“If you can see it, darling, it’s there” - Freddie Mercury
That being said, I still reckon the artist can at least elucidate on what he *wanted *to say and meant, what he felt while saying it and what he deliberately put “there” for you to see ; and that his own opinion on the matter’s probably worth a little more than that of Joe Philistine (of the Scarborough Philistines).
Personally, I agree with you. But I was really shocked and lost a good deal of respect for these academics when I found out they think the artist’s intentions are essentially irrelevant.
That seems the wrong way around, to me. If there’s a single ultimate answer to any piece of art, and the artist holds it, what’s the point to having critics?
I didn’t say there was a single ultimate answer. I said the artist’s opinions and intent in the creation of art are important and relevant. But I’m unable to answer the second part of your question. What IS the point to having critics?
Momentarily taking advantage of the fact that I agree with what you’ve said so far…
To ask the question that Boyo Jim suggested…do you, in fact, hold critics to be the most highly replaceable people on earth?
Me, I do! Speaking from experience, I feel that pretty much anybody can write reviews. It’s one of the lower-echelon jobs at newspapers. Art interpretation is terribly subjective; two people can look at the same work and derive completely opposite impressions.
The value, of course, of criticism is prophylactic and/or partisan. I might pan a movie, and thereby spare you the unpleasant experience of seeing it. I might praise a movie, and prompt you to the joyful experience of seeing it. A lot depends on finding a critic whose tastes match your own.
But, let’s face it, if all the art critics in the world died…would it make a noise?
Anyway, I’m with you on Serrano: it’s absurd to try to derive his intentions without better evidence than that asserted so far in this thread.
(Hm… Print out the Doper names of everybody I disagree with…put it in a cup…pee in the cup…photograph it… Is it art? Or criticism?)
I would have used the quote
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
Groucho Marx or Sigmund Freud
Not in a world where I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! is still on the air.
I don’t agree at all that “anybody” can write reviews. Or rather, not everyone can write a review that anybody else would ever want to read. You ask most people what they think about a movie, and you get something like this. Someone who can write interestingly and intelligently about art is a relatively rare find.
That’s part of it, certainly, but I think a really good critic can also introduce new ideas about a work that you hadn’t necessarily thought of, or provide a perspective on the work that you’d never considered. While you might not end up incorporating that critic’s views into your own appreciation of the work, it can still be interesting to see how someone else reacted to the work.
Oh, yes, absolutely. Without the critics, we would have forgotten Melville. We would never have known Van Gogh. We would have lost countless other artists, after their heyday passed, if it weren’t for critics keeping them in currency by talking about them, analyzing them, and representing them to the general public.
I learned something today. Or several things.
'Spose so… I used to hang around with a theater critic for a local newspaper – he’d always get two tickets, and I was his guest fairly often. He was a poser, a fraud, a pretender, and the most valuable thing I ever learned from him was how to really pile up a plate at an art-show buffet. I guess I am generalizing too much from this one really bad example.
I, myself, turned down a position as a game reviewer for a gaming magazine, because, to do the job honestly, I’d have to give bad reviews as well as good ones, and too many of the designers at the time were friends of mine. Rather than having to say, “Joe is a nice guy, but his latest game is not very good,” I politely declined the job offer.
Fair enough. Also, a good art critic can point out some of the technical things about painting, engraving, casting, etc., that most of us don’t know. One really wonderful series of photographs, for instance, showed a sculpture in various stages. Time-lapse, so to speak. It conveyed a lot more information than the final, finished sculpture, alone, would have.
Fair enough again. I hadn’t known that Melville and Van Gogh had been endangered in that way. I have heard that it is only because of Mendelssohn that we know of Bach today, and Vivaldi was pretty much brought back from the dead by the 1960’s flash popularity of “The Four Seasons.” So, hooray for reviewers as advocates.
(But, oy vey, you should have read some of the pure drivel that my friend pumped out! He’s an editor today…)
You claim this, yet you also claim to not understand the difference between using urine as an ingredient in paint in the Sistine Chapel and in Piss Christ.
You can’t have it both ways.
Exactly. It seems Miller has interpreted the work in a certain way. Anyone who disagrees with this interpretation is not only wrong, but stupid. This includes Jesse Helms, most Christians, and even the artist himself.
Can’t argue with that, I guess.
There is no similar context for Piss Christ. The urine is part of the work. On purpose. It’s not just a commonly used ingredient that is in all paint like when the Sistine Chapel was painted.
“A woman is just a woman..but a good cigar is a smoke.”.
Attributed to Sigmund Freud
I said one particular interpretation is stupid. That’s not even close to saying that only my interpretation is the “smart” one.
Freud? Kipling, by most accounts.
I wouldn’t say that that was Millers point at all. Miller points out one of many possible interpretations. That in my opinion the beauty of the work is that it challenges per-conceptions (that piss can’t be beautiful), and opens the viewer to many other ideas of what it represents. On possible interpretation is that of shock: “Look I’m defiling your sacred god”. I think even Miller would agree that that is one possible interpretation. What divides the intellectually curious from the intellectually lazy is the belief that the interpretation of shock is the only valid interpretation, and so that the piece is without worth.
It would be like watching Citizen Kane and thinking it was just a movie about some guy who missed his sled.
Or like watching Citizen Kane and thinking it’s nothing more than a nasty slur on the life of William Hearst. Obviously, it was intended to offend the Hearst family. There can be no other point to the movie…
I’d be more interested if you could convince Obama supporters that a hanging chair was a comment on the decline of public discourse.
Yeah, this is eisegesis - or “death of the author”. It means that reviews are best considered as works of art themselves rather than insights into the mind of the artist (other than when they refer to falsifiable information). If you don’t like a particular approach, don’t pay it any heed. If a reviewers opinion consistently coincides with yours (Charlie Brooker, for instance), take pleasure in reading their reviews.
Pretty sure it’s Shakespeare, dude.
Tolkien, surely. Pipe-weed, and all.