It’s really not.
No, it isn’t. Not even a little. Actually, that explanation just makes it sound like the guy has a chip on his shoulder about things he doesn’t consider art. Hey, I get it. I don’t like tentacle porn and some people do. But I don’t think that I am catching them in some sort of snobbishness if they can’t tell the difference between pictures of an octopod’s loving embrace and a tentacle death grip.
The fact is that a two inch square image on a computer screen does not give the same visual impact as a full sized painting on a wall. I don’t care if you like the art or not, but it reeks of reverse snobbishness to insist that what that website shows has anything to say about art and art fans.
The article shows one painting which has some impact even when seen on a computer screen. And demonstrates how magnified fragments can increase this impact. If magnification does not help Malevich’s masterpiece, perhaps the problem is with the masterpiece itself?
Besides the website has few of stories telling how art experts had been duped by hoaxers.
Disumbrationist School of Painting
Avantgarde artist Pierre Brassau
This did not involve any computer screens.
I don’t think so. The problem lies, rather, with the idea that art inheres in the artefact—i.e. that there are some physical object which, via some physial qualities, are pieces of art, while others aren’t. This is sort of the most ‘naive’ (I don’t mean any negative connotation here) way to approach art reception, and for a lot of works of art, it seems to work decently well—but this is just because those works of art have an enormously broad context, so they seem to be independent of it. But as I’ve tried to point out above, this contextuality is still essential to those pieces: take the Mona Lisa out of the context furnished by the human condition, and it’s dubious that you could still call it ‘art’ due to some quality it possesses itself.
Art is in the relationship between the object and its surroundings, which includes artist and recipient, historical, social and political, as well as the merely physical context. Much of the abstraction in modern art has its roots in the fact that fotographic and filmic techniques made art-as-representation obsolete; thus, art began, most notably in the impressionist movement, to focus not on representing anything, but on examining the nature of representation—what is it, really, that we do when we paint? What is the relationship of a painting to reality? Impressionism can be seen as proposing an answer to this question that revolves around the notion of light, recognizing that never the object itself, but merely the light reflected by it creates an impression within the painter that he then puts to canvass, which lead to the extreme of pointilism, where basically only individual rays of light were painted (that’s of course not all there is to it).
Later developments recognized that what one’s then left with isn’t actually a thing—it’s a collection of dots, from which we then abstract something, which has some kind of meaning to us. Expressionism explored how we produce the meaning within art, going as far as, with abstract expressionism and Jackson Pollock in particular, completely disrupting the figurative, and concentrating only on the reception—you can ‘read’ a Pollock, by following the different colors along the canvas, much as you would with some pointilist painting, but while with the latter, by some magic, an overall figurative impression develops, this is deliberately absent with Pollock.
Other approaches were to investigate the different components that come together in creating a figurative impression, form, color, composition, etc. Why do certain colors harmonize, and others not? What is the minimal alphabet of forms needed to produce a plausible approximation of real-world objects? What is the effect of juxtaposing different structures? And so on. Malewitsch’s suprematism was very much based in this development, creating a minimal grammar of forms, eschewing depiction for the attempt at creating a certain reaction, a feeling in the viewer, often through subtle tensions withing his compositions (such as the black circle being just slightly off-center, a kind of minimal change from a centered circle that, like a painting hanging slightly askew, maybe induces a vague feeling of unease—this minimal change, which sort of constitutes the simplest thing you can do in a painting to evoke any kind of reaction at all, is basically what it’s all about).
Furthermore, artists thought about the relationship between seeing, representing, and experiencing, most notably in the surrealist tradition, with especially Magritte calling into question the truthfulness of the image—you’ll know his famous ‘La Trahison des Images’ (The Treachery of Images), depicting a pipe, together with the words ‘ceci n’est pas une pipe’ (this is not a pipe): at first, a lie, because it is a pipe; but on further reflection, the truth, since it’s only a representation of a pipe. But it doesn’t stop there: the words themselves are only representations, and here, only a painted representation of words used themselves to represent certain things in the world. It goes on like this; but to somebody not speaking French, that is, lacking the requisite context, all of this is lost, and he’ll take the whole thing to be nothing but a picture of a pipe and some squiggly lines; not ever having seen a pipe, it won’t have any meaning at all to them, and they’ll perhaps utter that perennial damnation of all modern art, ‘my kid could paint that’.
And of course, they’d be right: their kid could, quite possibly, paint that. Or maybe a chimpanzee, or an elephant, or some other talented beast. Or it could be produced by an accidental spill of paint, or spontaneously coalesce from the quantum vacuum. It doesn’t matter, and neither do all of these hoaxes, and quizzes exposing modern art as a sham, etc. What matters is context: in the context of a quiz, what is art in a museum may no longer be, just as what you piss in in the context of a bathroom, you marvel at in the context of a museum. Art is not a static judgement attached to the artefact, it’s dynamic, and may change as the situation changes. There is no art-o-meter you have to point at something that definitely tells you whether it’s art or not; nevertheless, knowledge of the social, cultural, historical, theoretical, physical and psychological factors relevant to an object allow judging it as art or not art.
Finally, I think that almost every time, issuing the blanket judgement ‘x is crap’, where x is some large subset of human endeavour full of intricate complexities and opaque delicacies, is ultimately just a wincing away from the complexity of the world, cutting off a part of it in order to make it more manageable, in order to make the little corner we’ve carved out for ourselves seem more relevant, and to make what we do appear to us as being the only thing it’s worthwhile to do. I see this often with colleagues who decry all of modern philosophy as empty and sterile word-mincing without ever having read so much as an introductory textbook on the subject. They’ve mastered a very complex field—physics—, and I think there’s an intrinsic psychological need to think of this as being, ultimately, the field ‘that matters’. So, what seems not to fit into this purview, they just cut off by a blanket judgement. The same goes for modern art: considering it to be crap saves one the expenditure of considerable mental resources that would be needed to really engage with the subject.
The world is just too frighteningly big, so we try to keep it small, in order not to be crushed by it, in order to make it seem as if we were not totally irrelevant to it and in it. It’s very natural, really, but at the same time, a bit sad: ultimately, I think one always has something to gain by expanding that little circle of things that we call ‘our world’ a bit.
Is it like bread and wine become meat and blood of God only in the context of Eucharist? Imagine that you don’t swallow but instead run to a biomedical lab to perform a serological analysis of the substance. The attempts at scientific study of apestract art masterpieces are similar kinds of blasphemy. Because it is only in the process of a communion with the strange gods of modern art presided upon by a high priest of an art critic the junk magically transforms into masterpieces.
100% on pollock
50% on bremen - I need to nip down to the animal shelter with some paint.
Yeah. I nailed the Hitlers but thought he was rather more famous than Pissarro.
No. That’s exactly the sort of thing **Half Man Half Wit **is arguing against.
The miracle of transubstantiation relies upon the idea of “essences”. So the bread and wine become the flesh and blood of Christ in essence, not in chemical composition. They still appear to be bread and wine for all practical purposes, but their fundamental metaphysical properties have been altered.
Essences have their roots in Platonism – the idea that a transcendent realm of forms is the true reality and the things we perceive are merely shadows and echos of those forms. So through the process of transubstantiation the host becomes a manifestation of the essence of Christ instead of being a manifestation of the essence of bread.
The thing is, most people these days don’t take Platonism seriously. It doesn’t seem like a very useful way to understand the universe, although it still lingers on in different nooks and crannies of thought.
Once place it does linger is in what Half Man Half Wit calls “naive” art criticism. It’s the idea that art works have an essence – a hidden meaning / significance that adheres to the work apart from it’s physical from. From such a perspective, “understanding” a work of art is a matter of looking past its physical form to see the transcendent essence of the work that lies underneath.
However, this is not a very useful way to analyze art. The meaning a work is not really some Platonic essence that’s attached to it. It’s something that emerges in the mind of the viewer as part of the process of engagement. And since different viewers bring different backgrounds to their engagement with a work of art, it’s not surprising that they arrive at different interpretations/judgments of quality.
Each viewer’s interpretation feels true and right and transcendent. But that’s merely a perceptual artifact. There’s no true interpretation that trumps all others.
Your suggestion that “junk” art can be transformed into a “masterpiece” through a miracle is a product of this sort of magical thinking. It depends upon the naive assumption that “junk” and “masterpiece” are transcendent properties of works that can be perceived by careful observation. However, that’s not really a good metaphysical description of how aesthetic engagement functions.
Exactly. The properties of ‘being meat’ and ‘being blood’ are different from the property of ‘being art’ in the sense that the former are inherent attributes of the object (whether essential or physical), while the latter is strictly an attribute of the context that the physical object (the piece of art) helps set up. There’s a judgement of whether something is meat or not independent of any context; meat in space would still be meat, and you can construct a meat-o-meter to tell you so. Meatiness is exhausted by the properties of the object; if those change in response to external influences, then that’s either physics, or magic, but at any rate, something must have influenced the object itself and altered its properties.
This is different with art: without any change in the object, the judgement about it may change. For something more or less concrete, think of seeing something in a different light, or hearing a piece of music in a different mood. It’ll still be the same, unchanged, physical object (‘object’ here stretched enough to encompass a time-ordered sequence of sounds, etc.), but I for one have songs that I just can’t stand in a certain mood.
Still, I want to stress that this doesn’t invite an all-out relativism: while the boundaries between bad and good art are perhaps somewhat less well definied than the boundaries between good and bad tennis playing, nevertheless, if a piece of art, placed in its proper context, fails at what it set out to accomplish, then it fails as a piece of art. Of course, what its proper context is, might be difficult to ascertain, and there have been pieces of art that were once nearly universally denigrated, but have, due to some sort of reinterpretation, since become regarded as masterpieces; somebody saying ‘ah, but if you look at it this way…’ may change the reception (and indeed, the context) of some piece of art totally, and looking for these alternative angles is what half the fun in modern art, to me, is about. It’s what makes the reception of art an almost as creative process as its construction.
Merry Christmas to you. So if there is no difference between art and junk neither in substance nor in essence then there is no difference at all.
Besides, don’t you think that the illiterate Vendee peasants had been Neoplatonics? In psychology there is a well known effect of suggestion. In one of the experiments suggestion made people call salty food sweet. Thus one can suppose that the host in the mouth of a devout Catholic transubstantates into bloody beefsteak. The same effect can cause a devout art lover to experience a catharsis while looking at junk which a high priest of an art critic proclaimed a masterpiece.
These tests bring a guillotine into modern art gallery. It is different in substance from the guillotine which the commissars brought to Vendee, but is the same with it in essence.
But the fakes in the test also cause such processes in the minds of the test-takers. And statistically there is no difference between the fakes and the masterpieces.
No, it is those who seek initiation through modern art engage in magical thinking.
It’s weird how modern art, which is one of the most ruthlessly democratized movements in art history, is so often held up as some sort of elitist endeavor by the very people who are trying to act as a gatekeeper for “real” art.
Of course, there’s a difference. The mistake is thinking that the difference is a property of the object itself rather than a property of the intersection between object and viewer.
<shrug> Whatever you need to tell yourself.
I know that it FEELS like your aesthetic responses are TRUE. My aesthetic responses FEEL TRUE to me as well. The worth of a piece is so MANIFEST, is it not? The Good cannot possibly be Not Good, and the Not Good cannot possibly be Good.
And so if someone claims that the Not Good is actually Good … why then of course they must either be a liar or a fool … .
This is why so many people take art that they don’t get as a personal affront. If you believe in objective good and bad in art … and if someone claims to like something that you hate … then it feels like an accusation, doesn’t it? By liking something you hate and claiming that their liking is honestly come by … it feels like they’re accusing YOU of being a liar or a fool. You’re the one whose been duped. You’re the one who doesn’t understand what real quality is.
And so you have to fight back, right? Come up with a way to prove those hoity-toity art lovers are the real dupes! Look, you say, they can’t even tell a real painting from a fake! They have no qualifications to judge what’s good and what’s bad!
And so … you’re safe. Good job. Well done.
But, of course, this entire chain of thought … this entire feeling of being affronted … the need to prove objectively what’s good and what’s bad … is predicated on an error. That error is believing that the manifest solidity of one’s personal aesthetic response is evidence for the existence of objective aesthetic standards. When, in fact, it’s merely a quirk of how the human brain functions.
It’s a hard thing that I’m asking of you. I’m not arguing with you, really. I’m suggesting that you reconsider a way of looking at the world that makes this sort of argument necessary.
Don Simus, perhaps the following analogy helps: ask yourself why you like a piece of music, something simple, like a melody. It’s wholly abstract, in fact more so than most modern paintings: there’s nothing at all in the world which it represents or even resembles, it is just a time-structured sequence of frequencies, like many modern paintings are only spatially structured ‘sequences’ of colors, or forms. Nevertheless, none of the most rabid anti-modernists or anti-abstractionists would argue that thus, all music is nonsense. And this isn’t just because there are quite stringent rules that a piece of music must follow in order to sound good, because these rules are arbitrary: they are wholly a function of how our brains are wired up, and of our cultural prejudices, etc. (consider how music from outside your cultural circle, Chinese or Indian traditional folk music for instance, just sounds off to most western ears). Presented to somebody with different wiring, something that might be the most sublime symphony to you may sound like the worst of cacophonies. It is, in a word, the context that the listener brings to the melody that makes it sound good or bad.
Now, think of visual art in a similar way (in fact, there’s a strain of modern art, visual music, that has attempted to develop this analogy somewhat more). However, while the context we bring to music is more or less universal (modulo the aforementioned cultural differences), regarding visual art, judgments can be far more diverse. But even here, some universals can be abstracted: certain juxtapositions of color create tension, others a feeling of warmth, etc. So just as the musician employs their knowledge of our shared context to construct melodies of near universal appeal, the artist may endeavour to create visual arrangements that are pleasing, or unsettling, or create any sort of emotional response whatsoever in the recipient. And like the musician, in that, he may fail: thus, there is a difference, though perhaps one harder to perceive, between junk and masterpiece. A discordant note in a harmony stands out, and if there is no good reason for the tension it creates, the piece is in that respect just bad; likewise with visual arts.
You also, I think, fail to appreciate the role of criticism wrt art. You seem to believe that criticism is merely intended to pick out the good from the bad, but again, that’s a naive theory. Criticism is engagement with its subject, viewing it from different angles, placing it in different contexts. It’s not digging up the nugget within the artpiece that designates it as being good, but rather, it is an important aspect of the societal recipience of art, and thus, creates contexts for it. It’s a much more creative, rather than eliminative process.
Exactly. This is what I refer to as “critical play”. Criticism is itself a way of “looking” at a work of art, and some works are designed with a particular critical audience in mind.
There’s nothing wrong with naive reception by the way. I find that my own critical moves usually start with a moment of naive reception. I like something, or I don’t like something, and then I start thinking about the mechanics of my liking or disliking and go on from there.
I really like Kasmir Malevich. IIRC, in the Met he wasn’t that far from Joseph Cornell. Cornell should get more appreciation. Him and H. C. Westermann, people look at and say “that’s clever,” and that’s fine if all they want out of the work. But they’re welcome to see what else is there, and see that its really pretty smart. If that risks allowing a few pretentious viewers to just see it as a way a making they themselves look smart, that’s really a marginal issue, and worth the annoyance.
The problem with modern art is not that it is abstract, but that art lovers can’t tell it from ape work. However, apes are not capable of abstraction. Therefore modern art is not abstract, but apestract.
If you wish to talk of music, the experiment I mentioned in another thread is interesting. Similar things happen with art.
But that doesn’t mean that whatever they bring onto a canvas is incapable of invoking a reaction. Who painted it intending what needn’t matter (see ‘death of the author’). What if Hamlet had actually been writtin by the proverbial million monkeys—would that lessen its quality? Or conversely, what if those ape paintings had, in fact, been produced by a human, whose intention was trying to be as rough, as primitive, as inhuman as possible—wouldn’t they then be brilliant successes?
That none of this is what actually happened doesn’t matter; that it could have happened just showcases the fact that artiness is not an inherent quality, not an objective attribute, but a function of the object and its surroundings in the most general sense.
I’m not arguing that such suggestion effects don’t exist, that there are no empty fads, no overblown hypes, etc. in art (see my first post in this thread); just that your inference from the existence of such things that hence, art must itself be empty or a sham, is simply false.
Think about what would happen if I were to start writing random equations and asked random people on the street whether they were meaningful or just symbolic gibberish. Do you believe that, on average, we’d get a good score differentiating meaningful physics from gibberish? Or play a few rounds arXiv vs. snarXiv. Can you tell real from fake physics paper titles? If not, does that mean that theoretical physics is bullshit?
No, of course not; it simply means that such quizzes and surveys are a bad gauge for the content of a given field, especially those that are far removed from everyday experience. And before you hold that in the case of physics, certainly the experts can reliably tell fake from real, read up on the Bogdanov affair. (Note that this isn’t a precisely analogous case: in physics, you typically, with some hard work in most cases, are able to tell fakes from genuine contributions, since there are objective standards to fulfil; these do not exist in art, and indeed, there is no sharply drawn boundary between fakes and genuine works of art. That nevertheless it was possible to dupe serious physicists just shows the fallibility of humans, nothing more; so even if for some reason one would disqualify ape-produced works from being art a priori, the failure of the art establishment to identify them may not say any more.)
(By the way, you haven’t answered my question. Think of a melody you happen to like; precisely why do you like it? What quality is it that differentiates this melody from any other sequence of sounds? What makes it good art, as opposed to bad?)
Object and subject are not separate entities, but do intersect?
How do you know all this? Are you Uri Geller?
Not to prove, but to check. And it turned out that you indeed can’t tell art from fakes.
I’ve never read anything by either of them. But coming into that quiz completely blind, this:
is a good sentence. It’s clear. It’s free of cliches. It makes me want to actually read the book. Only perhaps a 1/3 score for:
I do also agree with whoever (sorry ;)) was saying that sentence by sentence comparisons are beside the point anyway, because they completely avoid plotting and characterisation which is at least half of what makes a really good book.
But those James Joyce sentences? They are not good sentences.
I liked Malevich before I knew I was supposed to. A zillion years ago, me and some friends were decorating one of our first apartments, and we came across a Malevich poster at IKEA. We thought it looked absolutely awesome (plus it matched the furniture). None of us had heard of the dude, or had any idea that it was “art”, as opposed to some random poster. It went on the wall in the living room. I always loved that poster. A couple of years later, I started reading art history, and found out that he was famous.
I’ve had a few of moments like that. Just more proof that I have great taste, I guess. 