# Like stupid and pompous idiots, who try to define and limit what art is. **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [November 5, 2011, 11:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008 "2011-11-05T23:33:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 16
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 3:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008/301 "2011-11-08T15:43:20Z")
> [@tdn](#): > > Bolding mine. > > Looks like you’ve been outsmarted by complete buffoons. Bah, read it as “without a reason,” or “and we ignore it for a reason.” as you prefer. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 3:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008/302 "2011-11-08T15:51:59Z")
Whoops: I cut this off and then lost my editing window. I would argue that modern art (yes, in the technical sense of the style of the modern period) started going down a bad road, although it took a long time to get there and had a wild ride with plenty of ups and downs along the way. It has finally reached the end of its existence: art which doesn’t exist. The lack of art being praised. And quite naturally, people responded by simply ignoring and outright laughing at it, which naturally pissed off the artists who saw themselves as the avant-garde. Unfortuantely, they got turned around are now _behind_ the curve. They reduced art to nothing, and then seem shocked when people called them out for creating nothing. You can in a way see the steady decline aliong the way. Artists tried to strip out everything unnecccessary, with the eventual result that they cut out the art as well. Still, there was a lot of fertile creation - I even think Dada is funny if a overdone. But it’s over. It’s done. People eventually minimalized their art so much that they lost the ability to make art. The new leading - by which I mean that they are leading somewhere productive - artists are quite different, retro but not, and you probably won’t see them in a high-priced art gallery any time soon. I’ve seen some truly brilliant collections simply hanging on the walls of my university. Right now, there’s a show of a single photographer who manages to take photopgraphs with more color than I thought existed, and who arranges his compositions with a truly blessed eye. ---
**Author:** ![Gyrate](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gyrate/32/3588_2.png) [@Gyrate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gyrate)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 3:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008/303 "2011-11-08T15:58:02Z")
> [@Malthus](#): > > And here’s the problem with most of this art - a problem that the sterile “it’s art/no it isn’t” debate tends to mask - and that is, art or not, the point was made long ago and repetition does not improve upon it. > > Whether “art” or not, it is old news. The sad fact it is old news that keeps being recycled. It is the equivalent of the 19th century “academy” art that guys like the impressionists were rebelling against. > > For art that relies on its shock value, on its originality, this is deadly. Being forced to pay homage to dead art making a point repeatedly made already is stultifying. I keep re-reading this and I’m not sure which part of my post it is in response to. > [@](#): > > The question is: why cannot art move on? Of course some artists do, and have, but the “high art” appears to have fossilized currently - on which can be blamed the increasing academization of art, which is now more a product of celebrity-struck academic study than intuitive appreciation. Remove the name from the work and no-one cares about it - it is thus the name, rather than the work, which is the true focus of ‘art appreciation’. Move on to what? Artists and composers continue to make new works, in their own styles. There isn’t an assembly line of people cranking out new works consisting of the audience listening to itself. Cage made the point, and it’s been made. With the possible exception of Mike Batt no one needs to make it again. > [@](#): > > It is similar to the concept in Zen of students earnestly going through the rigamarole of Zen practice without grasping enlightenment. Much of modern art aspires to be in effect koans in visual or aural media - but koans where everyone already knows the purpose - and thus useless for actually attaining enlightenment, as they cannot shock the mind out of complacency. I agree. At this point any performance is pretty much just for audiences to see what it’s like, what the musician does, what the other members of the audience do. It is a curiosity. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done properly. > [@](#): > > This isn’t some unique new thing, a similar stultification in art ableit for very different reasons was experienced in the 19th century. With this difference: the 19th century academic artists had at least the skill to paint pretty pictures. Cage produced a goodly amount of skilled music in his time, despite his fame for this particular novelty piece. I’ve sung some of it. Who are we talking about? ---
**Author:** ![Polerius](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/d78d45/32.png) [@Polerius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polerius)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 4:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008/304 "2011-11-08T16:11:51Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > It has finally reached the end of its existence: art which doesn’t exist. The lack of art being praised. Beautifully put. \This reminds me of a “game” I played with my daughter once. In a children’s cartoon an older character said things like “When _I_ was a boy, we didn’t have phones”. He said it so often that my daughter and I started to exaggerate to see who could outdo him. So we started down the path “When _I_ was a boy, we didn’t have houses” -\> “When _I_ was a boy, we didn’t have cities” -\> “When _I_ was a boy, there were no humans” -\> “When _I_ was a boy, there was no Earth” -\> “When _I_ was a boy, there was no Universe” -\> “When _I_ was a boy, there was no Existence” It was a silly little game between me and my young daughter, but the point is that we reached a point where we could go no more. It’s as if artists started down a similar game and ended up in a similar spot, with the definition of art as the target of the game. And, as **smiling bandit** said, it has finally reached the end of its existence: art which doesn’t exist.\ ---
**Author:** ![Polerius](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/d78d45/32.png) [@Polerius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polerius)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 4:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008/305 "2011-11-08T16:20:51Z")
> [@Gyrate](#): > > I remember the first time I saw a painting by Alexander Calder - a few circles and lines, artfully arranged - and said to my mother “I could have done that.” And she said “Yes - but you didn’t. He did.” Of all the defenses of modern art, the most inane one is the “yes, but you didn’t, he did”. People have to realize that there a _billions_ of things that haven’t been done yet: [ul] [li]Put a paperclip in a watermelon that is hanging above a roasted duck[/li][li]Cut exactly 769 squares out of a piece of paper[/li][li]Stick bacon to a bicycle wheel and use it as a hat[/li][li]…[/li][/ul] The list goes on and on and on. It is endless Just because something hasn’t been done before does not mean that it is worth doing, or that the person who first thought of it and did it should be praised for it. Stop using the “yes, but you didn’t, he did” defense for works of art. It actually denigrates the work if you can’t find anything better to say about it than that. ---
**Author:** ![tdn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/94ad74/32.png) [@tdn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tdn)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 4:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008/306 "2011-11-08T16:23:34Z")
It’s been done, it needed doing, and I think now we’re seeing a return to more conventional forms. I spend a lot of time in galleries, and representational art is by far what I see the most. Partly because that’s where the real money is. Despite what some skeptics say, artists are not making a boatload of money selling crumpled up paper. ---
**Author:** ![Gyrate](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gyrate/32/3588_2.png) [@Gyrate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gyrate)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 4:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008/307 "2011-11-08T16:26:52Z")
> [@Polerius](#): > > Stop using the “yes, but you didn’t, he did” defense for works of art. It actually denigrates the work if you can’t find anything better to say about it than that. Hey, I love Calder’s art. I find it aesthetically beautiful and moving. That was entirely not the point. > [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > The new leading - by which I mean that they are leading somewhere productive - artists are quite different, retro but not, and you probably won’t see them in a high-priced art gallery any time soon. I’ve seen some truly brilliant collections simply hanging on the walls of my university. Right now, there’s a show of a single photographer who manages to take photopgraphs with more color than I thought existed, and who arranges his compositions with a truly blessed eye. The exploration of “non-art” as “art” was always doomed to be a dead end. It doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have been explored. **smiling bandit** , have you seen the works of Grayson Perry or Anish Kapoor? There are artists doing new and interesting works replete with technical craftsmanship - thoughtprovoking yet accessible. The conceptualists are not running the shop; they just get all the press. Even Dale Chihuly continues to crank out beautiful things. ---
**Author:** ![Frylock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 4:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008/308 "2011-11-08T16:28:08Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > The new leading - by which I mean that they are leading somewhere productive - artists are quite different, retro but not, and you probably won’t see them in a high-priced art gallery any time soon. I’ve seen some truly brilliant collections simply hanging on the walls of my university. Right now, there’s a show of a single photographer who manages to take photopgraphs with more color than I thought existed, and who arranges his compositions with a truly blessed eye. The stuff you’re seeing hanging on the galleries at Universities _is_ part of the leading edge of contemporary art. You’re seeing the work of the next generation of established art-house artists. And what you describe is exactly in keeping with what I’ve read here and there is sort of the “next thing” in contemporary art.\* “Craftmanship is back” is a slogan I’ve seen repeated in several places. \*Contemporary art is, of course, pretty damn diverse, so this is a gross oversimplification. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008/309 "2011-11-08T16:33:09Z")
> [@Gyrate](#): > > The exploration of “non-art” as “art” was always doomed to be a dead end. It doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have been explored. That’s where I disagree. Once it was no longer about the art, it had reached its end. I think that was about twenty years ago at least. > [@](#): > > **smiling bandit** , have you seen the works of Grayson Perry or Anish Kapoor? Not in person, I’m afraid. What irritates me about the conceptual artists is a matter of two things: first, the successful ones get paid a fortune for jacking off. Second, they take away attention from the really brilliant artists. I tend to feel the same way about Architecture these days. People who do beautiful buildings which work as are ignored in favor of craptacular “starchitects” like I. M. Pei or Libeskind both of whom made some really interesting and dashing buildings to launch their careers - and should have bloody well stopped there. ---
**Author:** ![Steophan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steophan/32/9595_2.png) [@Steophan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steophan)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 4:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008/310 "2011-11-08T16:35:36Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > I don’t care what shuffling sounds people make. I hear them all the time. I don’t need some overpaid hack to tell me about them at length. No, you don’t hear them all the time. You _ignore_ them all the time, and it takes either a composer like Cage, or deliberate meditation (Cage was a Buddhist, so there’s an obvious connection here), to make you _hear_ them. If you don’t care to hear them, fair enough. But it shouldn’t be such an insult to you that other people do. As to the question of whether 4’33’’ is music, I possess plenty of music which consists of deliberately created sound without rhythm, melody or harmony. It’s hardly new, controversial, or rare. The thing with 4’33’’ is that it exists only as a piece of music - that is, either as the score or performance. It is not simply someone listening to ambient noise for that period of time - it is one or more musicians, in a concert hall, with an audience, following the score for the set time periods. The score, as I should hope is obvious, is not blank. At the _very_ least, that is a musical performance. I hope this makes it clear that, if you coincidentally observe some silence, for all or part of four minutes and thirty three seconds, you have no more listened 4’33’’ than you would have listened to the start of Beethoven’s 5th if you happen to hear a particular rhythmic pattern. You’ve just heard something that coincidentally sounds similar. ---
**Author:** ![fachverwirrt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/94ad74/32.png) [@fachverwirrt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fachverwirrt)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 4:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008/311 "2011-11-08T16:36:03Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > That’s where I disagree. Once it was no longer about the art, it had reached its end. I think that was about twenty years ago at least. What exactly is “it” in this statement? ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 4:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008/312 "2011-11-08T16:49:23Z")
[quote=“Gyrate, post:303, topic:602008”] I keep re-reading this and I’m not sure which part of my post it is in response to. I’m mostly agreeing with what you wrote here: > [@](#): > > That’s because you’re discussing the piece almost sixty years after it was written. For its time it was shockingly radical and forced audiences to rethink what they hear around them and how they think of music. Six decades on we’ve grasped the idea and moved on. It’s New Age-y now because the ideas that people like Cage (and Riley and Glass and others) were experimenting with in the 1950s have gone from shocking to conventional and in some instances to mass-marketed glurge. I’m simply expanding on it and making a general point: and that is, the point of such art (not thinking of Cage alone here) is to shock the mind out of complaceny by providing it with something unexpected that causes the mind of the audience to re-examine its preconceptions, whether about art, music or the nature of perception itself. However, once it’s been done, it’s been done. It was done 60 years ago, and arguably much longer in the case of visual arts. Art that relies on this sort of shock no longer “works” when it is expected, anticipated, or worse required. > [@](#): > > Move on to what? Artists and composers continue to make new works, in their own styles. There isn’t an assembly line of people cranking out new works consisting of the audience listening to itself. Cage made the point, and it’s been made. With the possible exception of Mike Batt no one needs to make it again. And therein lies the problem - admittedly moreso for visual arts than for music, where the limits of the obvious have been reached far sooner. The problem being that much of the “new” strongly resembles the “old”. > [@](#): > > I agree. At this point any performance is pretty much just for audiences to see what it’s like, what the musician does, what the other members of the audience do. It is a curiosity. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done properly.Cage produced a goodly amount of skilled music in his time, despite his fame for this particular novelty piece. I’ve sung some of it. Who are we talking about? It isn’t a slam on Cage per se, but a commentary on much that is deplorably imitative and repetitious in modern art generally. The person who does it _first_ is immune from such a critique. The problem is that, to use your former example, someone doing a circle on canvas may have done it 'first", it is not _conceptually_ different from someone who (say) did a square on canvas. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 4:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008/313 "2011-11-08T16:49:42Z")
> [@Steophan](#): > > No, you don’t hear them all the time. You _ignore_ them all the time, and it takes either a composer like Cage, or deliberate meditation (Cage was a Buddhist, so there’s an obvious connection here), to make you _hear_ them. If you don’t care to hear them, fair enough. But it shouldn’t be such an insult to you that other people do. yes, we do. We hear them and then dismiss them for a reason - because they’re irrelevant and meaningless. I am suddenly reminded of an old skit on Family Guy, back when it was good. ‘News at 11: Scientists ask, “Can Bees think?” A new study suggests that no, they cannot.’ In short, it makes a better punchline than art. > [@](#): > > I hope this makes it clear that, if you coincidentally observe some silence, for all or part of four minutes and thirty three seconds, you have no more listened 4’33’’ than you would have listened to the start of Beethoven’s 5th if you happen to hear a particular rhythmic pattern. You’ve just heard something that coincidentally sounds similar. Holy hell is that stupid. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Hamster\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8edcca/32.png) [@The\_Hamster\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Hamster_King)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 4:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008/314 "2011-11-08T16:56:31Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > Holy hell is that stupid. No. It’s spot on. A musical performance is more than just a sequence of notes, and many forms of music (not just 4’33) don’t make sense if you try to reduce them to that. ---
**Author:** ![Steophan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steophan/32/9595_2.png) [@Steophan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steophan)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 4:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008/315 "2011-11-08T16:59:40Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > Holy hell is that stupid. No, it isn’t. The only thing stupid appears to be you, as even after a clear explanation of something that should be self-evident, you _still_ don’t get it. 4’33’’ is not just over four and a half minutes of silence. I explained exactly what it is in my last post. If you don’t like it, that’s fine. If you don’t understand it, you shouldn’t be allowed out of the house unsupervised. ---
**Author:** ![tdn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/94ad74/32.png) [@tdn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tdn)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 5:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008/316 "2011-11-08T17:10:41Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > yes, we do. We hear them and then dismiss them for a reason - because they’re irrelevant and meaningless. > > (snip) > > Holy hell is that stupid. You’re not exactly coming off as intelligent yourself here. Background noise is anything but irrelevent and meaningless. It’s a reminder that we are alive, in the here and now. It means that we are not numbing ourselves to life, but living it. It’s a way of waking up. It’s a path to wisdom. Dimissing it as stupid, is, well, stupid. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 5:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008/317 "2011-11-08T17:32:37Z")
> [@Steophan](#): > > No, it isn’t. The only thing stupid appears to be you, as even after a clear explanation of something that should be self-evident, you _still_ don’t get it. 4’33’’ is not just over four and a half minutes of silence. I explained exactly what it is in my last post. If you don’t like it, that’s fine. If you don’t understand it, you shouldn’t be allowed out of the house unsupervised. Yeah, you can hear the audience sit there uncomfortably, and maybe someone getting up to whizz. I can do better by listening to the people walking outside every day. The difference is that I’m not gullible enough to buy a ticket to an auditorium to listen to it. If Cage wanted to include moemnts of silence, I’m all for it. But it does not stand on its own and cannot stand on its own. It must be massaged and messaged. Were it much, much shorter, and even then only in a specific place and time, it might (repeat, might) be quite useful. But to pretend it’s some great work _is_ pretentious bullshit. The problem is that you’ve taking it out of context. It isn’t music and it says nothing through musically. It is quite literally _anti-music_. And even if it were music it would be bad music, since it apparently relies on everything except music to make its point, which is a sign of a rather poor composer. Even the worst opera would never dare to do the same. > [@](#): > > Background noise is anything but irrelevent and meaningless. It’s a reminder that we are alive, in the here and now. It means that we are not numbing ourselves to life, but living it. It’s a way of waking up. It’s a path to wisdom. I’ve always had a warning siren in my mind, which activates when I’m being sold a load of bullshit. This thread has managed to officially break it. It’s forlornly fallen off and lies shattered on the pavement. Fuckin’ A! The path to wisdom? That’s how you defend it? And emotional conenction with the people around us? Well, I think you just implicitly admitted it doesn’t qualify as music. ---
**Author:** ![tdn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/94ad74/32.png) [@tdn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tdn)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008/318 "2011-11-08T17:40:14Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > Well, I think you just implicitly admitted it doesn’t qualify as music. I was talking about background noise in general. But hey, if you don’t want to get it, none of us can make you. ---
**Author:** ![Polerius](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/d78d45/32.png) [@Polerius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polerius)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 5:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008/319 "2011-11-08T17:49:42Z")
> [@tdn](#): > > Background noise is anything but irrelevent and meaningless. It’s a reminder that we are alive, in the here and now. It means that we are not numbing ourselves to life, but living it. It’s a way of waking up. It’s a path to wisdom. It may be all those things. That doesn’t make it music. ---
**Author:** ![tdn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/94ad74/32.png) [@tdn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tdn)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008/320 "2011-11-08T17:51:00Z")
> [@Polerius](#): > > It may be all those things. That doesn’t make it music. Even when it’s in a musical context? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008.md?page=15) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/like-stupid-and-pompous-idiots-who-try-to-define-and-limit-what-art-is/602008.md?page=17)