How is this art?

If he is doing it intentionally, as an artistic statement, and people know about it and are watching, then yes, it is.

So perhaps it’s not so much the audience at large that needs to be shocked and awed to recognize art but more that some publicists and museum curators do?

So a middle finger raised high in response to said artist’s work may be viewed as acknowlegement and approval?

If you do it in an artistic manner, certainly! :smiley:

Nowadays, yes. The prevailing view is that art is for the elite only, and a lack of understanding from what the artist probably describes as the ignorant masses is a good thing. I’m not really fond of that idea, but it’s out there.

Oh really, like who?

This is entirely consistent with historical views on the appreciation of art in western society.

There was that guy who put the crucifix in a jar of urine, and then Christo (mainly for his Paris traffic jam piece). Perhaps “a lot” was too strong a qualifier, but some conceptual art sure seems like trolling.

Interesting. Even for Biblically themed art? I would think that accessibility is important to that.

Good question. I do not want to imply that no artist has ever intended the great unwashed to derive any value from art.

It was important enough for the illiterate masses to recognize the story in a sculptural program on the tympanum of a cathedral or to be able to identify the patriarchs in stained glass. The significance of the number of petals on the rose of sharon or the tiny details of St. Augustine’s life would have likely been unremarkable to the great unwashed. These details were for the consumption of other artists and literati.

The artist of the middle ages was a craftsman whose works he rarely took credit for. The institution of patronage changed the role of the artist in society and as such the intended consumer of his art.

I haven’t heard about the Paris traffic jam piece. But regarding the crucifix in urine, I don’t think of this as trolling. I take it the “trolling” interpretation relies on a notion that he’s just saying, “Har har, I’ve put christ in a vat of urine har har doesn’t that make you angry?” But I don’t believe this is the right way to read the piece. Rather, I read it as bringing me to wonder why I don’t initially realize what I do realize after reflection: That it is not that the urine desecrates Christ, but rather, it is that Christ sanctifies the urine.

I have been told (I haven’t seen the piece or depictions of it myself) that abstracted from the nature of the substance of the liquid, the piece is actually quite beautiful. So, juxtapose the beauty, the sanctity, and the excrement, and the audience has a choice to make: Allow the sanctity to be defeated by excrement, and lose thereby the beauty of the piece (because all you see is urine, not the abstracta of the formal composition of the piece), or else, allow the excrement to be defeated by the sanctity, and gain thereby the beauty that is the result of the crucifix’s destruction of the sinful nature of the urine.

This in turn leads me to wonder, is this what sanctification has been all along–a process of abstraction from real-world conditions, and then an activity of pretending that this abstraction is concretely real? Should I approve or disapprove of this?

And so on.

So, as in a previous post of mine, it looks to me like this piece does count as art in a way continuous with traditional art, as long as we understand that the canvass is the audience’s mind, and the media are concepts and their relations.

Well, gee, this is kind of fun. I’m inspired to go out to an art museum in the near future.

-FrL-

So “that guy” (Andres Serrano), it is your assertion that he photographed the crucifix in the urine to gross people out, to offend Christians, and/or “stir things up”, like any good troll would?

I only ask because a few moments of research will show that that simply isn’t the case. The same goes for Christo, only double.

Also, in all my years in this business, I have never heard any artist ever refer to any “ignorant masses”, nor ever imply that if said masses didn’t “get it” that was a good thing becasue those people were lowly and stupid. Usually what you get is a shrug: “They didn’t get it? (shrug)”

My local museum has a lot of conceptual art from the early 80’s. Sol Lewitt among them. Frankly, it was all they could afford when they started their collection going in the early 90’s. So thanks RTA for confirming my suspicions about Sol LeWitt.

I found the distinction between conceptual art and artistic/artisan skill an helpful one. Conceptual art is just an idea, a concept. Once described, it can be put together by almost anyone. “Put a table full of potatoes in a museum” “Hang an urinal on a wall” " Make a waxen statue of a praying Hitler" among many other examples. Such art is only as good as the concept. Personally, I would be deeply annoyed by the OP’s potato-table. It is just so insulting that the artists thinks his thougths on art, shapes and potatoes are more interesting then my own.
Conceptual art can be interesting when the concept is good, though, or even just when the concept is new to the viewer. These Exactitudes for instance have a simple concept: “Make 12 pictures of similarly styled persons plucked from the streets of Amsterdam, Rio and Beijing”, but the result is not trite at all.

And then there is artisan/artistic art. There, the skill and style of the artist matter. The concept may be: “Splatter a canvas full with paint” but Jackson Pollock just does it better then anyone else. The age of Rembrandt saw many painters of religious scenes and portraits, but he was just better then the rest.
This is also largely a matter of taste, but on the best artists a lot of people agree they are the best.

The best art has both an interesting concept and is skillfully done. Some artists have interesting concepts but can’t paint or sculpt worth shit; and many young artists with a lot of talent just don’t have much interesting things to say yet.

Exactly!

What if that person is John Cleese, and he’s performing his Minister of Silly Walks routine? What if that “unusual gait” is Barishnikov prancing around on his toes in Swan Lake? Art is about perception. If you’re walking down the street and you see some ugly broad with a big-ass mole on her face, is that art? What if you take a photograph of her? I’m not trying to disparage the photographic skills of Diane Arbus, which were considerable. If I’d tried to take that same picture, it would likely not have come out half so well. Heck, I probably would never have even thought to take that picture. Which is the entire point: the moment of artistic genesis that led to that photo wass not the split-second the camera shutter clicked open. It was the moment Arbus looked at that woman and thought, “That would make a good photo.” That moment, that sensation of recognizing the sublime in the every day, is what all artists are trying to communicate. Modern art is interesting to me because much of it represents a conscious effort to pare the art down to just that sensation. Duchamp’s *Fountain* is, justly, the most famous example of this in conceptual art. Traditionally, artists would look at an everyday object and try to translate it into art. Duchamp decided to leave the translation up to the audience, to replicate in the audience that moment when an artist looks at that object and sees the sublime in it. The message is that art is not an object, but a process, a way of perceiving the world. Anything and everything can be art, if you choose to see it in this way.

(my bolding)
Serendipitous choice of words there , WhyNot

mabye everything is art?

Sounds like folks I’d like!

Which makes the word meaningless, and the OP unanswerable.

Ah, yes indeed. Pass that over here, dude…

You ever notice how nobody ever calls the place where art is displayed the Stuff Museum? That’s because “art”, to have any meaning, has to mean more than just “stuff”. If everything can be art, that’s just another way of saying that “art” and “stuff” are synonomous.

What suspicions are those? … LeWitt’s mural “wall drawings” are not low-rent, merely more readily available. Two months ago I saw a LeWitt mural in the front atrium of the San Francisco MOMA - hardly what anyone would call a poor, local-yokel museum. People - even “what the hell is that?” art-phobes - really tend to like the pieces; they are graphic, simple, and colorful.

As for his other works, LeWitt is a “minimalist” artist just as much as Monet is an “impressionist” artist. The wall drawings are more recent, while his sculptures - lattice-like forms of stacked open cubes - are how he made his name; if your museum picked up one of those, somebody spent some reasonably big bucks.

After thinking about it, I’d say the discussion shouldn’t run to the unresolvable question of whether or not something is or isn’t art. Just say whether or not you like it and move on.

Ideally that’s exactly what it should be. But too many pretentious idiots want to define it very specifically, and behave as though they’re the people that have the singular level of taste to proclaim such.