I think it’s pretty clear that a blank sheet of paper or a can of my own shit are not a book.
I don’t take accusations of being a philistine very seriously from people I already regard as silly. But then I’ve always had dangerously high levels of self-esteem. And all the beanie baby collectors I know treat it as serious business so
I’d say it’s too narrow in the sense that you seem to equate art with pushing boundaries, which would exclude many if not most art works that are created each year, and too broad in the sense that you consider blank sheets of paper and cans of shit to be art. So there is no particular reason to confine yourself to only one way in which your are wrong.
You don’t seem to understand what “ethical” means. Robbing a bank doesn’t suddenly stop violating your ethics because you wear a balaclava. And it’s not a cop out, it’s the basis of the whole problem: Der Trihs would not consider himself to be making art, he would be trying to trick people into believing something he himself does not. When all his effort is going into trying to trick people into putting it in an art gallery instead of the creation of art he is not an artist, but a con artist.
Me, I’ll stick to the landscapes and pin-ups. Even when they don’t get much attention, at least I’m happy to have created them.
Complaining about what is and isn’t art, is in itself a form of art.
I already backed off on the idea that art must be about pushing boundaries. I admit that was an over-reach. And, of course, it was something I said well after you asserted that my position was too narrow. It’s also worth noting that the only comment I’ve made on the blank sheet of paper was to note that it was a boring cliche. So, yes, “art.” But “pushing boundaries,” no. Again, it would be helpful if you would read my posts before responding to them, as you have once again assigned two contradictory interpretations to my arguments in the same post.
Actually I do know what it means, you condescending crumblet of excrement.
Deliberately creating art that is rubbish to sell to people is hardly comparable to robbing a bank, or even to similar in any sense to con artists. If someone thinks a piece of art presented to them as it is is worth something, there’s nothing morally or ethically wrong with selling it to them for what they think it’s worth, regardless of whether you do. Con artists sell things that are concretely not what they present them as (for example, claiming a painting is a Picasso when it isn’t). Rubbish art (in the examples given) was not anything other than what it was presented as. So you are totally fucking wrong. There is no deceit. It’s not therefore not a con.
Besides, if any artist has actually been able to make a living doing this deliberately, I’d like to see a cite for that. No, doing it once doesn’t count. Regardless, it’s a very, VERY tiny percentage of artists that do this, if any. The overwhelming majority of artists take what they do extremely seriously, and you know that. If you don’t know that, than this is proof that your opinion on the subject is totally lacking validity.
Der Trihs’s mendacious statement about ethics is a cop out, because he knows he doesn’t have anything like the talent to succeed as an artist, whether honestly (like 99.9% of them) or fraudulently (less than 1%, if any.) Saying “I won’t do it because I’m too honest” is crap. If you honestly present your rubbish art as it is, no deception, and someone wants to pay $$$ for it, it’s not a con.
Basically, this con-artist idea of artists is a totally fucking strawman.
By the way, art has absolutely always pushed various boundaries, and as long as there has been discussion about art, there has been controversy about it as well. I.e., what suitable subjects are, what are acceptable means of presenting the subject, etc., going back to the ancient Greeks. If you don’t know this, then your knowledge of art history is crap and you have no business involving yourself in a discussion about art.
Really? Then let’s see you sell this sort of garbage to someone, without resorting to deception.
Because I know succeeding as artist (whether a pillock like you thinks they’re legitimate or fraudulent) is way fucking harder than the philistines in this thread would lead one to believe.
I’m an artist of a very different sort, anyway: I’m a professional musician.
How about we go with the musical equivalent then: do you believe that not playing an instrument for four minutes and thirty-three seconds is difficult?
I say any idiot could do that, as long as he doesn’t drool on himself too loudly.
Actually, it’s pretty challenging, if you do it in a concert hall with a live audience and try to really sell it. A idiot would utterly fail at it. Most people couldn’t sit still with the audience watching/laughing/giggling/mocking for so long, or even if the audience was thoughtful and well-behaved. To go further and really set up a situation where the ambient sound really is to listened to as music, as John Cage intended, that’s a pretty tricky thing for a performer to do. I’m not saying it’s a difficult as, say, performing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. But it ain’t easy. And for it to really work, the performer has to have credibility as a musician already.
John Cage, for the record, was absolutely a genius on multiple levels. 4’33" wasn’t a joke, and it wasn’t a con. It’s not his best piece, either, by a long shot (not sure how you’d evaluate it except for its success at spurring conversation/debate), but I understand why he did it.
It appears that some of the posters here get their idea of The Current Art Scene from reading about the latest scandalous exhibit to make headlines. Do they ever actually go out & see what’s in the galleries? Houston ain’t Manhattan, but we’ve got a pretty busy art scene. There are, actually landscapes & still lifes (still lives?) selling at some of the well-respected venues. And less representational work that still shows skill & wit.
Do I like everything? No. But I just pass on to the next show…
One of the highlights from the most recent Art Car Parade–viewed by thousands every year!
Art may push boundaries, but art does not *need * to push boundaries to be art, and pushing boundaries does not make canned shit, blank pieces of paper, and giving birth art.
Who said that it did?
Apparently, it does: at least in a few, unusual cases that only a complete fucking moron would extrapolate as representing all of modern art.
Speaking for myself, yes I do. The sorts of things we have been discussing are extreme examples and do not represent what most artists do or most galleries display. I’m sure that many of you are convinced that anyone who can not see the artistic merit of craptapular conceptual art must not be able to appreciate any art at all, but that is no more true than saying that you can’t appreciate music if you don’t think that the sound of jackhammers is music.
I am deeply skeptical that you could tell the difference between a truly talented musician not making a sound and an untalented one not making a sound. And here is the key point:
This is the point at which people stop becoming art consumers and instead become cattle. “No, I don’t understand it either Martha, but John Cage is famous so it must be good”.
These arguments make me angry in a way that is matched only by arguments with language prescritivists. There is just a certain type of person who simply cannot tolerate how whimsical, ineffable, and fluid this thing we call communication and language is (and art is both). They feel compelled to crush this beauty, to pin it down, and to reduce it to code. I especially like the bit in the linked thread about Greek columns being a direct function of our lizard brains, as if we are simply machines responding mechanically to stimulation.
And we might be, but we are infinitely complicated, crazy, transformative, beautiful machines. We create art- good art, bad art, fake art, all kinds of art- and we respond to art. And it’s all whimsical, ineffable, fluid communication that makes our human experience all the richer.
One thing that seems to hang people up is money and galleries. The money and the exposure in galleries is not so much about the art itself, as much as the work of art as an artifact of the history of art. Museums choose pieces that represent new ideas, or present things in a new way, that adds to the language of art. Museums are documenting and preserving a moment in human thought, and while an individual piece may quickly grow irrelevant artistically, but still be valued for what it means in the history of art. This is why, for example, Monet’s paintings are highly valued- even the pretty clumsy ones- while your Aunt Ida’s very nice and skilled Impressionist style paintings she made in the 70s are not. Monet’s paintings are valuable because the document that time when Western art was reaching away from representation- a very key moment in art. You Aunt Ida’s paintings don’t.
This is also why your “I can do that” ideas don’t work. Unless you actually manage to present a new idea (and intent doesn’t really matter- the monkey that accidentally writes Hamlet still wrote a good play) you are aren’t going to do it.
I don’t see what is so wrong with art that uses a specialized language. I think we forget how versed we are in language. If you show a photograph to an adult who has never seen a photograph, they will not understand what they are looking at and may not be able to identify what the photograph is of (anthropologists have done this.) Does this make you an elitist for taking vacation pictures? Every field, even (especially?) sciences quickly gets out of the realm of the easily-understood and immediately-applicable and gets pretty esoteric. Should they shut down the Large Hadron Collider because I don’t really understand what the hell they are looking for or how whatever they are looking for relates to anything?
Someone using your name apparently, and he is pretty sure because he used “absolutely” and “always”.
Which seems to be exactly what art experts are doing. They are taking a somewhat undefinable sense of art that all of us have, and crushing that sense under a level of prescriptivist mumbo jumbo so that only through their mercurial interpretation can we know what is and isn’t art. The quotes from experts I pulled in previous posts are to me an example of people “compelled to crush this beauty, to pin it down, and to reduce it to code”. My Aunt Ida, on the other hand, simply judges art based on the emotional and aesthetic connection it stirs in her.