It can be judged by how closely it resembles the thing it purports to represent. That’s an objective criteria.
Wrong. Traditional art has some objective components on which to base a value. My comment that it is, to a great extent, subjectively valued is based on the fact that in the real world, people assign its value based more on subjective intangibles than by the available objective criteria.
Correction: more like 125 years.
I suppose you can, but why would you want to, unless you happen to love photorealism?
I’m not forcing you to do it that way.
Sorry. That’s just another roundabout way of saying that you like some stuff better than other stuff.
You’re welcome to your preferences, of course; the silly part is pretending that your subjective preferences constitute objective criteria.
Wikipedia puts things fairly clearly in summmarizing Wolfe’s works:
Wolfe’s thesis in The Painted Word was that by the 1970s modern art had moved away from being a visual experience, and more often was an illustration of art critics’ theories. Wolfe criticized avant-garde art, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. The main target of Wolfe’s book, however, was not so much the artists as the critics. In particular, Wolfe criticized three prominent art critics whom he dubbed the kings of “Cultureburg”: Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg. Wolfe argued that these three men were dominating the world of art with their theories and that, unlike the world of literature in which anyone can buy a book, the art world was controlled by an insular circle of rich collectors, museums and critics with out-sized influence.[1]
Wolfe provides his own history of what he sees as the devolution to modern art. He summarized that history: “In the beginning we got rid of nineteenth-century storybook realism. Then we got rid of representational objects. Then we got rid of the third dimension altogether and got really flat (Abstract Expressionism). Then we got rid of airiness, brushstrokes, most of the paint, and the last viruses of drawing and complicated designs”. After providing examples of other techniques and the schools that abandoned them, Wolfe concluded with conceptual art: “…there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representation objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes. … Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until…it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture…and came out the other side as Art Theory!…Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision…late twentieth-century Modern Art was about to fulfill its destiny, which was: to become nothing less than Literature pure and simple”.[4]
source:The Painted Word - Wikipedia
In what I regard as one of the more telling examples of his book, Wolfe described how the Cultureberg critics began turning out phrases along the lines of, “the integrity of the canvas” and “respecting the purity of planes” (I’m not sure of the EXACT phrasing, but I’m close) and the leading modern artists of the time dutifully began turning out these huge canvases that were nothing more than colored squares or sometimes even a single line across the canvas, with thin paints that allowed the canvas beneath it to be seen, cause that way you had your integrity of the canvas made visible, along with your pure planes. I found the argument particularly striking because I had visited an art museum a few months before I read the book (long after it had been published) and they were doing a retrospective of some of the very artists mentioned, and I stared at these huge canvases showing a few squares, and wondered what the hell they were thinking about, or trying to get the audience to think about. After I read “The Painted Word” I knew … I was out of the loop … the paintings were merely somewhat pedestrian illustrations of the theories of some “important” art critics, who would see that the artist understood things in the same deep and important way they did, and thus praise their work, leading important collectors and museums to buy their work, making them rich and famous. Easy as pie. There was no “there” there for me to look at and be enriched by.
So, yeah, hard con baby. Squirm if you like, but I think Wolfe got it cold.
That’s true. My perspective is that I prefer my art to be things I can’t see and can’t imagine, rather than stuff I can. It’s rather odd, as I’m a photographer, which is pretty much the height of realism. But I just can’t do abstract painting in a way that pleases me. I’ve tried. It’s unbelievably difficult to get it right. Pollack to me is the master of making it look so effortless, yet so well composed and thought-out. I could get lost for hours in the details of his splash paintings.
I should add, I don’t like the “art world” and my feeling towards critics is mostly one of suspicion and sometimes outright contempt. And I think there is a good amount of posturing and unadulterated bullshit in these circles–there’s plenty of contemporary art I can’t stand. I’d say about 90% of it. But, still, I love non-representational art and place a higher value on it than more realist works.
The sooner people stop using the term “modern art,” the better. It certainly has nothing to do with chronology, or people 500 years ago would have used the term to apply to their art.
Most people use the term to describe anything non-representational and requiring no skill whatsoever; something that “anyone can do” . . . that is also pointless and incomprehensible.
There’s a whole lot of art being created today that doesn’t fit that description.
People use it for Picasso, too, and he’s clearly representational in most of his works (although abstracted.) And I’d change “requiring no skill” to “seemingly requiring no skill.” I have heard people make comments about Kandinsky and Pollock, that their works require no skill. Are you fucking kidding me?
They’re not my preferences. You can objectively judge art by how closely it resembles what it purports to depict. That’s simply fact.
Yes. That is an objective measure of some sort, but it’s not a measure of “art,” just the ability to reproduce as accurately as possible in two dimensions. It may be an objective measurement for what you subjectively consider “art,” but it’s not universal. Art is not mere reproduction.
My friend - there’s the rub: there’s a fine line between clever and stupid. Which translates in this case to either:
- There’s a fine line between a genuinely affective artistic statement and poorly-crafted and/or misguided attempts at art
And/Or
- There’s a fine line between offering a learned perspective as to whether a work is genuinely artistic and just dismissing it because you don’t like and/or get it with no comprehension of the craft involved
To me, a non-representational painting is only worth something if it matches my couch. Purely decorative, raw aesthetics.
Any painting is something anyone can see (since they’ll see it once it’s on canvas) and anyone can imagine. Most people just don’t bother to. But a lot of it’s not worth imagining in the first place.
Piet Mondrian is the guy I like to pick on in these discussions. Lines, boxes, colored squares. I can make lines, boxes, and colored squares. And if I slip a few bucks to an art critic, I might even by able to make a career out of it. This isn’t to say that’s what he did - for all I know, Mondrian was genuinely moved by squares in bright primary colors, and crafted them with painstaking care in utter earnestness. What I do know is that I don’t care. There’s no message for me to take away from looking at one of his paintings.
And I’m not saying everything needs to have photorealism. Surrealistic or impressionistic paintings are fine in my book. They don’t look exactly like things that exist, but they’re close enough so that you have a starting point of reference to decode what the artist was trying to do with his deviations from normal visual reality.
Accuracy is an objective measurement of quality in a created representation. Therefore, it is an objective standard one could use in the calculation of a piece’s value. Period. Whether people do or don’t apply it is, indeed, a matter of personal preference. I’m not arguing otherwise. And in the real world, a lot of people don’t apply that standard, thus the inflated values of “modern” art.
As for your statement of what art is not… Art isn’t anything. Ask twelve art critics, you’ll get twelve different definitions. Have twelve critics look at twelve objects and rate each of them as art or not art, and you’ll get answers all over the map. It’s all fluffy and phony. The only definition of art that I can come up with to encompass this variability is :
“Art is a created or manipulated physical object that a group of people deems to be art.”
And thus, everything is art.
ETA:The below was typed before your reply above.
That’s fine, so long as you understand your “objective” measure of art is based on your subjective interpretation of what art is. I’m not anti-representationalism, but I do gravitate more towards work like this or this (which actually is based on a photograph of a detail in Tiffany glass), than I do more classical and representational work. A lot of people are, and it doesn’t make it a “hard con,” (although, like I said, I think there is a lot of hucksterism in the art community.)
I don’t think art has a satisfactory definition. It’s circular, as discussed in the post above yours.
That first painting looks like neon vomit static. The second one’s pretty.
I doubt you’ll find argument from me. It’s like defining “what is music” and “what is poetry.”
The first is Gerhardt Richter, my favorite living artist. His work spans several styles, from photo-based compositions (his photo-paintings) to his abstract-expressionist-type paintings (like the one above), to minimalistic compositions.
The second is actually not a painting, but a photograph (though manipulated) by a fine artist photographer, John D’Agostino, whose work I admire (and who, perhaps not coincidentally, is very much influenced by the favorites I’ve mentioned in this thread: Kandinsky and Pollock.)
Are you saying that Monet was not a good painter, because his paintings aren’t as cyrstal-clear sharp as those of, say, Jacques-Louis David?
Translation: “I sneer at people who don’t share my taste in art. And I justify my contempt by imagining they’re sneering at me.”
These arguments over abstract art always seem to boil down to a group of elitists wanting to impose their aesthetic criteria on everyone else, and being unable to imagine that “normal people” might honestly LIKE something that they find stupid and ugly. So it must be a con or a joke or a provocation.
There’s definitely snobbery at work here, but it’s not flowing in the direction you think it is … .