Overrated And Underrated Artists

I figured this would be a fun topic, but who are some artists that you think are overrated or underrated?
Or some artists that you don’t like, but it seems everyone else does - and vice versa. It can include artists from any medium.

The first one that comes to mind for being overrated is Andy Warhol. Everytime I see one of his so-called works of art my first thought is, “geez even I could do that”. And just because an artist has some big explanation as to why the piece is significant IMO doesn’t make it significant or art.

Huge topic. For overrated artists: Jeff Koons, Fernado Botero, Salvador Dalí, and most “conceptual art”.
Re. the question, “geez even I could do that”: this is an accusation that’s been thrown at artists for the last century. I’d argue a lot of it stems from Marcel Duchamp’s infamous Fountain, where he just took an ordinary urinal and put a fake signature on it:

Seems to me it’s intended to be completely artless, and is therefore completely ‘conceptual’, although I suppose one could argue that the fountain has roots in the ancient world, that the shape of the urinal is beautiful, etc., etc.
That said, it takes some skill to do a good silk screen, so I wouldn’t have thought Warhol was the easiest to do oneself. Arguably the question as to how easy a piece would be to reproduce shouldn’t be the main criterion for judging quality. I mean, something should count for having been the first person to think of something, even if the idea is quite simple to execute.

Jackson Pollock. Most. Overrated. Artist. Ever. Random ass flicks of paint dripped on a canvas is lazy, garbage hack work. A toddler or a spastic monkey could make the exact same thing.

Andy Warhol for one, Rod Stewart for another.
Also the stars of some of these so called “Reality” shows who are famous for being…wellll…uhhhhh…famous.

Overrated: John Cage. His reputation far outweighs his influence. He’s the one who composed a classical piece consisting of silence. Some guy dressed in a tux staring at a piano for five minutes is not genius, it is simply boring.
Underrated: Townes Van Zandt. “Pancho and Lefty” is as good a song as anyone has written.

Overrated: John Cage. His reputation far outweighs his influence. He's the one who composed a classical piece consisting of silence. Some guy dressed in a tux staring at a piano for five minutes is not genius, it is simply boring.
That's not really what he composed. Cage deliberately blurred the line between music and non-musical experience. The famous 4'33" is meant to be a performance of the ambient sounds in the room. I don't think it's intended to be music - more of a social statement, that there's really no such thing as true silence.
Huge topic. For overrated artists: Jeff Koons, Fernado Botero, Salvador Dalí, and most "conceptual art".
Dali? I don't know enough about painting to say if one artist or work is overrated, but I was under the impression that Dali's personality may have been more responsible for his fame, rather than his work. :-P

I’ll agree with the consensus here that artists like Jackson Pollack are overrated as artists. IMHO they probably should be thought of more as philosophers than artists. John Cage, for one, is more respected for his philosophical approach to sound than his actual musical output. At least, amongst people I know who have studied his stuff.
Considering musicians, I am not a fan of the Arnold Schoenberg 12-tone school at all. Economics has pretty much agreed with me, in that that kind of music is very seldom ever used nowadays, but it’s still popular in a lot of academic circles. It was an interesting idea but it got too far away from how out ears and our brain actually interpret sound.

Overrated: John Cage. His reputation far outweighs his influence. He's the one who composed a classical piece consisting of silence. Some guy dressed in a tux staring at a piano for five minutes is not genius, it is simply boring.
That's not really what he composed. Cage deliberately blurred the line between music and non-musical experience. The famous 4'33" is meant to be a performance of the ambient sounds in the room. I don't think it's intended to be music - more of a social statement, that there's really no such thing as true silence.Did Cage ever explain that? I'm not a fan of Cage, but, I don't actually know how he is rated by other musicians, music historians, etc.

For Literature: Stephen King, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, James Joyce, Kurt Vonnegut, Leo Tolstoy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Issac Azimov, Greg Egan are overrated.
Anthony Burgess, Graham Masterton, F. Paul Wilson, Chuck Palaniuk are underrated.
For Music: Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Hayden are overrated classical artists. The Rolling Stones, The Eagles, Allman Brothers, David Bowie, Bob Dylan are overrated classic rock artists.
Underrated classic rock artists - Love, Mountain, Blue Cheer, Van DerGraff Generator, Ammon Duul 2. Underrated classical music artists - Vangelis, Carl Nielsen, Wojiech Kilar.

That's not really what he composed. Cage deliberately blurred the line between music and non-musical experience. The famous 4'33" is meant to be a performance of the ambient sounds in the room. I don't think it's intended to be music - more of a social statement, that there's really no such thing as true silence.
Did Cage ever explain that? Yeah, Trombone is right: it's sort of intended to be a Zen thing. The music is whatever sounds come up in the room. I think as an intriguing thought experiment it deserves to have been done once. My problem is less with that piece than with the rest of Cage's work, which I find largely incomprehensible. I have the same issues with 12-tone, and indeed virtually all so-called 'academic' classical music. It seems all to be sort of in-jokes for composers and is otherwise unlistenable. But hey, who am I to say? Re. Pollock -- I didn't undersand him until I took a high school class in the visual arts, and now I really love his stuff. It's not random paint drippings: there is a rhythm to how he laid down the lines and colors. To me they are an illustration of line and intense gesture.

As much as I have been wanting to figure out how to judge art objectively, I have never found it. I have read all kinds of books on this topic and even Doug’s blog is worth checking out for anybody who is interested in this topic.
Regarding some of the artists mentioned here, I rather like Dalí, and I love Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy and Chopin. I don’t know if Warhol and Pollock were great artists but they both tried something new and seemed to have made an impact on other artists and our society in general. Warhol, I think, was way ahead of his time; his Velvet Underground’s “Banana” album cover is, IMO, brilliant. I am not smart enough to have ever been able to get through Joyce, so I can’t comment on him.

Thanks for the shoutout, George. I should be clearer about Dalí: his early stuff is very good (though over-reproduced and so arguably over-rated as well); it’s his later stuff that is awful, where he became a self-parody.

I should be clearer about Dalí: his early stuff is very good (though over-reproduced and so arguably over-rated as well); it’s his later stuff that is awful, where he became a self-parody.
Agreed. That's the way it goes with many of these people. Tolstoy's later work, for example, feels as if it was written by a completely different person, and an insane one on top of it. My favourite pieces by Dalí are The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus and Christ of Saint John of the Cross. I absolutely love those paintings.
As much as I have been wanting to figure out how to judge art objectively, I have never found it. I have read all kinds of books on this topic and even Doug's blog is worth checking out for anybody who is interested in this topic.
When I say overrated, George, I mean that an artist might not be as original or innovative as they are given credit for. That stuff can often be judged objectively. However, the value of the art..... that's something else.

I think your definition of “overrated” is rather subjective as well. What have you read by Tolstoy, Mike? And although Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker can be overplayed (especially in North America), I don’t see how his music is not original.

Ah but then should we consider “originality” the most important thing about rating an artist? I mean, the whole notion that quality should be identified with originality began in the 19th century. Before that, one could almost argue it was the reverse. The great artists of the Renaissance were great partly in that they were rediscovering the arts of Greece and Rome, etc.
Personally, although I do understand the need for salesmen to consider originality, because it gets the headlines, I think that whole idea is largely played out now. I mean, what the hell can an artist do nowadays to be original? Put a pile of garbage on the floor? It’s been done!
And if you think about it, the one thing originality is closest to is fashion. Originality is fleeting, and largely of historical interest.
I’m willing to give some marks for originality, like I said with John Cage’s silent piece, but not many marks. But you’re right that being original is a bit more of an objective matter than being good.

Also, if “overrated" means not being original, then Warhol, Pollock, and even Dalí (including his later stuff) are way underrated. To me the terms overrated and underrated are completely meaningless.

Well, there are various more-or-less objective ways to “rate” art: one can look at how much they sell for (that’s how the Bordeaux wines were rated back in the day); one could come up with an “elite” of tastemakers like museum curators, owners of large galleries, art professors, and critics of prominent newspapers and ask them – that’s kind of how the Oscars works, right? (Though that’s just the critics). Or one could just decide to use one’s own taste as the benchmark. “If I like it, it’s good! And dammit, I know what I like!”
Do any of these really capture “quality”? Could they be wrong?