use big words and say "I feel like the artist was trying to represent..." blah, blah, blah and everyone will pretend like they understand what's going on. It also helps to flex your fingers like you're putting quotation marks around a word while your talking, then people can interpret that word however they feel fit. For example, we looked at Andy Warhol's Marilyn series today

I really love Marilyn Monroe, who doesn't? My teacher came up with about 15 different interpretations of this series including that it represents the superficiality of being famous, Marilyn's different 'masks' she had to wear because of being a celebrity, something to do with drugs and another to do with a man in drag, he said that this series was a like lifesavers and everyone had their own 'flavor' of Marilyn etc. It was really interesting and I was fully entertained the whole class period! I definitely cannot say the same for my accounting class. :( I do have to say that my teacher scares the living you-know-what out of me though, he definitely never had a job that dealt with customer service but overall its a pretty entertaining class. I love art history because I don't feel like hitting myself with a blunt object everyday in class and we get to look at stuff like this all day...
Yes, it is a urinal and yes, I really do think that this is art. I've been converted to the weird side... well, partially, some of it is really just goofball. :)