Ethel Greene, “The World’s Greatest Parking Lot,” oil on canvas, 1969

The "revulsion being the point" comment brought back a memory...

My brother and I had a disagreement when I was young. He is a prolific and talented artist who went to an art and design college, and I was a teenage dumbass who was invited a show of his and others' work.

One such work was a framed typewritten letter.

I told my brother that that was not art and I thought it was stupid to call it art, and that it devalued the efforts of the other artists.

He didn't respond at first other than to say that art is often in the eye of the beholder and if it elicits a reaction it typically can be qualified as art.

He left it at that but I kept thinking about what he said. I was really annoyed that they could possibly call a stupid framed letter art just because it was hung in an art gallery. I said as much to several people over time.

About two years later I went back to visit him, this time for a solo show. He does abstract painting, and I liked his stuff. We started talking about the work and how some if it reminded me of our childhood home.

At one point I brought up the framed letter and how it still made me roll my eyes when compared to the work you see in art galleries.

He just smiled and said "still thinking about that piece?"

I was annoyed to admit that whatever my opinion might be I could not deny that it had had a profound effect on me, evidently.

So, yeah the revulsion at the thought of an acre of potential meadow being permanently smothered so that 4% of it could be used to park pollution machines is definitely the brilliance here...

I think art depends a lot on context. It’s promoting something to you and asking you to respond to it, and how you respond to it depends a lot on who you are and what you think about.
This image makes me think about ecological destruction and the emptiness of capitalism, but I don’t think every person who looks at it feels despair - it probably depends on whether they spend time on a website with a community called FuckCars or not lol. It leans into a mixture of surrealism and realism. It’s interesting how she’s leaning into realism to kinda draw out that sense of disgust and revulsion. Waterbed by her seems to lean more into her softer surrealism, because she’s not wanting us to feel the same kind of uncomfortable.
Similar to the idea of “it’s just a typewritten letter,” I absolutely love Duchamp. I got to see his Fountain and one of his Wineracks on a tour of Europe. “It’s just a urinal.” But goddamn did I break down in tears. The Winerack was a lucky surprises (I saved a pesky in-law from causing an international incident there lol).
It’s art because he took it out of context and told us to think about it. He said, “maybe everything is art or nothing is. What do you want to do about it?”
- I'm extremely interested about the nature of the potential international incident...
  And while Winerack is a great similarity to the typewritten letter, it feels not unlike modern day AI art plagiarism to me. He literally bought the thing in a shop and then displayed it with his name on it!
- Yes, was immediately thinking of Duchamp as well 😸:
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)
In that case I would probably read the letter before I try and make a judgement, if it's something emotionally charged then sure I get it.
If it's lorem ipsum, I genuinely don't understand how it's art but you do you, artist. I've had people try to explain their art to me and I still didn't get it.
It really is something that's subjective.
Also something I don't get: painting something and then covering it with layers and layers of single color paint. I am willing to accept others find it thought provoking, I find it a waste and honestly want to fingerpaint a little stick figure on the blank space. Surely that would add to the art? (again, I don't understand it)
- painting something and then covering it with layers and layers of single color paint.
  I think this might be a kind of reference to Rothko. I have to say something cliché, ask you to take this as an act of faith, but it’s a spiritual experience in person. It’s the immensity of the thing itself, being in a room surrounded by this wall of carefully placed color. It’s motion. Maybe you can approximate it by looking at a high res image of it, but nothing really escapes the three walls surrounding you, drowning you in color.
  There’s the Rothko Chapel down in Texas that has a lot of his work I want to see - the experience I had was at the Tate.
  A stick figure is kind of cute to imagine, but it would subvert that “sensory tank” experience that I found… blissful. Black, as a color? To look at the absence of light as a kind of thing?
  Tbh, I make a lot of that “slap slight variations of the same color across a single canvas” - usually my homemade paper or random thrifted objects. I like doing it, but I’m not quite sure if it’s “art” in the same way.
Those "framed letter" pieces just make artists look like pretentious pricks.
The worst example I've seen is an oak tree. What is hilarious is apparently I only saw an artist's "copy", not the original.
Unfortunately, people seem to think that just because something elicits a reaction of “this is not art” that that qualifies as eliciting the required reaction that makes it “art”. Still being irritated over the subjective claim that a framed letter is art, IMO, doesn’t validate that the claim that the letter is art. The artist or viewers can call it what they wish.
Simply thinking about it doesn’t make the thing art, though. Like, it still could be but the only thing you were thinking about after all that time was how stupid it was and that feeling could be replicated by so many things and it wouldn’t matter. Being subversive and being stupid and not being able to handle criticism are two often conflated things.
It’s like misspelling something and throwing out a “language evolves”. It’s a cheap cop-out to cover up a mistake.
- To say “that feeling” of indignation (at the letter’s inclusion in a gallery) is the same as other things that make him roll his eyes, is reductionist. We regard things as stupid for different reasons; they’re not all the “same feeling.” As others have said, the artist’s intentionality in presenting something is part of its message. So the indignation he felt about a piece being put in a gallery is part of that piece’s effect on him, born from the artist’s choices. That feeling is different than hearing a moron say something dumb and thinking it’s stupid.
  Intentionality is the key. Case in point, “language evolves” is a silly thing to say after a mistake, but many subcultures start misspelling things on purpose, and that intentionality is how language evolves.

I'm a city planner. I want a print of this to put up in my office

Might reach out to these guys? She seems kinda under appreciated.
That's kind of like a chef having a photo of a turd with some chives on it. I only hope you want this to remind you of what to stay away from.
Yes, yes... have those citizens driven before you and hear the lamentations of their environmental activists!

Wow didnt realize this was a painting at first

Average US city
- Except in my city they'd all be full.
thank god it is a painting

I hate this. It's great!

I watch Foodfight! at least three times a year. Just thinking about it means that I will watch it on YouTube tonight, to avoid opening my sealed copy.
- I think you replied to the wrong person, and why?

And some asshole will still park right next to you. Like 3 inches from your car. And there are dozens of open spots.

- "Captain, there's something we need to discuss."
  "Go away, Spock!"
- Nobody wants to ~~die~~ piss alone.

Of course all the best spots are already taken

Don't it always seem to go,

That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone...

They painted over paradise,

And drew up a parking lot.

Now remember, we're in the Itchy lot.

We park at the back because when the park's all full and everybody's struggling to get out, we'll be the first to leave!
I always park between Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

I wish I could find a higher res of this. The actual paint work looks great and I wish I could see more detail in the cars.

My biggest beef with Lemmy art communities. I think largely due to restrictions from instances, the image quality is almost always dissapointing here.
- She’s a relatively obscure artist. I ran into similar issues. I think she’s housed at the San Diego Museum of Art. The stuff I’ve found on her seems to point out how underappreciated she is as a surrealist, how she references Magritte as an influence. She seems really “slept on.”
- To be fair, I couldn’t find this in better quality anywhere else either. I had a hard time finding references to it at all other than an article that didn’t have the picture, and a Reddit and Flickr repost that are the same quality.

When the parkinglot is so big, that you need additional public transport to get to your location.

That's the new slogan for Disney World, I heard!

I need a car to go park my car

This must've been an absolute bitch to paint. All those lines. Damn. But I like it. I wouldn't want to look at it all the time, but a nice painting.

I dunno I feel like the worlds greatest parking lot would have those slanted spots, maybe some food trucks.

Also there don't seem to be enough cart returns so cart cunts would have a field day.

No bathrooms, no handicap spaces, no stop signs at the intersections, I mean come on.

I think there is room for improvement here.

it's the greatest ever parking lot in the same sense as the usa is the greatest country on earth.
it actually kinda sucks.

That's a long walk from the car.

Okay we're here, now to find a good spot...

So many questions.. Where is it exactly? What does it serve?

It's an acrylic painting. It was in the Crocker Art Museum, but idk if its moved.
Edit: https://www.crockerart.org/art/detail/the-worlds-greatest-parking-lot-ethel-greene-2022-29-1

Terrifying.

I get hating looking at this, but I actually love looking at it. It's such a weird space. I wonder about it. I want to be there, to see what that's like.

It's an urban hellscape with no wildlife radiating heat back to the upper atmosphere instead of sequestering it into the biosphere. I cannot even grasp how you romanticize that
- It feels liminal, I wouldn't want this IRL but as a piece of art I love it and would honestly have it hanging on my wall.
- What's urban about it? There's no city in sight.
  I don't particularly like being around wildlife, and I like novel experiences. It's interesting.

I thought it was a picture of my hometown

What town is that if you don't mind my asking?
- Costco, USA

i feel like a bus or smth to get to the other side of the lot would be nice...

This is giving me mad Vivarium vibes. Anyone seen that film? It wasn't good but boy was it eerie

Ahhh pastoral America. Looks like home ♥️

Looks like a Joni Mitchell nightmare.

It puts me in mind of squares of cornfields, which are in and of themselves a gross imposition of human industry upon the natural world. Though us contemporary humans look at them and think how picturesque, how wonderfully alive and fertile such a scene looks.

I assume the artist is American. These kind of plannings (huge parking lots etc.) only exist in USA, well mostly.

Great painting by the way.

People can paint things from other countries.
- Of course. But there is a good chance they'll prefer things from where they live / when they lived, and there is a good chance that place is their country.

You're making autocrossers drool.

I am not parking at the back of the lot.

Great piece.