Famous works of art that you hate

Cafe Society
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Yes, I’m aware of that. “Your” can indicate partisanship as well as possesiveness. If you’re debating politics, and someone refers to “your country,” do you think they’re confusing you for George Washington?

Again, you’re missing the point. Yes, there are objective criteria for analyzing art. “I like whichever artist uses the most blue paint,” is an objective criteria for analyzing art. But the decision to judge the merit of a painting on objective criteria is itself a subjective opinion.

There are galleries filled with endless repetitions of the crucifixtion, painted by men with vastly superior technical skills than Thomas Kincaide. Does that make them better artists? No, because there’s only so many times you can watch the same guy getting nailed to a stick before it starts to get old. Put one of these anonymous crucifixtions up next to one of Kincaide’s “Kleig Light in a Cottage” paintings, and to my eye, you’ve got two equally worthless painting, because neither of them has any emotional or intellectual effect on me. All the technical skill in the world is meaningless if the individual viewing it just doesn’t like what you’re doing.

Has anyone in this thread actually said that?

Only if you’re hopelessly oversensitive, or massively egotistical.

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That was hillarious.

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Where did I ever say anything about art majors or the teaching of art? Of course there’s a difference between a student’s work at the beginning and the end. I have never said that all art is the same. It pretty much goes without saying that a person can learn new techniques, new approaches, new whatevers and thereby change the way one makes the art of one’s choice. And so a student’s work can clearly and objectively be different before and after some period of learning. But whether the art produced after is better than the art produced before is purely subjective.

You, again, misinterpret what I’ve said. Your observations about what is in Kinkade’s painting were, largely, objective. for example, you said “Foliage doesn’t go from bright to dark like that”. That can reasonably be interpreted as saying, factually, that Kinkade’s foliage has an area of coloring that goes from bright to dark. I can’t argue with that. But then you say, “It’s incongruous” and that’s where you’ve gone from objective into subjective. You see it as “incongruous”, other people may not. You are clearly right that there is foliage that goes from bright to dark, but you are not “right” in any sense of that world that the result is incongruous.

It’s art. Who makes these rules that his art must be judged by realistic standards and Picasso’s shouldn’t? Claiming to be “the painter of light” is not the same as claiming “I paint absolutely realistic light”. You are free, obvioulsy, to apply whatever standards you like to Kinkade’s work to decide if you like it, if you consider it “good” art, etc. But by the same token, I am free to apply my standards to decide those questions. You just can’t say that your standards, your judgements, are any more “right” than mine. That’s all I’m saying.

No more so than Kinkade’s.

Again, there surely is some quantifiable difference, but whether Frank sings “better” than William is a subjective judgement.

No, I’m saying that art and singing both have the unarguable attribute that any questions of “better” are purely subjective, are a matter of each person’s personal judgement, and there is just no objective way to say that a Picasso is “better” than a Kinkade, or that Sinatra is “better” than Huang. The fact that a whole bunch of people say one is better doesn’t make it some sort of reality, it’s still just a whole bunch of people’s opinions.

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True, on all counts. I’ve actually gotten into arguments, right here on the SDMB, arguing that exact thing.

No, because whether a particular bill is counterfeit or not can be decided on purely objective terms. You are right that money only has value because people agree that it does, but the differences between a “real” bill (where “real” is defined as having been printed by the government) and a counterfeit bill are objectively determinable.

You are making the same mistake that fessie is making, you are not making the distinction between determining if two things are different, and determining if one of them is better. Nowhere have I ever said that there is no objective way of determining if two pieces of art are different. Clearly one can compare paintings and easily show differences in brush techniques, usage of color, subtleties of tone, etc. etc. Just so, one can easily and objectively determine the differences between a real dollar bill and a counterfeit.

But in art, regardless of how different the two paintings objectively are, whether one is better than the other is purely subjective and always will be. Just so, whether a real dollar bill or a counterfeit dollar bill has value is up to the person you’re trying to give it to. I’ve heard tell of some artist who hand draws really nice facsimiles of dollar bills and then exchanges them for things worth far more than a dollar. The piece of paper he hands over is clearly not a real piece of currency, but the person who takes it decides that it has great value.

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There are educated opinions and there are uneducated opinions.

I know which one is more valuable to me, but that is just my uneducated opinion.

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Um, isn’t that like saying that a Kinkade and a Picasso both have paint, so what’s the difference? The difference is in how that paint is applied and combined. In the newspapers, the difference is in what words are used and how they’re put together. Sheesh.

No, that is just incorrect. There are reasons why you think his work is awful. There are reasons (possibly the same ones) why other people have the opinion that his work is awful. The very word “awful” requires a subjective, personal judgement, how can it be otherwise?

No, you’re trying to educate me in your idea of how to look at art. You have done nothing to tell me why your way is somehow “right” and other ways are wrong.

Sure, corroborate specific points of your opinons and your judgements. Still, why are those any better or more right than mine? That’s the part that you need to educate me about.

No, not at all. I have never said that I know as much about art as you do, clearly I don’t. What you have and continue to fail to do is explain to me why your judgement of a piece of art is any better than mine. Ok, I’m sure you can see things in the painting that I can’t. You can see what kinds of styles and techniques were used, and I can’t. So what? Really, so damned what? That you know what kind of brush strokes were used doesn’t make your judgement of that painting somehow objective. That you can go on at length about the differences between Kinkade’s techniques and Picasso’s doesn’t somehow grant greater validity to your opinion than to mine. It’s still just your opinion, nothing more.

So, are you saying that chemistry is no different than art? That there is no objective reality to a water molecule being composed of one hydrogen atom and two oxygen atoms? That covalent bonding is just a matter of personal opinion? Rather silly.

Look, there are objective things in the world and there are subjective things. Anyone who doesn’t understand that simple concept has a lot of learning to do. Chemistry is objective, art is subjective. Why do you seem to take such umbrage at that simple fact?

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BOOM! All of the oceans in the world explode.

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Just as with art, there are educated opinions about chemistry, and there are uneducated opinions about chemistry. Mine happens to be educated. You can trust me or not, but for water that would be one oxygen and two hydrogens. What you just made with two oxygens and one hydrogen was highly explosive.

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So, yours is an educated opinion. Nevertheless, it is still just an opinion, no better and no worse, no more right and no more wrong than mine. Why is that so hard to accept?

Here’s an example: Suppose a world-class gourmet chef prepares a meal of sauted bull testicles, done up just perfectly in the most wonderful way imaginable. You taste it and gag, because even done up well by a world class chef, the taste of bull testicle just doesn’t suit your palette. In other words, it just tastes bad to you.

Now the chef says that you’re wrong, the dish, in fact, tastes wonderful. Does it suddenly taste great to you, because the expert said so? Or is the judgement of what tastes good still a matter of personal, well, taste? For the chef to say that the dish does, in fact, taste wonderful is just nonsensical when, to you, it tastes like crap. There just is no “in fact” that can be applied to matters of taste.

Ok, now the chef takes you under his wing. You spend six months in intensive cooking school under his personal guidance. You know more about gourmet cooking than you even knew existed. Do the bull testicles NOW taste wonderful? Or is it still the case, even with your vast culinary education, that taste is a pesonal, subjective thing? Are you now, because you’ve been educated, going to say that bull testicles, in fact, are better than whatever your favorite food was before being educated?

You know, there’s really no need for the snide little digs calling me ignorant. I mean, I am just as justified in saying that if you’re satisfied with your ignorance about the difference between the objective and subjective, that’s your choice.

Back to the subject, though: I have no doubt that if you and I were standing in front of a Kinkade and a Picasso, that you would be able to educate me at length about the differences between the two. But I have equally no doubt that you would never be able to show me why the Picasso was better than the Kinkade, in any sense other than your opinion and judgement.

Why can’t what be true of visual art as well? That “guys in suits are paid big bucks to discuss a bunch of peripheral information that’s somehow essential to enjoying the” art? Isn’t that what an art critic is?

Besides, I have never heard anyone, ever, anywhere, anytime, say that you have to know all the little details and “peripheral information” in order to enjoy watching a baseball game. I really don’t understand how this analogy even applies.

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Oh, I believe that there certainly is a set of criteria, make no mistake about that. But the criteria are still nothing but people’s judgements and opinions.

You really, really need to be more careful. Where did “whims” come into this? I never said anything about whims. I believe, certainly, that the judges in a musical or theatrical audition have solid reasons. I just don’t believe, as you do, that those reasons are anything other than the judges’ personal criteria.

Hey, thanks for bringing up Americal Ido, I was going to myself. If, as you seem to believe, there were solid, objective criteria for judging one singer better than another, American Idol would be a really boring show. There would be no tension, no question, no debate, everyone would just agree on who was the best.

But that’s not the case, is it? There is HUGE disagreement over who is the better singer. Large numbers of people who say that so-and-so shouldn’t have been voted off; lots of people who just can’t believe that THIS singer is still in the game, while THAT singer – obviously a far better singer – got booted last week. Heck, even among the supposed experts in the field, the judges, there isn’t a consensus.

How could that be if, as you say, the criteria for judging who is the better singer are so clear and objective? I’m sorry to break this to you, but the only explanation for the huge disagreements and debates over American Idol is what I’ve been saying all along: That it’s all personal opinion.

But please, educate me. Explain to me how and why there can be such wildly differing views on who should or should not advance on American Idol if, as you say, there are such clear-cut, well-defined, solid criteria for judging the better singer?

171

This is the most egregious mischaracterization of a debate that I’ve ever seen here. Allow me to sum up the argument so far:

art people:
“But there *are * objective criteria by which we judge art. They are as follows:
painstakingly explained”

Roadfood:
Well, what you have so painstakingly explained are not, in fact, objective, they are simply a bunch of subjective criteria that have been largely agreed to by those who we may loosely say are in the art community.

Here is an example of an objective criterion: In baseball (as long as fessie brought it up), how is it judged whether a runner gets to first base safely or not? Well, if the runner gets there before the first baseman gets the ball and tags the base (or the runner), the runner is safe. If the first baseman has the ball and touches the base first, the runner is out.

art people:
Aha! Gotcha! If it’s so all-fired objective, then how can there be arguments about whether the runner was safe or not? Huh? How do you answer that, mr. objectivity? If there are arguments, it must be opinion, so being safe in baseball is just as much opinion as good art.

Roadfood:
Well, the arguments come about because people’s perception of the event can differ, due to factors such as their line-of-sight, the quality of their eyesight, and even what they would like to have happened. Nevertheless, that people’s perceptions can differ doesn’t alter the fact that the criteria themselves are objective. As proof, we could hypothetically imagine a large enough set of cameras, trained on first base from various angles. The tapes from such cameras, played back in sufficient slow motion, would certainly make the question of whether the runner was safe unambiguous to all.

art people:
Yeah, well we got criteria just like that in the art world.

Roadfood:
[I bet you don’t like me characterizing your side with bad grammer. Neither do I. Your usage of such above was uncalled for]
Ok, educate me. Tell me what the criteria are, objectively, by which art is judged good or bad. The explanations that fessie have given so far do not do that. They show the application of criteria, not the criteria themselves. What would persuade me of the rightness of your side is a characterization of the criteria similar to my baseball example above.

Let me give you an example to show what I mean: If you were to tell me that photo-realism was one of the criteria, that would be objective (at least moreso than anything else I’ve heard here). Of course, that would put 90+% of the art in the world into the “bad” category. If you said that using two clashing colors in the same work made something bad, that would be objective (there is reasonable, objective agreement on what “clashing colors” means). Heck, even if you said something as vague as that “subtlety of color usage” made something good, I could say that that was reasonably objective.

So can you do that? Can you provide even ONE criterion that objectively separates good art from bad, and that does so in ALL cases?

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This wasn’t addressed to me, but I believe I answered it in a recent reply to DianaG, my baseball example. Yes, of course, baseball is a construct of humans; it has no existence outside of human existence. And yes again, the rules of baseball are simply agreed upon by people. But given that, still, once the rules have been agreed to, there are simple and totally objective ways to make the judgements necessary in baseball, such as whether a runner is safe or not.

What I’m asking for is examples, just one example really, of the same sort of objective criteria used to judge art.

The problem I have with the techniques you provided is that they cannot be applied equally to all works of art to reach the conclusion of whether it’s good or bad. And also, still and again ad nauseum, the criteria themselves are intrinsically subjective.

The baseball criterion “runner gets to base before being touched by baseman with ball” has no subjective aspect to it. If you asked ten baseball umpires what that means, you’d get the same answer (ok, not word-for-word same, but substantially the same) from all.

The art criterion “the painting has the same treatment all over” (something you said applied to Picasso but not to Kinkade) has subjective all over it. How close does the “treatment” have to be to be considered “the same”? If you asked ten art critics what “same treatment” means, how many answers would you get?

In baseball: touching the base equals safe, missing the base by so much as a millimeter equals not safe. That’s objective.

in art: “same treatment”. And “same” here means, what? How close does it have to be to be the same? How is that closeness defined? Who decides? Is it even the case that all the art experts agree exactly on what that means?

In baseball: No one disagrees about the meanings of things like “base”, “ball”, “touch”, etc. If one happens to be ignorant about baseball, it doesn’t make those things suddenly subject to opinion and, in your words, whim. They still do have exact, agreed upon meanings.

In art: Uh, you’ll have to help me here. What, exactly, are the things in the art world that have exact meanings, agreed upon by all in the art world, that make up the criteria by which art is judged?

And before you say it, I can already hear one of your objections: “But baseball and football are judged using different criteria, so why should the same criteria be applied to every piece of artwork?”

Answer: Because baseball and football are fundamentally different. What do they have in common? They are both sports. That’s about it. Pretty much every single other thing about them puts them into totally separate realms. Now, you can try to claim that a Kinkade and a Picasso have nothing in common but that they are both paintings, but really, do you want to go down that path?

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If the criteria were even anywhere close to objective, the analysts would agree. You cannot disagree with what is objective, you cannot have differing opinions – equally valid opinions, that is – on something that is objective. The runner in baseball is either safe or he isn’t. People can disagree about what they believe they saw, but there exist objective ways to determine who is right and who is wrong. There is a right and wrong in that arena.

There exist no objective ways to settle the question of whether a Kinkade is better than a Picasso. When opinions differ in baseball, you can (or could, if the cameras had been there) go to the video tape and take the question out of the realm of opinion. When art critics or experts disagree about the merits of a particular painting, where’s the equivalent of the cameras that can take the question out of the realm of opinion?

That’s the biggest load of horse puckey I’ve heard in a long, long time, and just more proof of what I’ve been saying. Who the hell gets to decide what is and is not a “true visual experience”? I can see it, but the art yahoos say I’m not having a “true visual experience”? Utter crap.

More crap. Migod, how can you possibly spout such arrogance? You know best, you know people better than they know themselves, so you know how they’d see things if only they were “educated”? You know, for such a fact, that Kinkade’s work is crap, so it’s just must be the case that people who like it haven’t been educated enough to see the crap. It’s kinda like The Emporer’s New Clothes in reverse. Only the uneducated can see something worthwhile in a Kinkade. The educated see it for the crap it truly is.

Man, you are SO hurting your own cause here.

That is YOUR OPINION as to the point of art. When you’ve got every single person on Earth agreeing with you, I’ll concede your point.

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Well, you’re welcome Roadfood!

I decided that all those words you typed mean “thanks for your effort, fessie, I hadn’t looked at those paintings in that way before.” That’s MY subjective reality - and there’s no way on God’s earth you’ll convince ME that I have anything to gain from seeing it any other way.

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There’s a point to art?

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Membership in the so-called Legitimate Art World is self-serving, self-limiting, and self-defining. You are only considered a member if you agree, basically, with what the current members have already decided are the criteria for judging art. I’ll bet that the following statement holds true: “If a person believes that Kinkade is a great artist, that person will not be considered to be a member of The Legitimate Art World, at least by the other members of The Legitimate Art World”. Am I wrong? If so, please point me to a member of The Legitimate Art World who believes that Kinkade is a great artist.

In other words, of course everyone in The Legitimate Art World agrees on the so-called objective criteria for judging art, because if you wildly disagree with what The Legitimate Art World says are the criteria, they just don’t call you a member.

So let me ask you this, to drive home my point (pointlessly, though, I’m sure):

I believe that it is true that there are artists who, at one time, were considered by The Legitimate Art World to, shall we say, produce work of inferior quality. But now The Legitimate Art World considers their work to be great, or at least deserving of the label “true art”. I readily admit my art-ignorance in not knowing any names of such artists, and my attempts at googling to find some met with unsuccess. Weren’t there, in fact, movements of (at the time) new art that were initially eschewed by The Legitimate Art World, but later totally embraced by it?

Hey wait, Impressionism seems to fit the bill, here’s a quote from the Wikepedia page:

And those Impressionists were such hacks as Monet and Renoir.

And yet now, those same hacks are considered by The Legitimate Art World to be great artists. How on Earth did the objective criteria that those French juries used to reject the Impressionists in the 1860’s change to make the same artwork great today? I mean, good art is good art, objective criteria are objective criteria, right? So the paintings must have physically changed so that they matched the objective criteria. Did someone leave the paintings out in the sun and the colors melted and ran to objectively turn the paintings from bad to good?

Or is it the case that The Legitimate Art World actually changed its mind? But wait a minute. If the criteria for judging art are objective, how can The Legitimate Art World change its mind? Did they decide that the objective criteria they had been applying that judged the work bad was invalid? Maybe I’m just the country bumkin that DianaG thinks I am, but I just can’t see how that can be considered objective.

Oh, The Legitimate Art World clearly tries to make believe it’s objective. They even had to call the works that were accepted back then “trivial”, in an effort to make it appear that the current criteria are really objective, and those silly French back then were just wrong. In the absolute sense of wrong, of course. But I wonder what response you’d get if you could talk to those French juries. Do you suppose that they’d be just as convinced, just as sure, just as adamant as fessie and DianaG that their standards were, in fact, objective, and these silly people from the future are just showing their ignorance of the art field in calling Monet’s work great art?

in any case, if it happened once (or how many times?) it can happen again. If The Legitimate Art World can change its mind about the Impressionists, who’s to say they won’t change their mind about Kinkade a hundred years hence?

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I don’t believe anyone has said they are your criteria. We’ve been saying that they are not objective.

I actually fail to see how those two are contradictory. It’s true that it’s all subjective, at least as far as art goes. It’s true that all opinions are equal insofar as no one’s opinion has any more validity than anyone else’s, and no one’s opinion has any better claim to being “right” than any other. ALL opinion when it comes to art have no claim to being “right”.

AND, it’s also true that The Legitimate Art World, as you called it, have an agreed upon set of criteria that they apply.

Now where is the contradiction in those two paragraphs? It is YOU who are trying to use the second to contradict the first. You who are saying that, because The Legitimate Art World has agreed upon some criteria, that therefore those criteria are RIGHT, and other criteria are WRONG. The French in the 1860s would equally vehemently believe that they were RIGHT and you are WRONG.

No, that’s a complete misquoting and mischaracterization of those who have been disagreeing with you on this thread. And it’s a rather insulting mischaracterization, too. I have read no posts on this thread that said anything even remotely close to that.

Ok, explain how it’s insulting. It sounds about as egalitarian as possible to me. It seems only through arrogance that one could believe that “our opinions are equally valuable” is insulting to one of the parties.

See, I think this is the key point here. You honestly believe that you’re right. I’m just saying that neither one of us is “right”, because “right” is nonsensical when it comes to judging art.

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Oops. Kinda proves my point though. Doesn’t matter what I think water is made of, it’s still made of what it’s made of. There’s no judgement that can turn two oxygens and one hydrogen into water. But the current Legitimate Art World can turn the crappy Impressionist art in the 1860s into great art today.

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And you are as wrong about that as you are about art. What arrogance you display, presuming to tell me what’s in my head. You are clearly the one who refuses to be educated.

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Also, the last refuge of one who knows he has lost a debate, and has no answers for the questions put to him: Ignore everything and just say that you’re right, in a big font, because clearly that settles it. It does conclusively prove my point, though: Just as with art, you have nothing objective, so you just decide that you’re right.