cleaning woman as performance artist.
This is your speculation. Where is the evidence?
But abstract or conceptual artists are certainly far from unique in that regard, no? A representational painter may produce work that he feels is beneath him, but that he knows will sell. I daresay, there are more than a few successful commercial singers who have recorded songs they personally thought sucked, but that they knew would be popular. It doesn’t make much sense to single out “modern” artists as particularly suspicious in this regard. After all, if so many educated, intelligent, and erudite people can be “conned” by an artist’s explanation of his own art, is it not just as likely that the artist himself believes his own explanation?
Did you know that Tchaikovsky hated the Nutcracker Suite? Detested it as the worst thing he’d ever written. Franz Kafka left instructions in his will that all of his works be burned. He thought his books were so bad, he was embarrassed for anyone else to see them. Arthur Sullivan thought the comic operas he’d written with W.S. Gilbert were lightweight nonsense, and longed to write a “real” opera. Hell, even William Shakespeare made no particular effort to preserve his plays. It was only thanks to the efforts of the actors he’d worked with that we have any copies of his works. They were the ones who thought his work needed to be preserved for future generations.
The point being, artists are the worst reference for the worth of their own works. Their opinions on their own works are immaterial. The work speaks for itself.
I’d also like to note, for the record, that dismissing the entire art world, and the field of art criticism, on the dodgy opinions of your high school art teacher, is a bit like have an incompetent science teacher, and deciding that chemistry is a hoax.
I’m sorry you had a bad experience with art in high school. My high school guidance counselor was inept as well. Did you tell people that you had no real connection with your more abstract pieces? Perhaps they simply thought you were genuinely intrigued and wanted to support your foray into non-representational art. My philosophy is simple. Do what you like. If other people want to pay you lots of money to continue doing what you like, have at.
This is actually kind of neat, following the links to the various art installations. The idea of throwing something out there and letting people interact…anything at all, whether it’s a balloon with a dollar bill and a note, or strips of haiku flying from random trees…I don’t know. It’s interesting.
BTW, if I drove by the Prada-Marfa thing, I’d go put something IN the store. Anything at all, from the trunk, whatever. Especially if I drove by a lot.
Also, I don’t see why the ‘painted puddle’ that was cleaned out of the rubber trough couldn’t just be, well…repainted. Big whoop. It’s not like it was aged 100 years and it would take another 100 to reproduce it.
So is everything art? Is a turd a piece of art? Why not? Is it art if one person likes it? How about if no one likes it yet, but someone may like it in the future? Does it become art then? How about if I create something that I don’t consider art but someone else does? Are they disrespecting me by telling me I don’t know what my own creation is?
Defenders of crappy art like to pretend that they are anti-elitist, but it’s really quite the opposite. Women all over the world have babies every day, but some over priveleged white woman does it in a gallery and we are supposed to treat her like she’s an artiste for some reason. Workers risk their lives expertly welding together beams 100s of feet in the air but someone who just learned to weld in art class puts two pieces of junk together and is better than them because he did something that was not useful.
But that’s the problem, much so called art does not speak for itself. It requires a written explanation of why a collection of candy wrappers represents the suffering of left handed Lebanese olive farmers. And then a bunch of precious art critics to interpret that explanation, and some gallery owners to sift through potential pieces and select ones that acquire cachet by appearing in an important gallery in an important street of an important city so that important people can stand around saying important things about how “anything can be considered art” while laughing at 99.9% of artists who try and accomplish something that requires skill and provides pleasure.
If the piece in question “spoke for itself” the cleaning lady, whose opinion is just as valuable as yours, wouldn’t have considered it a piece of crap that needed a good cleaning.
Lets hope not, the incident happened in Germany.
If you don’t understand what you’re looking at, the fault is not with the object. It’s fine to say “that’s crappy art”, but your comment will only be valid if you’ve bothered to find out what the artist is trying to say, if anything, and what the genre is about. Otherwise, it’s just uneducated commentary and is worthless.
Why not read some art criticism (Arthur Danto might be a good starting point) and figure these things out for yourself, rather than throwing around bellicose questions and waiting to be spoonfed answers?
You guys are arguing like there’s one answer. Schrodinger would laugh at you.
Hrm…art as quantum entanglement…maybe the schools aren’t so far apart after all!
Why are you so concerned about drawing a hard line between what is and isn’t art? If someone creates something that’s intended to evoke an aesthetic response in someone else and succeeds, that’s art. If they create something that’s intended to evoke an aesthetic response, and it doesn’t, that’s failed art. But it’s still art. If someone discovers something that wasn’t intended to be art, but presents it to others in such a way that it evokes an aesthetic response anyway, that’s found art.
You’re not “supposed” to do anything. There’s no squad of art police that will come around and harass you if you don’t connect with a particular artist’s work. Like what you like. Dislike what you dislike. If you don’t like abstract or conceptual art, that’s completely okay. There’s nothing wrong with that.
The thing you seem to have trouble grasping is that its is possible for other people to HONESTLY like something you don’t. They’re not deluded. They’re not engaged in some elaborate joke or scam. They’re not doing it on purpose to make you feel uncool. They LIKE it, the same way you like Matisse or M. C. Escher or Norman Rockwell or whatever.
You’re applying this “problem” to modern art, but the same can be said of any other art movement. To someone not versed in Christian symbolism or works of the Italian Renaissance, a painting of the Virgin by Titian (for example) would certainly need an explanation of the scene and iconography. A bunch of “precious art critics” would then need to interpret why this painting of the Virgin is better or worse than Michelangelo’s version. Once decided that the Michelangelo is superior, the important church in the important city where it is located can attract important people to talk about it.
I suspect if modern art detractors knew as much about it as they do about the “skillful and pleasurable” arts, there would be a lot less confusion.
As for whose opinion is more valuable concerning art, the cleaning lady’s or the art historian’s: I say the historian’s.
Quantum indeterminacy isn’t the cause of ambiguity in language, so I’m unclear what your point is.
This beholder has quite the eye.
What happened to art speaking for itself?
the questions you asked were about aesthetics, not about specific works of art. And if you were to spend some time reading about aesthetics and contemporary art, you’d see that pretty much everything you’re talking about and questioning has been addressed at great length by various critics.
Of course I grasp that people may HONESTLY like things I don’t. But you seem unable to grasp the fact that some people feel cowed to pretend to like things that are utterly without artistic or aesthetic merit.
Thousands of people a day walked past cracks in the pavement on their way to see the crack in the floor at the Tate gallery so that they could pay an entry fee to see one particular crack in one particular floor that experts had deemed was “art” rather than a simple tripping hazard. Do you honestly think that if the experts had played a trick on the public and just roped off a random crack in a city street, and put warning tape around the crack at the Tate, that people would not have stood around and murmured in hushed voices about how emotionally moving the crack in the sidewalk was and warned their children not to trip over the broken floor in the gallery?
i’m uncertain that that wold be real.