Art critics love to be duped, though. How else can you explain Manzoni pricing his canned feces by its weight in gold? I truly believe that was the whole point of his work.
But here is the best part:
Alright, I had to look up “recondite,” but other than that, that was a pretty straightforward (and insightful) post. What part of it did you find unclear?
Considering that I’ve heard a preference for landscape pictures over modern “art” blamed on “White Western Imperialism”, not really.
Here’s a question for you sad pustules that aren’t even together enough in your thinking about art to be an inflamed hemorrhoid on a fat man’s pimple-ridden ass, if it’s so easy to deceive the public and critics into thinking rubbish is art and thereby make many millions: why aren’t you doing it? Get thee hence. Use a pseudonym if you must. Show us how it’s done.
Oh, right. You suck. Sorry about your pointless, mediocre lives. I hope railing against the Evil Cabal for the Promotion of Art that Makes You Feel Inadequate and Irritable makes you feel a little less pathetic. Or, if you’re really motivated, maybe you can infiltrate the ECPAMYFII and subvert it from the inside, and thereby save civilization [del]millions[/del] a piddling small amount of cash! That’s the ticket. Go! In the name of humanity!
Der Trihs, since you know so much, you fucking pillock, kindly point me to the headquarters of the Conspiracy. You know, so I can join up and spend my life making you feel stupid. Oh, wait, I can do that just by waking up in the morning. Idiot.
Cute. The first sentence states that the message is clear and then the rest of the paragraph descends into more and more esoteric theoretical thoughts, seemingly counter to the first sentence’s brazen declaration of clarity. Except the message is right there in the second sentence. That’s the message of the piece and it sounds, based on the description of the actual piece to, indeed, be fairly obvious. The rest is a rumination on contrasts between this work and other works and why the writer thinks this one is more powerful than other similar works. If he thought everything in that paragraph was self-evident, he’d have had no reason to write it as anyone could have gleaned as much from simply viewing the piece.
I don’t know.
What I do know, is that as soon as someone draws a line in the sand with “past this line, There Can be No Art,” someone, maybe with great vision and imagination or maybe not, will sooner or later make a bold stride straight over it.
Being unclear is not the issue, it’s the fact that it’s such pretentious twaddle. It’s like one of those “generate a mission statement” websites.
Because I have ethical standards that preclude doing so, and wouldn’t find that kind of fake acclaim satisfying anyway.
See, this is just another example of what I’m talking about. It’s all about a self appointed elite trying to convince itself it is superior. We are mediocre; they are brilliant and talented. And if we fail to see that brilliance, it’s because we are such plebeian lumps, not because it doesn’t exist.
What “headquarters”? It’s a subcultural trend, not some cabal.
Isn’t that lucky.
The entire concept of ‘art’ is a shifting, contingent mass of a concept cluster that has no fixed definitive meaning through time and across places. Its differentiation from ‘craft’, ‘techne’, ethnographic artifacts, driftwood, etc etc etc etc is suggested solely by a bundle of loaded, culturally generated, non-universal notions, largely determined by a European intellectual culture that believed in a universal concept of beauty, for example, among other fantastically contingent constructions and discourses. At this place and time one sort of what we commonly–but not universally agree to-- call art happens to be of an avant garde experimental mode that is meant more for a specialized market and for the consideration of like-minded artists and critics than it is for everyman. Don’t take it personally.
Am I supposed to feel insulted?
Well, Der Trihs, to no one’s great surprise, you’ve managed to miss the point on two levels. Firstly, the fact that someone you knew once made a bizarre statement about race, doesn’t justify a second, entirely unrelated statement about race. Secondly, my point was that sh1bu1 was trying to make modern art out to be something particular to white people - when a more reasonable (although not one I personally agree with) racial criticism of the contemporary art establishment would be that it goes too far in the other direction, prizing non-white artist simply for being non-white. A position which your counter anecdote supports.
To the contrary, it’s a direct and devastating rebuttal to one of the central misconceptions on which you’ve constructed your entire argument.
Also, sh1bu1 re: John Knight’s work, note this sentence from that critique: “when he turned from Minimalism and Conceptualism to work that specifically challenged the art system and its conditions.” In other words, not really relevant to the point I was making.
Riiiiiight. Cop out. Use a pseudonym. Whatever.
You demonstrate plebeian lumpitude pretty fucking well. If you were slightly more sophisticated, you would just say, “that art sucks.” Slightly more, you might say, “that art does nothing for me, and I would never spend a dime on it.” Even more, and you might try to devote enough time to supporting and collecting art to influence the direction of at least some significant artistic venue and get that venue to avoid the art you think is of no value.
But only a plebeian lump with the artistic understanding of fuzzy, brown goo in the corner of a roadside public restroom takes the step of “ZOMG! It’s not and can never be art!” That step makes you an idiot.
You said there was a conspiracy, dipshit. You can mockingly refer to a conspiracy, I can mockingly refer its headquarters. Get it?
I agree. The review is a bit above my head, I admit - I might be able to follow it better if I’d seen the display itself - but it’s not written for a general audience: it’s specifically written for people with a strong grounding in art theory and history, and uses specialized language familiar to a specialized audience. It’s no different from what you might find in a forum dedicated to law, or medicine, or auto racing, or Dungeons and Dragons. Lots of specialized jargon to discuss minutia that’s only of interest to people deeply involved in the field. That doesn’t meant the art itself is inaccessible to a general audience. Indeed, from what I can find about it on the internet, the installation appears to be neither minimalist nor particularly conceptual: it apparently revolves around the contrast between distinct, recognizable images, which is a fairly conventional artistic technique.
Apologies in advance if I’m wrong, but I guessing this was addressed to me. In response, I would merely refer you back to Creed’s Work No. 867. If I’m understanding your perspective correctly, that piece is worthy of being called “art” purely by virtue of the fact that it is possible in principle for an observer to divine a unique insight from it. If that’s the case, then the fact that a performance piece like mine has already been done better by other people shouldn’t be a barrier to its inclusion in any modern art gallery.
But isn’t this kind of a circular argument? Take Creed’s Work No. 867, for instance. By framing a crumpled ball of paper inside the minimalist wing of a prestigious art gallery, he is certainly encouraging observers to form a different relationship to it than they would in everyday life. I’ll happily concede that much. But if that alone is all that is necessary for an object, any object, to be labelled as “art” it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there’s a lot of stuff on display which is in a gallery because it’s art, but is only art because it’s in an art gallery. In which case any of the stuff on my desk would be equally deserving of that spot. But we all know that if I tried to swap that bit of paper for my deck of playing cards - hell, if I even tried to swap it for another bit of crumpled white paper - I’d get in a lot of trouble. But why? What’s the difference? Why wouldn’t any object I replace that bit of paper with be equally as artistic? Equally as deserving? In what way would it be incapable of eliciting a different flavour of this exact same response, this warping of perspective?
It seems to me that if what you’re saying is true, then far from us debating what is art, the artistic establishment should be telling us what *isn’t[/] art, and why.
My suspicion, is that the only reason they haven’t done this, is because it would lead to a conversation they don’t want to have, whe
Now, lest you get the wrong idea of what I’m about, I want to make it clear that I’ve only ever come across a select few “works” that I would not call art. I like going to art galleries and I’ll freely confess that I’m baffled by a lot of the stuff I see. However, I don’t doubt the artistic merit of the works I don’t understand. Take Dali’s Lobster Telephone, for instance. I don’t get it. Probably never will. But it’s clearly been created for some non-utilitarian purpose and, no matter where you put it, some would find it interesting, thought provoking, aesthetically pleasing, or whatever. Same with the Kippenburger piece which inspired this thread. You could never say something like that about No. 867.
If this is true, it does seem rather circular to me. Given the immense variety and scope of modern art, I find it difficult to understand how any gallery owner could justify the exclusion of any piece.
No, it’s art if someone says it’s art, not because someone might say it’s art. You are absolutely free to perform your piece and I wish you the best of luck. I would not be interested in attending a performance, however because I doubt that you would be able to wring anything all that interesting from it. Others may have other opinions and that’s fine.
Somehow, I accidentally deleted the end of this sentence. It should read:
“My suspicion, is that the only reason they haven’t done this, is because it would lead to a conversation they don’t want to have, where they have to justify the inclusion of Creed’s work at the expense of something else.”