[Keanu]
Whoa.
[/Keanu]
The Hamster King put it far more eloquently than me.
If you’re defining art as “anything that invokes emotion,” then I’m not sure how you could possible exclude “Piss Christ,” considering the huge amount of *very *intense emotion it stirred up. Personally, I think the outrage was largely misplaced - I found the image to be quite beautiful. If you didn’t know the material being used, you’d assume that it was a standard bit of devotional art. If Serrano had just called it “Orange Christ,” probably no one would have heard about it. That being said, I don’t think the title is purely for shock value. One of the central concepts of Christianity is that this is a fallen world, and we’re all inherently contaminated just by living in it, and only through the grace of Christ can we be cleansed. The piss in the painting isn’t a commentary on Christ himself, but on the world in which he chose to incarnate - the world is full of piss, and yet its not enough to smother the beauty of Christ’s sacrifice.
“Fountain” is quite possibly my favorite work of art ever. On one hand, it’s simply bathroom humor, which is always appreciable for its own sake. That it’s bathroom humor that’s worth millions of dollars just makes it funnier. But it also offers an interesting take on the nature of art and how we perceive objects around us. Someone designed that urinal to look just like it did. Every curve of its surface is intentional, and the choices made were not purely functional. There is, after all, more than one urinal manufacturer out there. If you want someone to buy your brand urinal instead of someone else’s brand, you’ve got to make your product more attractive to the consumer. Which means that there’s likely a non-negligible amount of deliberate aesthetic design going into it. I’ve always thought industrial design was fascinating, and recognized “Fountain” as a justification of industrial design as involving legitimate artistic choices. Mind, I literally grew up in a machine shop, and worked in one for ten years through high school and college while I was first learning how to think critically about art, so that influences my view quite a bit. While I’d seen “Fountain” in pictures before, the first time I saw it in person (actually a reproduction, the original being lost shortly after its first exhibition) at the Tate Modern, right after I’d graduated college, it was like a thunderbolt. It instantly brought together a huge number of disparate ideas I’d had floating around in my head and solidified them into (what I like to think is) a reasonably coherent conception of the nature of art.
These were both conclusions I arrived at independent of any statement by the artist on the meaning of their work. I’ve since read Serrano’s defense of Piss Christ and found it matches a few of my own ideas about the work, but doesn’t touch on most of them. I’ve never read Duchamp’s defense of “Fountain,” assuming he made one. Given that he was a Dadaist, I suspect any such account would not be trustworthy to begin with.
You’ve defined art as something that provokes emotion. In the recent Pit thread about John Cage, several posters described having emotional responses to seeing 4’33" performed. (And I’m not referring to the people in that thread who hated it.) If you are right about 4’33" not being art, does that mean those posters were lying about their emotional reaction? If they weren’t lying, doesn’t that mean that, by your own definition, 4’33" is art, even though it doesn’t do anything for you personally?
Alternatively: The Mona Lisa does absolutely nothing for me. Would I be justified in saying that the Mona Lisa, therefore, is not art? Or would it be more accurate to say that it’s art that simply doesn’t appeal to me?
I said that art conveys emotion, not that it arouses emotion. Both a punch in the face and Piss Christ certainly arouse emotion, but they’re not conveying it. Unless you’re trying to claim that the message Serrano was trying to convey was “Andres Serrano is a contemptible blasphemer”?
I suppose you could argue that it’s art in that sense, but in that case, it’s plagiarized art. Duchamp (or whoever it was who contributed it; apparently this isn’t cut-and-dried) wasn’t an engineer at the plumbing-fixtures supply company, and the “artist” who claimed it was art was just stealing credit for someone else’s work.
Do you believe that photographers are plagiarizers who steal credit for someone else’s work? Or maybe you don’t think photography is art at all. A lot of people don’t.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, that Duchamp made Fountain in a time when both art photography and mass-produced design were relatively new things, and the “skilled craftsman” model of the artist was being called into question … .
Again, this is ridiculous. You’re applying your own reaction to the work and trying to attribute motive based on that. Maybe he was trying to convey his anger at the way he felt Christianity had been co-opted by charlatans, or his disgust at the idea of crucifixion, or the powerful feelings he had toward Jesus that were so beautiful even a “blasphemous” medium wouldn’t be able to take away their power. I don’t know, and no doubt these could easily be bullshit explanations, but his motives could have been artistic by your definition.
I’m curious as to how a punch in the face doesn’t convey emotion. That seems to be a pretty definitive declaration of someone’s emotional state. If someone punches me in the face, I think they’ve conveyed their emotions to me in about as unambigous a fashion as I can conceive.
I’ve also already explained the emotions I think Andres Serrano was trying to convey with “Piss Christ,” and I thought I was fairly clear that “contemptible blasphemer” wasn’t one of them. But let’s say I’m wrong, and renowned art historian and prominent intellectual Donald Wildmon is right about “Piss Christ” being an insult and attack on both Jesus Christ and the Christian religion. Is that still not the artist conveying his emotions?
But all of that is really besides the point. You claimed that nobody could get anything out of either of the works if they didn’t read the artists explanation first. I, personally, got a ton out of both works completely independent of any artist’s statement of intent. The point being, art is subjective. If a particular work does nothing for you, doesn’t mean that nobody else can find value in it, and as such, it’s probably better to avoid sweeping statements like, “If you get anything at all from such an installation, it’s from the artist’s statement, not the piece itself.” People appreciate different things. Don’t assume that your tastes are universal.
I don’t know that you could really call it plagiarized. Duchamp never claimed to have manufactured the urinal - indeed, its nature as a “found” object is central to my interpretation of it. But even if I concede that Duchamp was a plagiarist - so what? That’s a statement on the worth of Duchamp as a person. It tells us nothing at all about the worth of the work. I still had the emotional reaction to the work that I did, regardless of who gets the credit for putting it in front of me.
Or maybe he really was trying to convey the idea that Jesus Christ, and Christians in general, deserve to be drenched in piss. How does that make it “fake art?” If that were his meaning, he would seem to have been highly successful in conveying his strong, negative emotions about Christianity, which, per Chronos’s definition, puts this squarely in the “real art” world.
Chronos, I’ve posed this question a couple of times, and now Miller has. I really am interested in your answer.
I agree - the made-up examples I used were mainly chosen because I gathered based on his use of “blasphemer” that this explanation would still render it “fake” art in his eyes because of his own personal feelings on the subject matter.
Cage’s 4’33" is another case of an artist claiming credit for someone else’s work. Anyone who was emotionally moved at a “performance” of 4’33" was not moved by Cage’s “work”; they were moved by something else that was present there, and would have been moved by that whatever-it-was even without Cage’s “work”. Nobody can be moved by Cage’s work itself, because it doesn’t exist.
Now, there probably are some people who aren’t moved by the Mona Lisa. The work is failing for that segment of the audience. But it’s intended to convey emotion, and unless, like 4’33", it fails to move anyone at all, then it’s still art.
Two things about this. First, its internally inconsistent. If the work doesn’t exist, how can Cage be claiming credit for someone else’s work? You can’t steal something that doesn’t exist. Secondly, does this mean that the people are specifically claiming to have been moved by John Cage are stupid? Or are they lying? How are you better able to understand their internal emotional processes than they are themselves?
Cage is claiming credit for the background noise that occurs at one of his “concerts”. The background noise exists, but it is not Cage’s doing.
So a photographer who takes a beautiful picture of the Grand Canyon is a plagiarist? After all, the existence of the Grand Canyon isn’t the photographer’s doing. He’s just putting a frame around it.
Like a photographer, Cage put a frame around a particular sort of experience. He said “You know how you listen at a concert? Listen to the ambient concert hall noise like that. Isn’t that an interesting experience?”
Now, you might not like that sort of thing, but if you try to define it away as “not art” you’ll discover that you’re defining a lot of other things away as well. That’s because you’re not starting out to understand aesthetic response in general, you’re merely trying to cobble an ad hoc critical discourse that retroactively justifies your own taste. Now, you could just say “Hmm … 4’33” is not the sort of thing that I like." and leave it at that. But you seem uncomfortable doing that. It’s seems like it’s important to you to put works that you personally find hard to engage with outside the box labelled “art”. Why this is important to you is an interesting question to consider. The answer probably lies in the role that art plays as a status marker in our society. Those of us with intellectual pretensions (I’ll cop to it) don’t like thinking of ourselves as unsophisticated, or imagining that others might think we’re unsophisticated. Sometimes it feels more comfortable to put a difficult work outside the box: “I don’t need to justify my lack of appreciation for that thing, because it doesn’t count as art!”
But, really, this isn’t about you. People who like Cage are not judging you. The are not trying to make you feel unsophisticated or ignorant. They just like Cage.
Anyone wishing to turn this thread into an attack on or defense of 4’33" should be aware that it was extensively discussed in a relatively recent Pit thread.
Word. That should be carved in marble above the entrance to any museum of modern art there is. And if it won’t fit, they should get a bigger entrance.
So is there anything that isn’t art? Or can anything be art of someone claimed it was art?
If so, then it seems to me that if a software engineer claims that the program he writes is art, then it’s as much art as a painting. Which means - going back to the OP - that art studies are unnecessary since everyone else in college is already an artist. There’s no need to study art specifically because the study of anything is the study of art.
Art is first an idea - so Duchamp’s signed urinal, Warhol’s soup can or Lichtenstein’s big comic book paintings long with 4’33" - all provoke and inspire with the idea behind them.
Ideas? Everyone’s got ideas. I got a zillion of them myself - doesn’t make me an artist.