Not one of Blu’s best pieces by a looong shot anyway.

Ok americans…let’s face the truth!

RJ, it’s not well painted. Sorry Blu.
When you see it from front on you see that the coffins get bigger as they receed into the distance, going against the laws of perspective. The shape of the coffins is all over the shop (technical UK term, sorry America!) The wood effect is weak, and the dollar bills also bad.
It’s difficult to paint on this scale, but not so difficult, and we know that Blu knows how to do it.
Blu can paint a million times better than this. Blu has ideas a million times stronger than this. I think in this case it’s a blessing that the piece was buffed. It keeps his high-quality high, and we can be generous enough to forget about this mural and just remember all the killer ones from the past.

Of course coffins get larger at the top to accommodate shoulders, that’s not what I was talking about. I’m talking about the fact that coffins don’t grow in size as they disappear into the distance in rows unless the coffin behind the one in front is BIGGER. It’s called PERSPECTIVE – things that are closer to you look bigger than things that are further away.

I didn’t even mention the fact these coffins look like they’re made from soggy cardboard. Having carried a coffin this year I know just how solid they are. There is a weight to coffins that doesn’t appear in this work.

But of course I’m not allowed to say that, because it makes me a “hater”. WTF!?!

it’s not hate, it’s critique. Every art school student, every artist who has work on public display, gets “critiqued”, it’s part of the process of learning, growing, and making better art.

I know Blu, I’ve sent him emails critiquing his work in the past, because I think his work is often great and can be even better with the help of honest appraisal instead of unhelpful blind praise.

People that are fans of art and not artists probably don’t understand how mentally and emotionally hard it is to be an artist and deal with the often harsh words of your peers. But they also don’t understand how important it is to growth. We have to stand naked with our chests and skulls ripped open revealing our hearts and minds in front of the world. If we’re gonna put ourselves through that we can handle being told “the wood effect is weak”!!!

Damn. Blogs and the five second attention spans of the people that comment “awesome” every time an artist paints something are lowering the quality of work and the ability of the artists that make it to compete against the rich history of art on this planet. Artists LIVES are at stake here, their whole lives works. We’ve barely gotten started and already people are acting like everything we do is the most amazing thing they’ve ever seen. What motivation is there to improve if we’re already “AWESOME”!?!?!?

Having now seen a lot of the walls from this Miami madness I’m really disappointed in the quality. Even more so because many of these people are my friends and I know they can do (and have done) a whole lot better. In fact I’m not letting myself read the comments of the people posting the pictures, because I couldn’t bare to read how AWESOME everything is when it isn’t. It’s ok, average, so-so, better-luck-next-year…

It reminds me of seeing friends who have girlfriends they’re not particularly into, staying with those girls because it’s better than being single. It’s a waste of both their times. Damn, if you’re not passionately in love at least be single and desperate, so that there is some EMOTION, some FEELING, in your life!

Maybe that’s what’s lacking here, emotion and feeling. Blu seems to be the only person with something to say, and that piece has already been buffed.

What’s the point painting in a country famous for it’s right of freedom of speech if you ain’t got something to say!?!

sure, critique has it’s place (we had one in my drawing class at school this morning). the “critique” here, though, in the context of a post about a new mural that was commissioned, painted, and then promptly buffed by the commissioning museum, seems like the wrong time and place for it. it blames the victim for the censorship (& lets be clear, the censorship was about the content, not the technicals). add to that a “critique” calling the destruction of the work being critiqued a “blessing” and that, to me, is “hating” (the work, not the player).

critique. please. i’d be happy to see everyone improve their game (and recognize that technical details are not everyone’s game). hate if you like in the critique, but don’t be surprised if you are called on it. get all indignant for being called a hater if it helps you.

for me, Blu’s work is concerned with social-justice issues of our day, and his brilliance is in distilling his perspective into relatively simple pictures that everyone can interpret and then painting them large in the public sphere. he tackles difficult subjects, there is some humor in the rendering, and much of the work has a micro/macro quality where a lot of small details make up a bigger work, but he is not a finish fetishist.

in this case, rows of coffins draped in U.S. dollar blankets (with crosses tucked in), rather than American flags, gets a simple, difficult, idea across (and as with all art, people will interpret the message differently). the work is not about the technical finish of the coffins or their perspective. improving the technical finish of the wood on the coffin wouldn’t change the idea for most folks (although some would geek out on it if it were more realistic, others might find it too finished).

Deitch MoCA’s response – buffing the work they commissioned – shows that Blu’s idea was powerful (too powerful for that location). this was a drastic response which taints Deitch, MoCA, and could poison the whole show (we will see how the other artists and art community responds). Deitch’s career has been partly focused on this stream since the 1980s, he has been positioning himself for this show for some time, and now that it is almost here he has to kill the first work for the show, so i don’t believe this was a simple act (my guess is the content pissed off someone like Broad or Geffen with the money and power to make buff the mural with or without Deitch’s support and Deitch played along to keep the museum funding and his position). i’m not aware of any precedent for a private contemporary art museum to commission work and then destroy it and we will see how this plays out.

(p.s., i liked your buff nuff blog Dave)