Your choice is based on “Sculptors” not “Sculptures” i.e. a person who has consistently produced best sculpture? I don’t feel from the small number of examples you have shown us you have been able to convince me. Could you throw in a few more to help!
Are you going to have a second best 5?

I have found that I like a very wide range of sculpture and find 5 to be an impossibly low limit! Hence my top 100+ which will be in excess of 300 at present reckoning. I will be doing a separate list to include Brancusi and his Ilk.

Keep up the good work Alex.

indeed!

Anyway, great post, i stumble upon it today.

I think of Picasso and Dali, who were capable of realistic work but chose another style, or the Impressionists before they invented Impressionism. They still used their technical skills, just in a different way. These days, you don’t need a lot of skill, just “inspiration”.

Michelangelo took years to paint the Sistine Chapel, years to create David. And Donatello’s David looks a lot more homo-erotic to me, by the way. It’s the helmet that accentuates his nakedness. Or maybe the way he’s holding that sword.

A lot of sculpture was only designed by these greats, and completed by their apprentices. Sometimes, they can actually tell who sculpted what part.

An artist would starve today taking the attention and care required to create a piece on the scale of a Michelangelo.

And Brancusi sucks.

While I fully agree with the krap is krap statement, art appreciation is still too subjective to be rateable into a list like this.

I get a little depressed when everyone argues (albeit eloquently) over who is number one and numner two when in fact IT IS NOT A #*@$# SPORT!

I know fans of abstract art will characterize the phenomenal attention to detail as a throwback to the patriarchal tribal society rife with violent inequality while the purveyors of classical art will cry foul at the blatantly sheer simplicity of such a pornographic creation. But you’re both wrong. It was, is, and will be the best ever. I fart in your general direction.

THE greatest sculptor of all time, as recognized by many scholars (I trust you won’t take their word for it, as this is art and noone’s opinion is absolute) was Phidias of Athens. He was responsible for the Elgin marbles, the seated Zeus of Olympia, and most importantly, the chrys-elephantine state of Athena in the Parthenon.

P.S. Sid is a moron.

Why are places like the NY Met Museum filled to bursting all year long, whereas most regular commercial art galleries are populated only by otherwise useless art history grads? (Where else would get our unreadable art criticism?) As the brilliant David Hockney says - people like pretty pictures. I don’t want modern art to go away - I just don’t want it to be the only item on the menu.

No, it’s not “krap” or “trash” (that kind of dismissive language disqualifies your argument from any serious consideration — which boils down to ‘I know what I understand, and I don’t understand this, so it isn’t art’). Based on your posts, you simply relate to pieces you can see representations of yourself in (obvious human figure; your interest in certain type of methodology). There’s nothing wrong with having an opinion of what you like or dislike. What is wrong is the hubris you demonstrate in thinking that you’ve figured out that “the emperor is naked” and you can conclusively dismiss a product of hundreds (if not thousands) of years of art history and tradition as “krap”. You are just really showing how little you actually know.

If you had bothered to try to educate yourself on the pieces you linked you, you’d realize they are part of a great tradition of pushing the methods, concepts and materials ahead and away from their traditional origins. That they are part of a tradition and not removed from it. The methods that went into the examples you point out would require many of the same processes that the past masters’ would have utilized. The Malevich painting was meant to be seen up close. The subtly of the white shifts and intricate, delicate building of the pigments was a continuation of what medieval monks were creating with their painstaking illuminated gospels — Malevich was getting closer to God through the details. I wouldn’t want to wager how long he spent hunched over that piece, methodically building it.

Look at this way: Bernini would never have conceived of creating anything like that Brancusi piece. His time and place wouldn’t have allowed it. He would never have known it could be done. That’s the point: modernism happened as a reaction to it’s time.

Picasso was a child prodigy who could paint as well as many of the great masters. But he kicked that direction to the curb because he was bored and adventurous. He was a man of his time. He was influenced by moving pictures and photography. He had a massive visual vocabulary of the art past to build on. Producing another historical or biblical based rendering of the human body is done and done to death even by his time. Why bother beating that horse when there fresher avenues to explore?

I wonder what Bernini would have produced if born in the 20th century. Probably not “Apollo and Daphne”.

Becki: Nail-head? Because a half-baked post utilizing the word ‘krap’ repeatedly is the final word. Gimme a break.