Hey… Psst… Buddy? You like Mondrian? Check this out: Piet Mondrian: The Evolution of Pure Abstract Paintings - EmptyEasel.com
In all seriousness, I adore Mondrian. And, more than once, I’ve used that link to explain the progression of his art and counter the “it’s just some lines and a MS Word Paint Fill” argument.
“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation”
Widely attributed to Herbert Spencer, and applicable to many art fans and critics.
My dad bought a Pollock reproduction and put it up in his office because it appealed to him. And he was a high school dropout, hardhat navy diver, construction worker who retired after a very successful business career, which he largely attributed to having a pretty good BS detector.
Project Gutenberg is valueless.
Shit, now what? How can you prove to me that any given text there has value? Some could argue that regardless of their free status the fact that people have paid money for them gives them a baseline value. Others can point to a text and describe how it created in them some sort of feeling or thought process that they ascribe value to. Perhaps you have a favored text yourself and feel this way about it. But if you insist that I accept your emotional explanation as evidence the text has value, then you must accept that the emotional experiences regarding Pollock’s paintings are just as valid.
Clearly there is as least one more source of beauty in the world for me than there is for you.
I appreciate lots of things, I try to be open to the appreciation of everything. But there are some art forms that just don’t do it for me, I’m afraid, and I accept that those things are my loss. I accept that others have a source of beauty that I just don’t see. That’s my loss.
Thanks for the link. I don’t know his work, but from what I see there, it speaks to me. It’s also a good bit different than Pollock in feel. I’ll have to explore his work a little more.
I have not lost one item of appreciation, what I have is a * different* sense of appreciation.
Lets take a look at a consumer product - how about something as mundane as a transistor radio?
Nice design, no art perhaps, functional but just a product?
Let’s look into this a bit further
The principle of radio transmission along with its history - including the use of it to transmit the distress call from Titanic - well there’s a start.
Look at our galaxy, or even our current understanding of the universe, and here we see radio signals transmitted naturally, through the construction and demolition of matter from one form to another - and yet through centuries we had religious organisations that actually forbid us to look at the true nature of the universe, there is a struggle for scientific knowledge in the humble transistor radio here and its also the story of the development of our modern world, and at the same time its the story of creation itself.
Next we move on to the materials sciences and the principles of operation of the transistors itself.
Then we move on to communications, the ability to send information and entertainment around the world - which has had and continues to have a fundamental influence on the human world, and by extension by our own behaviour, has an effect on the wider word beyond humans - for good or bad.
Once you have all that, how about a particular model of transistor radio? That had to be designed, the company will give it an individual identity, they will also design this as part of a range, and ultimately it will have a corporate identity - so that you can look at the radio and understand who made it and to some extent the values that the manufacturer wishes to portray to the consumer - you might even go as far as saying that this product has a nationalistic identity and with it a set of nationalistic values.
Look at this,
http://www.proteus.jp/MT/archives/images/DSCN2552a.jpg
Not art to you? Yet the way this was designed marks it out immediately as a product by just one company, and you can pretty much look at a range of their other radios, all different and yet still part of the same stable. This particular one is on the cusp between analogue tuning and digital tuning displays - and demonstrates the questions that designers must face when implementing an operational interface. This was the result of decades of research, history, science and yet is already left behind as the world of consumer goods moves on. No aspect of its structure is accidental, it has been thoughtfully conceived however absolutely none of that would matter one jot if it did not appeal to some aesthetic on the part of the consumer.
You are not going to get emotional about some little box of electronics, or perhaps if you did, you might have to get emotional about almost every item you possess - and you haven’t enough of that to go around - so stick up for exclusivity, keep the proles out, flag up your wonderful intellect with an appreciation of indeterminate blobs on a canvass that serves absolutely no useful purpose, and look down on those who see the world differently, more practically - and in this way you can feel comfortable in your manufactured identity, one that allows you to ignore the vast majority of art in the world.
So in this little transistor radio we have history, innovation, research, science and art - what does Pollack have to offer?
ANSWER: Pollock offers art.
There you go. Glad I could help you with that.
So does Sony, Audi, Intel, Apple, and a host of other manufacturers, what makes the difference is in your own head, an image of what art is, and for many art has to be exclusive and keep out the masses - that way the ‘true’ art lover gets to remain special and important - self declared authority and taste, a self construction carefully manufactured with a cloud of obscuring rhetoric to reinforce that superior attitude.
Look around at the manufactured world around you - there is plenty of art there, why don’t you get emotional about it?
We get attached to objects for sentimental reasons - they have history and memory for us - gallery art is just manufactured sentimentality.
I would say that Pollack offers history (his stuff is more than half a century old, after all, and is built on a foundation of other artists’ works and ideas, and is itself a foundation for artists that came after him), innovation (he pioneered his style), science (the fractal quality to his works has been attested to already in this thread), and, of course, art. Research seems a bit redundant in a list that already has both science and innovation, but maybe I’m not quite understanding what you mean by that.
Your hymn to the glories of the transistor radio is very well conceived, and I do not disagree with a word of it. You’re not really breaking new ground, though. The idea is old hat to anyone with a basic grounding in modern art. Duchamp was exploring that territory as early as 1917, and of course, Warhol made his entire career on the concept. It’s kind of ironic that you broke this rant out in an attempt to prove something to a fan of Jackson Pollack, because odds are pretty good that anyone who likes Pollack is already familiar with your argument, and probably sympathetic to it.
As to the idea that you’re missing out because you don’t like Pollack, you shouldn’t take that as an insult. It’s not that there’s something wrong with you for not liking him. But it’s a statement of fact that a lot of people gain significant, unique satisfaction from viewing his paintings. You don’t get that satisfaction. It is not an insult to say that you are missing out on that satisfaction.
That’s interesting, but hardly definitive. Does that make Pollock an artist or a visual savant? To what degree did he envisage his works before he started on them? Is the fractal complexity a result of an artistic vision or simply application of a process? I’m not asking these questions in a loaded manner, I doubt there is a definitive answer, to them or to their importance.
I don’t think “the emperor has no clothes” is a argument worth pursuing. Clearly, many people sincerely respond to his works. I personally find some merit in his other works, but the drip paintings do absolutely nothing for me. They don’t match my sense of aesthetics, for whatever reason. I doubt that appreciation of a Pollock could be learned, it seems like a fundamental issue of taste.
The radio is nice, but it doesn’t grab me in a visually compelling way.
What does Pollock have to offer? His work is beautiful. Maybe you just see drips and splashes, to me his compositions are beautiful. And I saw great beauty in the first Pollock I saw, when I was an 8-or-9 year-old boy, and had literally no idea who Pollock was, about any kind of back story or, in fact, any artistic background at all. I liked it then, and I still like it, because it’s beautiful.
Now, when someone loves a piece of art and I don’t get it, I shrug. Too bad, not for me, not my kind of thing. That’s OK. What I don’t do is argue with them and try to get them to prove to me that whatever it is that they like and I don’t is good art. Because beauty, as you might have heard, is in the eye of the beholder.
It’s not an argument that’s winnable. Tell me, if some shlub tells you that his homely wife is the most beautiful woman in the world, do you argue with him about it, or do you smile and tell him he’s a lucky guy? Because if it’s the first thing, you must get punched in the nose pretty often and I’d have to say you’d deserve it.
You can’t argue taste, it’s a personal thing. You can either accept that some people genuinely like stuff that seems like crap to you, or you can construct some kind of paranoid fantasy about how they don’t really like it and are just pretending to like it to seem cool.
If you genuinely believe that an appreciation of art makes you look cool, then it is no pretence.
How much do you understand about electronics? How much do you know of radio transmission, because it is not just the looks alone, in a similar way to people being interested in the back story of Pollack - the principles and knowledge that are used to ensure a radio will work is a back story of which most most folk have only the slightest awareness - thus they are not equipped to appreciate it.
The thing is, I can quantify the electronic principles behind it, I can demonstrate with some precision how it works and even lay out some of the challenges involved.
With fine art - not so much.
You might argue that art stands on its own merits, but if that is the case, then why is the provenance so important - why should we care one jot about the artist? Why would a perfectly well executed exhibit be worth so much less if the provenance is not established as being from a big name artist? Is not the merit of art that which is in front of you? Or is it the fact that someone bought a similar artefact for a lot of money - is this what art is really about?
Oh … there is so, so much you don’t know about design … .
I don’t see anyone here doing that. No one here is saying that you HAVE to like Pollack, or that you’re a lesser person if you don’t. But what they are saying is that it’s possible to HONESTLY like Pollack. You can like Pollack without being a deluded poseur.
Art exists to structure an aesthetic experience. You look at it and you feel something you wouldn’t have felt otherwise. That’s it’s sole purpose. People like looking at Pollack paintings because they make them feel things.
You seem to believe that non-representational art can’t do that. If I look at the Mona Lisa, I’m looking at a painting of SOMETHING – a particular person. My aesthetic experience is a product of my decoding the blobs of paint into a recognizable object. But what if the blobs of paint don’t decode to anything? How can that possibly produce a meaningful experience?
And so you believe that people are deluded when they say it does.
But if the worth of a piece of art depends on your ability to decode it in a specific way, how to you account for music? A Bach cantata is beautiful in and of itself. It is a glory to listen to, not because it means something, or accomplishes some practical purpose, but because it makes us feel something when we listen to it that we wouldn’t have felt otherwise.
And if Bach can do that with with sounds, why can’t Pollack do it with images?
No, my point was that I like art and I don’t care what the cool kids think about it.
My dad was an electrician, I picked up a little knowledge of that by osmosis. I play electric guitar and bass in a various formats, and have done so for decades. I know enough to rewire a guitar and have done so many times, and I’ve put quite a lot of effort into understanding how guitar pickups work; I’d say I know a lot more about guitar pickups than the average guitarist. I’m quite capable of seeing the beauty in old radios and particularly in valve amplifiers, and I have a better-than-average though far from expert understanding of how they work.
Musical instruments - and that includes things like amplifiers - are certainly things of beauty. But they’re also tools, a means to an end. Music, like painting, is the thing itself. It only exists to be experienced. That’s the point and the value of it.
Well, I don’t think that really matters. Either it looks pretty to you or it doesn’t, and no amount of logical argument is going to change that.
When I first encountered Pollock, I was a child, and a child in an environment that had no interest in fine art. I knew and cared literally nothing about Pollock or fine art in general. What interested me was that I found it visually compelling. I loved to look at it. Now, it’s interesting to find out about art history and the lives of the artists and so on, but it has no effect on whether I like their art or not.
As to why provenance is important to collectors and museums, well, that is an interesting question. A forgery that no-one but a handful of experts can tell from the real thing is, more-or-less, the same as the real thing. Except it didn’t come from the hands of the artist. So, yes, there’s an element of it being a “holy relic” which is a bit nonsensical. But, you know, people don’t always make sense. A good copy might be virtually as “good” as the real thing, but it isn’t the real thing, so it’s really no good at all. People like (for want of a better word) authenticity. And while it doesn’t make sense logically, I personally would not pay good money to go and see “perfect” copies of paintings by great artists, but I would (and regularly do) pay good money to see the real thing. Even though I’ll freely admit that I’m sure I couldn’t consistently pick the difference.
If you want human beings to be consistently logical, I’m afraid you’re out of luck.
Someone mentioned not getting Rothko upthread, and that’s me, too. I don’t dislike his paintings, but they don’t do anything for me. I even sat through the episode of Simon Schawma’s PBS series on art history devoted to Rothko, and I still don’t get it. Nobody had to explain Pollock to me-- there was an instant “wow” from the first painting I saw.
casdave doesn’t get it, therefore everybody who does is a poser.
Got it.
…and of course there is no posing in the art world at all.
Why do we need art critics? Is this to decide what is worthy and what is not.
Is art good because there is a critical mass of the ‘cognoscenti’ who believe it is so.I
Pollacks name should not be important as such, nor any other artist for that matter, it should stand on its own merits.
Why does artwork need to be signed?
What is the real thing? If an object produces the questions we might ask ourselves and the internal reactions then it matters not who is the artist.
Art itself is a tool to produce a response - in that it is a means to an end.
This would be a reasonable argument against nearly any artist, in nearly any medium, except for Pollock. You can demonstrate the underlying principles of a Pollock painting with nearly as much precision as you can the electronic principles of that radio, and with a good deal more precision than most aspects of functional design. Now, you can maybe debate whether the mathematical patterns in a Pollock have inherent worth to them, but they are absolutely, indisputably there, and absolutely, indisputably, very difficult to reproduce, even for skilled and trained artists.
I also think, meanwhile, that just because good functional design can be appreciated, does not necessarily mean that good design is therefore art. For comparison, I have a great deal of appreciation for how the insides of my Mac desktop are laid out, since it makes it very easy to access any component desired, and everything fits together quite efficiently. But it’s not art, precisely because the design is based on functionality. The designers didn’t put it together that way because it would produce an emotional response in the user (which is what defines art); they put it together that way because it works well.
Yet many consumer products are designed to appeal to the emotions, and this is frequently a significant selling point. The look of a product is important such that a company can cease trading altogether if it gets it wrong - you only need look at how design kept apple afloat.
There is no reason why something that serves a useful purpose should not be considered art.
Seems to be a measure that art must be of little practical use for it to qualify as art.
Can a building be art? Well yes and we have seen this many times but somehow this does not translate down to other products, except perhaps for some cars.
Why do you keep talking about industrial design? You’re derailing your own thread to talk about a completely different topic. Pollock didn’t do industrial design. Whether or not a designed object is beautiful or not has nothing to do with the value of Pollock’s work.
Lots of people have a lot of appreciation for design – including, as has already been mentioned, some modern artists. I think design is fascinating and a lot of manufactured objects are very beautiful. But it has literally zero bearing on the artistic merits of Jackson Pollock, since that’s not what he did.
[QUOTE=casdave]
…and of course there is no posing in the art world at all.
[/QUOTE]
Your weird paranoia about posers has no bearing on the fact that some people really do like Pollock’s work, and many of them have attested it here.
We don’t need any kind of critics, but some people like reading what other people have to say about paintings. In the same way that some people like reading what other people have to say about music, or movies, or restaurants, or any other aesthetic item. Part of the reason is probably that some people can decide whether or not a particular exhibition, or movie, or album, or whatever is worth checking out, because they know a particular critic has similar taste. And part of it is just out of an interest in seeing what experiences it evoked in someone else. Hence why people still write about already very well-known paintings (or musical compositions, for that matter).
It’s not as though there’s some standard of what’s “good” or “bad” art. There’s just art that some people like and art that other people like.
That doesn’t make sense at all. Would you apply this standard to anything else? Should bands not put their names on their albums? That’s bizarre. Why shouldn’t someone who likes some of an artist’s work have some way of identifying exhibitions of that artist so they can see more of it? If I like one painting some dude did, why wouldn’t I want to see more? Or should I not have any way to find other albums by a band I like, and other movies by a director I like?
Because people like to get credit for the things they create, especially if those things are popular.
It matters to everyone who wants to go see the artist’s next exhibition, or find out what museums have collections of their work.
It seems weird to have to explain such obvious things.