Reflection

I feel that I met my goal of creating something interesting. The two biggest problems with "Rothko Advertisements" to me were: 1) it didn't look like much effort had gone into it and 2) there wasn't much I had to say about it. The first problem I solved by creating a bunch more works in a similar style. It doesn't have the same "wow factor" as some other people's projects, but it is possible to spend several minutes just looking at the images and text. (Interestingly, most people at the exhibition skimmed over the text, which I was not expecting. I tried to keep it short, but people still greatly preferred to view the images.)

The second problem I addressed with the creation of the fictional artist and critic. The theme at the heart of this work is the dialogue between artist and critic, which is usually outside the scope of a piece of art, and happens next to it in the curatorial statement or analysis papers. I brought that into my piece, so it is sort of meta-art.

Module 1's theme is appropriation, and I follow that with the edited images. There is also a sort of reverse-appropriation here, where I take something that I did actually make and then claim that someone else did it. I am not really a fan of the edited images, and I think they are kind of shallow and don't provide meaningful commentary. I was surprised that some people actually did like the images- several people in particular thought "Last Meal" was funny, which I did not intend at all.

I did not have a clear opinion I wanted to convey with this work, and I think that is a weakness in some ways. I wanted to leave it vague and open to interpretation- people can think Oren is clever or just a cheap Banksy knockoff, the critic is insightful or just stating the obvious, the artist's death was connected to his final work or not, etc. This allows for more discussion, and to some degree makes it more interesting, but there is not much of a "thesis statement" in this work. The analysis sections also do not add as much as I had hoped, and were I to redo this project, I would use them to explore Oren's personal life in more detail. As it stands, the work does do a good job of inspiring conversations about art and the artists who make it, so I am happy with the end result.