Thanks for all of your replies so far on the first piece of “art”. I hope some other stuff can maybe be submitted (works that have been removed from their original web page, and hence from their context) for us to give our critiques and opinions of.
I have a couple comments about some of the other pieces submitted, but first more about mine.
Jayn_Newell pretty much had it right. I created the piece myself. And, while it is by no means my first time with Photoshop, I usually only work on my photographs. I do fool around with this-or-that kind of trippy stuff sometimes, but it basically was an early attempt at “art” (outside of photographic art).
However, I did not set out to make a “art work”; I had snapped some pix of a cartoon on TV and was going to use some of them to make some derivative animation. Instead, I started fooling around with what you saw and when I was done I, at first, thought it looked like a decent piece (later-- well before I posted this thread I changed my mind and thought it was pretty lame).
Here is the picture of the cartoon still I derived my work from.
The text information shown below the art is bogus. It was not made in 1993, but rather yesterday. But I am an American and the part that is covered up does have my real name and the title I breezily concocted (Ivy’s Flowers --yawn). Also it is not, of course, a painting.
I only made that stuff up and presented it that way to see if that would have any effect on people’s opinion of the work. I suspect it did, but one would have to do some scientific polling with a control group and all that jazz to know for sure.
I’d wager that to some people the old “is it art?” thing gets rather boring. However, I am still very interested in how and why folks consider things art. Or good art. Or valuable, important art.
For instance-- I clicked on the link provided by panache45 of the honeycomb-like piece before I read his post. I at first found it rather lame–thinking it some 1970’s simple computer-generated claptrap. When I read that it was actually made from little pieces of wood I was impressed and changed my opinion to “pretty good, but not great.”
Then I thought-- “Isn’t THAT interesting!! I found it so much better, more interesting, and impressive when I discovered the actual medium was 3D and required some handicraft!” Strange what one considers “worthy” in artwork.
For example, let’s say you saw a 4’x4’ canvas covered with an almost (but not quite) uniformly beige color hanging in the MOMA. At first you may be inclined to think: “Blah-- what a nothing!”
But then you discover that it is not some crap painted slapdash by somebody in 5 minutes, but instead is a dropcloth that had been placed underneath a torture chamber to collect the sweat of Spanish Inquisition victims as they were forced to confess. And further, it was placed there surreptitously by a rebel Padre who secretly thought the torture to be an obscene affront to God and all Humankind, and who considered the perspiration of the victims to spell out a sacred message of warning to future generations of Catholics.
Now all of a sudden it’s a masterpiece, a relic, right? Yet it’s still just a dingy rag stretched over some wood! Just how much and why does context matter in displays of art?
Anyone up for posting some more “unknown context” art? I’ll look around on the web and put a couple more up myself when I have a little more time tomorrow.
