I have to agree with Weston and njtt. I’m not an artist myself, but I do have more than a few artists in my family–some contemporary artists, no less–and I’ve been making the argument for years that art that relies on context isn’t real art.
I mean, really, if something is only “art” because it’s in a gallery, the art isn’t the object but instead the act of “recontextualisation”, which is just a massive scam and circle-jerk. Watch Stephen Colbert’s “Art Odyssey” series and tell me a pair of overalls and a paint roller can still be called art if they’re outside the confines of a gallery.
This is not like the LHC because there’s nothing to “understand”. It’s utter mediocrity parading as sophistication.
Again, your failure to understand art criticism is almost total. The only difference between the critics you quoted earlier, and your Aunt Ida, is that the critic is able to describe, in detail, the nature of their emotional and aesthetic connection to the work in question.
I absolutely disagree. The art experts are putting the piece into a historical perspective and providing an intellectual basis for appreciating it. My Aunt Ida is going to say whether she thinks it is attractive, makes her feel happy or sad or joyous, and whether it will go with her couch. None of those are important to the art critic or historian.
I’m just surprised that this is an issue. It’s been tested. People intentionally make stuff that is completely random, having a child paint it, have an elephant do it, even have a computer do it, and then claim it as art, and then watch to see people interpreting crap that isn’t there.
Is there modern art that’s still art? Sure. But a lot of it is bullshit as indicated by the fact that it wouldn’t be art if you weren’t told it was art. The results are in, and the people who recognized the bullshit were right. There really is no longer any debate–just people who deny the truth.
Oh, and 4’33" was a stunt. It’s art, but it’s not music. It’s a performance piece designed to subvert audience expectations. It makes a statement about music, expectations, and the artist.
But, here’s the thing: it also means that any further attempts at silence for art’s sake are not art. It’s been done. The point’s been made. Even future performances are usually gimmicks.
If an artist drew something on paper just to point out that everyone will call it art when he did no work, that would be art. Drawing and pretending like it says something it doesn’t, and then have other people do the same thing? Sorry, that’s not art. There’s real modern art out there, but this isn’t it. Art is not art just because you call it such and make up an explanation to go with it. It must have meaning inherent.
No. The purpose of the LHC isn’t to get a reaction out of you, it’s to get a reaction out of the universe. It was built to increase humanity’s understanding of the objective truths of the universe.
Yeah, yeah. Another gotcha that simply illustrates that you don’t understand the position you’re trying to undercut. Artist intent doesn’t matter. This holds even if the artist is a child, a machine, or an animal. All that matters is the viewers reaction to the work.
Wrong again. This is, in fact, the position that this sort of art is specifically refuting. The idea of putting something like Duchamp’s fountain, or Creed’s piece of paper, in a gallery does not exalt the idea of a gallery, it destroys it. It argues against the gallery as the determiner of artistic worth, and instead puts forward a populist view of art, as something that humans produce constantly and instinctively, that we are so immersed in on a daily basis that we don’t even see it anymore.
If originality is a necessary prerequisite for something being art, you’ve just argued that vast majority of the world’s art museums out of existence, classical and modern alike.
If someone tries to do 4’33" again, they may be tedious, but tedious is not the antonym of art.
This presumes that meaning has any external validity beyond social consensus. We’re not talking about math or physics, here. Things only mean what we say they mean. If an artist creates something, and assigns a meaning to it, and at least one other person agrees with that meaning, that meaning exists, at least between those two people.
Now that I think of it, one result of the prevalence of modern art is that I now respect craftsmanship a whole lot more. Craftsmanship is the product of talent, knowledge and effort, human qualities I greatly admire. Craftsmanship is a celebration of the human capacity for greatness. Art? What the fuck is art? Anything can be art, which means that nothing is.
Which is why I think we should stop referring to people like Michaelangelo, Rembrandt and Van Gogh with the empty title of “artists”, and instead refer to them as what they were… master craftsmen.
If art depends entirely on the viewer’s reaction to it- why automatically discount the response of ‘this is trite crap’? It’s a perfectly valid viewpoint, and one you don’t have to be a trained critic to understand.
What is counted as ‘art’ depends far too much on who is the named ‘artist’- otherwise, in the linked thread in the OP featuring the cleaning woman and the dried puddle, the actions of the cleaner would have counted as just as much an artistic statement as the original peice. Somehow though, they don’t- why? Because one is an ‘artist’, the other only a cleaner.
Getting the critics to take you seriously in the first place is the only condition to things being called art, but once you reach that exhalted level- by winning the art lottery equivalant, and for seemingly no greater skill, everything you do (or cause to be done, as most artists ‘creating’ large installations outsource most, if not all of the actual making to less exhalted but more technically skilled people who don’t qualify for credit on the peice) is automatically ‘meaningful’.
No, it’s still music, whether you like it or not. One purpose of the piece was to reframe the boundaries of “music” as being aleatory and beyond the artist’s deliberate control, and on that note it succeeds as music.
Well no, it doesn’t mean any such thing - “further attempts at silence for art’s sake” may be (are not necessarily) conceptually tired or redundant, but they’re still art. Furthermore, plenty of contemporary musicians are doing very interesting work with silence: Steve Roden, for instance, or many of the performers on Erstwhile Records - this recording is as close to silence as music can possibly get, and it’s wonderful to hear. So in that sense, not only was 4’33" a musical work, but it was also one that opened the floodgates for some very exciting work since.
Intriguing that you say this - makes me wonder how many performances of 4’33" you’ve seen.
You may believe it or not, but I got 100. Some of the pieces had a person behind them, others did not.* I picked out the ones with a person by them, and said they were by an artist. The rest I said were by an ape. And I was right.
*This goes against my view, btw, that apes have a degree of personhood. But what I said above could be reformulated in terms of “degrees of personhood.”
While I don’t particularly care one way or the other how or whether we define art, I’m puzzled by the combination of the following two statements:
The first seems to be saying that what (or whether) an artist “means” in the creation of an artwork is irrelevant to its artistic interpretation, while the second seems to be saying that on the contrary, the artist’s meaning is relevant.
On a view like Miller’s, the intent of the artist has no significance that comes specifically from his being the artist. He has the same role in contributing meaning as does any other human being.
