I sort of agree, except it’s impossible to quantify, or at least I think so.
I don’t think there’s even a reliably quantifiable way to define ‘good art’ and if anything can be ‘good’, nothing is.
No; what if not thinking about it is a specific feature of my technique as an artist? (in the same way that not photographically representing the subject is a specific feature of impressionism, or abstract art).
As far as I’m concerned, there is, and can be, no objective, perfect definition of ‘art’ (the closest I can get is ‘that which is considered art by at least one human’*), much less can there be objective, perfect definitions of ‘good art’ and ‘bad art’.
The closest I can get to a definition of ‘art’
I used to think this was a terrible shame, but just lately, I’ve started thinking it might actually be a great thing.
*But some enterprising individual might come along, describing him or herself as ‘not an artist’, producing a series of works called ‘this is not art’, and go to great pains to explain that it is not art, and nobody should consider it as such, and yet, it would (IMO) very definitely be art, even (or especially) if the nonartist was successful in convincing everybody that it was not art.
You do realize, of course, that every outraged or querulous reaction is precisely what the artist is shooting for, don’t you?
When I saw it a few weeks ago, I the thought of posting a camera at either entrance to the room (you had no problem with the “globes” exhibit, but the potatoes bothered you?) and just snapping people’s faces as they tried to understand what their eyes were tellling them. A wall of those photos would be art too, in my humble opinion.
I thought it was fabulous, if you can’t tell, btw. Best exhibit in the whole damn museum.
Without knowing more about either, it’s impossible to say. See below for why.
Here’s the difference between modern art and classical art in a nutshell: in classical art, the quality that makes a piece art is completely determined by the finished product, but in modern art, it’s much more strongly tied to the process of creation. The pile of potatoes with a voltmeter running through it is art because it was created with the intention of being art. The crack on your windshield may or may not be, depending on its genesis. It should go without saying that any artist whose preferred medium is other people’s windshields is a major-league asshole and deserves whatever happens. But that’s not the point here.
There are a couple effects of the shift from product to process that go a long way towards explaining why very few people get it and so many ridicule it:
First, it’s no longer possible to appreciate art outside of its context. The quality that makes Rodin’s sculptures so enduring is immediately obvious to any casual observer, but Duchamp’s urinal requires effort on the part of the audience to understand. That’s not to say that there’s no benefit to knowing the context of classical art, but it’s not as important as it is for modern art.
Second, no one knows how to judge the quality of a piece of art in real time. It’s not obvious to me that anyone ever did, but from looking at the classics you can get the sense that quality is immediately obvious and agreed upon by a large number of people. Nowadays you need the context, and it’s very difficult to assess technical merit or the importance of it. Great modern art will still be discussed years from now, but obviously we can’t know which pieces have that quality.
Did you think it was fabulous simply by virtue of the outraged and querulous reactions you saw people having as they looked at it?
The production of such reactions seems like kind of old news, so to speak. Was there something specific about this piece that you found made it fabulous?
To be perfectly honest, I find an artist making “art” just to elicit a (largely) negative reaction is trite and immature. Kids do stupid things in a school yard to call attention to themselves. I guess some artist never outgrow that stage.
The cheap world globes with great big lumps of camouflage tape on them were equally retarded. Took a bit more work than the potatoes but probably not much more. What exactly were they supposed to be symbolic of?
I think you and I will just have to agree to disagree on this entire subject.
Well, if they’d all walked in, looked startled and then eye-rollingly bored, I’d be inclined to agree with you asto old news stuff. But they didn’t. They remained curious, engaged, puzzled, upset for a good long time.
If all the reaction was “Oh, THIS shit again, how trite,” you’d get a lot of those reactions, and you did not. Witness this thread. As long as the bourgeouisie can be epated, it’s well worth doing. Start acting bored, stop examining the potatoes endlessly from every conceivable angle for fifteen minutes (What? You never saw a potato before?), and they’ll stop putting stuff like this on exhibit.
I guess I’m torn. I understand what y’all are saying about the piece moving the OP to think, to ponder, to write a thread about a pile of potatoes, and therefore it’s SOMETHING more than a pile of potatoes.
But as far as I can see, the ONLY thing it made him think, ponder or write about is whether or not it was (is) art. It didn’t make him question the patriarchy, ponder the beauty in a woman’s thigh, or subvert the dominant paradigm. It didn’t lead him to glorify or denigrate God or Man. It didn’t make him feel elated, or subdued or wonder at the creation of the world or the people in it. It didn’t make him feel or think of anything outside of the piece itself.
For me, a completely uneducated person in this area - art must lead the viewer deeper in or further out. It’s not about the item, but about where it leads. Leading to “is that art?” isn’t really leading anywhere. It’s a circle. It’s stuck. It’s static. It’s dead.
Hmm… that sounds like it may be about war and the loss of national identity in the postmodern world.
But I’m probably reading that into it.
If that were a correct reading of the piece, though, then it exemplifies the kind of thing which makes me feel like some of this conceptual art is little better than a bumper sticker. And you’ve got, by the way, both your political bumper stickers and your absurdist bumper stickers, and each has its analogue in some examples of conceptual art.
I haven’t read more than the first two sentences, but it confirms something I wanted to say. With art like this, I think the canvas or medium isn’t so much the material the piece is made of, but rather, a mass of concepts and their connections which are instantiated in the mind(s) of the audience. The artist is literally messing with your mind, or at least, trying to.
If the point of traditional painting is to create an aesthetic visual experience, then I take it the point of art like the one described in the OP is to create an aesthetic conceptual experience. However, I’ve used these words “aesthetic” and “experience” without having a clear idea what I mean by them.
But I can say this at least. A good traditional painting evokes a sense of beauty and or wonder by the novel juxtaoposition of patches of color. Perhaps conceptual art is supposed to evoke a sense of beauty and or wonder by the novel juxtaposition of concepts.
Not really. If you saw this at a science fair, you wouldn’t think it was dumb, would you? Would you say to the kid who created it, “That’s a really fucking dumb demonstration?” No.
Merely showing it in an art gallery has changed your reaction to it and caused you to think about it differently. Now this perfectly good science fair project has made you feel angry and superior to the people in the art gallery. Since art is about changing your perceptions and your emotions, then this is art.
My issue is that it’s an old technique. It’s like doing an inferior copy of the Mona Lisa: it’s art, but it’s not particularly imaginative art. Dadaism is far from new, and this is just a different object than Duchamp’s urinal and bicycle wheel. He led this way, and anything else is just a variation.
The thing is, the artist gets to select what he want viewers to think about. You may well prefer thinking, about the subjects you list above (trite as they are, and tired as painters are in dealing with those questions ), and if you want to hthink about that, you’re welcome to visit a Rubens exhibit.
Modern artists do not feel obliged to give you warmed over Rubens, though. Lert me ask you a few simple ones:
Is it ever appropriate to use a potato in a work of art? If not, why not? If the artist had simply connected one potato to another with a one-foot long piece of electrical wire, would that have been better or worse, from your point of view? If an artist somehow pureed potatoes and used them in a painting medium and you didn’t know you were looking a potato-soaked canvas, could that be art? How about if he attaches a note saying “potatoes were used on this canvas”? would that then become offensive? Why or why not?
These are just some of the questions the artist may want you to contemplate. If you don’t want to contemplate them, that’s okay. This is a democracy, and people get to choose. They just don’t get to choose for others, that’s all.
It places an object into a context in which it seems to be being used for two unrelated functions, simultaneously. Since in the ordinary course of life I can only use one object for a single function at any given time, this exhibit produces in me a feeling of slight discomfort, maybe even a kind of tornness if that’s not too strong a term! Am I approaching a dinner table, or a bunch of batteries? It’s got to be one or the other, right? But it’s not. I almost seem to be two agents right now–the one thinking of food, the other thinking of electricity. One and the same set of acts on my part seems to have behind it two incompatible sets of motivations. The piece has made me schizophrenic.
Well, anyway, I can imagine something like this is supposed to be part of what is evoked by the piece.
The concepts of potato, dinner, table, battery, and so on, have been juxtaposed through the experience of participating in this exhibit in a way which evokes in me the same kind of puzzlement and wonder (to a far lesser degree I have to admit though) as when I’m working on a mathematical or philosophical problem, or even on composing a poem. If these are examples of conceptual beauty, then I think it’s clear the potato exhibit tries also to evoke an aesthetic conceptual experience.
Here’s what’s kind of funny though–I didn’t have to go experience the potato exhibit to draw any of the above out of it. I just had to hear it described. I wonder if this, in and of itself, shows some deficiency in the piece, and I wonder if its a deficiency which generalizes to all conceptual art?
Maybe I’m wrong though, and experiencing it “for myself” would be different, conceptually aesthetically, than simply imagining the experience from a description.
I forgot to mention another possible deficiency in the piece assuming my reading of it is appropriate. The effect I described in myself is very easy to produce. This has been established for the past several decades. Yes, yes, we all know objects can seem new and different when placed in odd contexts, and yes, yes, we all know this says something about the audience and its/their conceptual framework and so on. But what’s new here?
Well, if that’s the case, GoogleAds wants to sell us Art:
Yeah, but they’re all still leads, and that’s cool. All your questions are ones I’m willing to ponder. (I also think that for an artist to think that no one wants to glorify God anymore is amazingly conceited - there are as many ways to glorify God as there are individual people, and it never gets old or “trite” for me.) I think we may be back to the difference between effective art or not here. According to the OP, none of these questions were raised in him by looking at the piece.
The thing this brings us to is that, for some people (pseudotriton ruber ruber, for one - **Frylock **(great name for this thread, by the way), for another) the piece does lead somewhere. They found all sorts of insights into people looking at the piece - or the people standing around it. (Perhaps you were simply facing the wrong way, and the “art” was in the faces of the people looking at the potatoes!) So a piece can simultaneously be “art” and “not art” if there are two observers.
This is why I, much as I detest pretty much anything that comes in an “installation”, still support public funding for this sort of thing. It’s not my business if prr’s art isn’t mine. If she’ll support funding for restoring my trite Renaissance oils, I’ll support funding for her potatoes!
Conceptual art is meant to provoke a reaction, not necessarily a sense of wonder and beauty. A lot of conceptual artists, or at least a lot of the highly publicized ones, are fairly described as trolls of the highest order.
