Pollack’s paintings communicate between the artist and the viewer in the same manner as a Rorschach Ink Blot. Except, in color. Communication depends on a common frame of reference. The more of that frame of reference you strip away, the less communication you can achieve.
This proves two things : Jack, and Shit. Those photographs are actual visual records of things. So they use forced perspective to create optical illusions - they’re still actual visual records.
Well, I wasn’t talking about photography, nor did I imply that I was talking about photography, so if you want to take what I said and apply it to photography, or the aesthetic design of whole-wheat crackers, you can, but that’s all on you.
Didn’t say that, nor did I imply it.
It isn’t an extension of my premise. We’re talking about emulation of reality in art as a criteria - a photographer doesn’t emulate reality. He doesn’t have to have skilled brushstrokes to reproduce an image. His art is in the selection of lighting, framing of shots, et cetera. Utterly and completely different than a painter or sculptor. I’m absolutely baffled as to how anyone could conflate the two.
Not quite. Almost.
I’m **not **saying we should value art subjectively. Valuing art objectively is **not **incorrect. Valuing art subjectively isn’t incorrect either.
This seems self-evident and, ultimately, a re-statement of “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
Fine by me.
Excellent. Now to tie it back to the reason I was in the thread in the first place - I personally gravitate towards evaluating things objectively. I’m not suggesting that other people are wrong for doing it differently. But because of my deep-seated craving for objective value, I consider non-representational art, in most cases, worthless. Ergo, my answer to the OP’s question is that it’s essentially a ‘con’ - subjective value built up by a combination of hype and good fortune.
That’s my opinion on the matter, and the reasoning that has informed that opinion.
It sounds like what you are saying is that the traditional criteria that can be used to judge representational art are what you are more comfortable with - even though art is YMMV, at least you can rate the “rendering” of the subject with an objective base.
The very challenge that Modern Art embodies is just that - asking a viewer to explicitly realize that *other criteria matter when deciding what is Art - and you don’t realize how much you depend on those criteria. While you think you may be evaluating a painting of a vase of flowers on its objective qualities, you are also deciding whether it even counts as art *- which you feel comfortable doing because you “know the rules.” But with a Warhol soup can or Pollack’s drip canvases - they are forcing viewers to realize that they have assumptions about what art is that they (the viewers) may not question. With the case of some Modern Art, getting viewers to realize that they have assumptions and to question them is Mission Accomplished…
Everything is art and nothing is art. I’m not saying Pollock’s work isn’t art. I’m saying I don’t think it’s worth a damn.
To expand on that a little : The argument you’re attributing to Modern Art - challenging conceptions of what is and isn’t art - assumes that there is a right answer of what is and isn’t art. That assumption, as far as I can tell, is utterly unjustified - no one has a definition that is satisfactory as to what is and isn’t art. Therefore, the argument modern art tries to make, in your view, is utterly moot from my view.
I get your basic concept and see how it would work in a lab environment, i.e., as a thought experiment. But we live in a context of multiple dimensions - our historical, social, geo-political context; the status of art and art criticism is a context, etc. And so while there can be “no” fixed definition of What is Art, there are *working *definitions that exist and overlap and fade, etc. But just like in Economics all fixed costs vary over time, there are active definitions that can be treated as fixed in a timeframe…
That is entirely the point, y’know.
Getting back to the OP though, I think judged on the individual piece that sells, it’s probably easy. But the years of practice and hundreds of pieces which didn’t sell, and led up to that, make it hard earned money.
This assumes that the purpose of art is to communicate: The artist has a message that he wants the viewer to receive. He encodes that message in the work. The viewer decodes the intended transmission. Mission accomplished!
This is how art and literature appreciation classes are typically taught. The students are shown how to INTERPRET a work … how to look past the surface attributes and perceive and underlying message or structure. The work is viewed as a conduit for communication. Good works communicate deep and meaningful things. Bad works are indecipherable and meaningless.
The flaw in this approach is that it calls into question the purpose of doing art at all. If the whole point is to communicate something, why bother with the encoding and decoding steps? Why not just SAY what you want to say? Instead of writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, why not just hand out cards that say “Slavery is Bad”? Instead of trying to hide some complex metaphor of human existence in some lines and colors on a canvas, why not just send a telegram?
The generation of interesting meanings is certainly *a *thing for art to do, and many forms of art do it well. But it’s not the only thing for art to do. Ultimately, art is the structuring of an interesting experience for the viewer/reader/listener. Afterward some traces of that experience may linger with us – the recollected ghosts that we call “meaning”. But even if no traces of the experience remain, even if we don’t attach any significance to our engagement with a work, the encounter may still have been beautiful/powerful/moving.
This is the realization that brought us abstract art. Abstract art isn’t there to make the didactic point that art doesn’t need to have a meaning. Because making that point is ITSELF a transmission of meaning, and you’d only need one abstract piece to make that point. Abstract art is the offering to the viewer of a meaningless experience, that is nonetheless, beautiful.
And if you say that it’s impossible for beauty to arise from meaninglessness, I ask you … what does Pachelbel’s Canon “mean”?
Or, as Susan Sontag writes in her essay “Against Interpretation”:
*
“Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.”*
Okay, I see where I’ve gotten confused here. When I talk about art, I tend to talk about the product. So, to me, comparing photography and painting is completely natural: they’re just two different ways of rendering an image that I can look at. You’re more interested in the process - when you talk about realism as an objective value, you’re really talking about how hard it is to achieve realism: it’s much more difficult to create a realistic effect with a brush than it is with a camera. I tend to ignore the artist in evaluating a work. I don’t care if he spent five years creating a work, or dashed it off in twenty minutes: it’s how the final whole effects me aesthetically that counts, not the amount of blood and sweat that went into it.
This. (I won’t attempt to respond to the last four pages, but at least the OP)
I come from a university music department. Everyone can wave at John Cage’s 4’33", and Nam June Paik’s “Into the vagina of a whale,” and say “Ah ha! Anybody could do that!” Well, yes and no. Clearly you don’t need to be a virtuoso pianist to write four and a half minutes of silence. But John Cage thought of it and you didn’t. Someone beat you to it. Part of being a modernist, or an “experimental artist,” or whatever the moniker of the day is, is that you did something that wasn’t done before. It is new.
I won’t attempt to be clairvoyant and guess “why” they do what they do, but I think the musician analogy is a good one. I don’t think anyone picks up a guitar and decides that it’s a great career, because look at how much money Esteban makes every year (don’t ask me why that’s the first guitarist that came to mind; I don’t know :D). One need only see how many buskers there are out on the street to say that simply deciding to play guitar is not a sound career model. Just because you don’t see outsider artists begging for change next to their expressionist sculptures on a streetcorner, doesn’t mean that they aren’t starving artists just the same.
I didn’t bring up the idea that communication was the purpose; panache45 did. Argue with him/her.
Fair enough. I guess I associate the objective value of a work with the skill required to create it. So a detailed portrait of Tom Cruise that is almost photorealistic requires a lot of skill and effort to pull off; a photograph of Tom Cruise that is photorealistic is pretty easy to pull off if you can get past his Scientologist bodyguards. I’d agree that effort has nothing to do with aesthetic value, but my whole thing is that aesthetic value is so subjective as to be nearly meaningless.
Or it’s the entire problem. Depending on your point of view.
I offer an objective definition of art :
Art is a product shaped, altered, or created by design.
You may criticize it as being so broad as to be meaningless; I submit that to narrow it any further would be to exclude something that someone, somewhere, considers art.
But even that is a subjective judgment in many cases. Is a photorealistic painting that hard to pull off? Not really. Unless you see the artist freehanding it, there are many ways (such as projection, for instance, or taking a photograph, putting it on a grid, enlarging the grid, and then painting it) that make photorealistic painting fairly easy to do.
When I see the abstract works of, say, Kandinsky I personally see a lot of painstaking skill in there. I can’t reproduce or make an original work that looks or feels like a Kandinsky, but I can certainly paint a reasonable facsimile of reality from a photograph using one of the techniques from above.
I think defining something by what it does is more helpful than defining it by how it’s produced.
Which is the more useful definition of a car?
“Something that takes me from here to there.”
or
“Something made on an assembly line in Detroit.”
If something can take me from here to there, I don’t care where or how it was manufactured. Similarly, if a work structures an interesting experience for me, I don’t care how random or accidental its production was.
I think that you’re just looking for way to define art you don’t like as non-art.
Just because you know a creative shortcut to do something doesn’t mean you’re less skilled than someone who takes the long way around. It might mean that, but it’s not necessarily so. And even if it was done while looking at a photograph, an amateur is not going to get the same level of fidelity and detail as a pro.
One of my hobbies is painting pewter miniatures for roleplaying games. Since every figured has been sculpted/cast, one could argue it’s just a paint by numbers where one gets to choose one’s own number-color combinations. But there’s a HUGE continuum of skill there. Color choice, layering of paint, mixing paints, washes, and using other application techniques to achieve the proper effect, and painting really teeny-tiny details. I guarantee my stuff would look better than someone who just picked up a brush for the first time, and I’m pretty middle of the road in terms of skill.