Artist Lecture #1: James Hyde

(had i not found it so dull) i would have found the painfully modern-art frescoes and sculpture of james hyde humorous.
not that they were comical in any way, but that it is 2007 and some artists still are preaching and making (what i find to be) such minimalist conservative works that "make you aware of the space in, around, throughout"............. its like the fried guy (art critic) just now recognizing photography as art.....
i feel like such notions are so outdated; they are the important periods of art history that bore me to tears.

the whole lecture brought to mind the word "beautiful" and its now almost negative connotation because of its lack of meaning. Hyde described himself as a formalist, being that the meaning of his work exists "within the forms". maybe i have become over-cynical because of the CONCEPT pushers in my own department, but i honestly had that feeling of "its not enough".
its not enough anymore to rely on meaning within forms, there must be something outside of that.
hyde did though, make a comment that resonated somewhat with my own ideals;
he stated that "anything that is important is invisible".
on that note i agreed to an extent. it is like in a photograph (or moving image) where what lies outside the frame holds the most fascination, what happened a moment before, the moment after, who took that picture, what were they thinking..........

overall i personally cannot decipher what exac-atic-ally distinguishes hyde's, and other renouned artists like him, from those like myself when i attempt to paint and end up with a weird abstract mess of color..... why do they become so highly praised for it?