Tim Lefens Lecture

Tim Lefens presented three of his theories during his lecture. The first theory he talked about was the deathbed theory, which was basically asking if you were about to die and the only thing in the room with you was white walls, what painting would you want to see on the wall? Tim's next theory, the double funnel theory, is that a person must drop their ego into a large funnel which is then dropped into a smaller funnel. Once a person is completely  devoid of their ego and of the material world, they will enter a more spiritual conscious. I agree with this because when your mind is free of thinking about trivial material things, you are left to ponder earth and the greater universe. Tim's third theory was that the art world is like a pyramid,  there is only a few great artists which are at the tip of the pyramid, and many mediocre artists at the base. and artists such as Warhol sliced off the tip of the pyramid so that now there are much more mediocre artist on the top of the pyramid. Honestly, I kind of agree with where Tim is going with this. I feel like Warhol is famous because he is the inventor of his movement, and at the time it was new, but now theres a million artists running around and copying him, and in my opinion, the product isn't really anything special. However, I don't agree with how Tim Lefens was contradicting himself when he first said that nobody can define what great art is, and then proceeded to name a list of artists who he thought were horrible. I thought it was interesting that his views totally contradicted the art education department's views of what art should be. Tim favored abstract art and said that art should not have any political connections. The art education department says that art should focus around big ideas. This is something that I struggled with last year in my intermediate painting class. I always wanted my paintings to have some sort of theme or idea behind them, and my teacher kept pushing me to just let go and do whatever came to me. At first I was scared and didn't understand what she was talking about. However, after I just painted without thinking about anything and being in a sort of trance state where I felt like something else was guiding me, or that I was just following my intuition, I made the best paintings ever. I think that Tim also contradicted himself because he talked about doing abstract art like I just described, but I feel that the disabled students who created the art did have a social message behind their art. Even though Tim contradicted himself many times, I really liked his lecture because of the personal stories that he shared. My favorite one was about the bones and how he left them in his room and forgot to close the door to the house, resulting in a swarm of raccoons. He was really funny and I enjoyed listening to him.