Incidentally, here’s an interesting video of a rare orchestral performance of John Cage’s 4’33.
And for anyone who doubts John Cage was a “real” composer, here’s a video of the finale of his brilliant Third Construction for percussion ensemble.
You are stuck on this idea of a dictionary definition of something called “art.”
“Art” is just a form communication. What is communication? Basically anything that conveys meaning from one person to another. A copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude is as much communication as my monosyllabic grunt at the guy getting too close to me on the subway. A parking ticket is communication as well as Shakespeare’s sonnets. Despite being enormously broad, the word “communication” does have some real meaning. A table is obviously not communication. Nor is the North Wind. The lunatic disjointed rantings of a schizophrenic are not communication, because they do not convey meaning. But a baby’s cries- despite probably not being formed through reasoned thoughts- are.
“Art” is only slightly less broad- it can perhaps be thought of as communication that conveys some kind of feeling, emotion, commentary, or theoretical understanding of something, as opposed to informative or instructive communication. This would include One Hundred Years of Solitude and Shakespeare’s sonnets, but generally not my parking ticket or monosyllabic grunt. Yes, it covers a lot of ground. But that doesn’t make it meaningless.
One of the fun toys with art is the idea that how you frame something affects if it is art or not. Context matters. This is why a crumpled piece of paper in a gallery is “art” but a crumpled piece of paper on the street is not. Is it really that surprising that a crumpled piece of paper can have different meanings in different contexts? A respected teacher handing me a crumpled piece of paper instead of handing back my paper might completely deflate me. A child proudly handing me a lovingly crumpled piece of paper might warm my heart. A guy on the street handing me a crumpled piece of paper isn’t doing anything but pissing me off that i have to find a trash can to throw it away in.
There was a period where artists had a lot of fun playing with framing. The context became the “art”, and the object itself was just a prop in what was being conveyed. It’s an idea that has been done before- picture those relatively lame old Victorian paintings framed in enormously elaborate gold frames. The message there was no so much “I really like this boring painting of a field” as much as “I can afford this huge gold frame!” Or picture how Medieval paintings have gone from being religious instructional materials that derived a lot of their meaning from the church installations and rituals they were surrounded by to the modern context where they are seen as pretty pictures seen in isolation in a gallery, with an academic understanding of Medieval symbolism taking the place of understanding it in the context of having a religious experience in this huge overwhelming church packed with paintings.
So a few decades ago, people starting just having fun with some of these ideas. What does it mean to have a baby in an art gallery? What does it mean to create an artistic installation on a remote Texas highway. What does silence mean in a packed concert hall. Let’s find out! Let’s talk about context and framing!
A lot of it seems pretty trite now. The whole concept relies on a bit of “gotcha” that loses it’s charm once you know the trick- like an M. Night Shyamalon film. We see most of this stuff in retrospective, when the surprise and newness has worn off and people have moved on to talking about newer things. Of course it seems obvious now that a concert hall full of people waiting for a concert that isn’t going to happen is going to end up with a lot of background noise and maybe some thinking about silence. But imagine being in the audience, ready to hear the new piece by a famous composer, the first time that happens. I’d imagine you’d have some confusion, then shock, and then slowly starting to hear the ambient sounds around you. Then you’d think a lot of stuff like “Well, what is music, anyway? Is this music? No. Well, why not? Hmmmm. I guess music is a pretty slippery concept. And silence…it’s not very silent here, is it? What’s with all this noise all the time? I never really thought about all these sounds. Hey, this is kind of neat.” and eventually you’d walk out of the concert hall with some ideas in your head that you had never thought about before. Pretty neat!
Our appreciation of it now is based in part on the effect it had then. I mean, if Obama gave the Checkers speech, word for word, it wouldn’t have the same impact it had when Nixon said it. Does that make the Checkers speech meaningless? Of course not. It had a lot of meaning in a time and a place, even if these days only people with a personal memory of it or a special interest in historical political speechwriting really care.
Anyway, I’ve written a lot. If you don’t have fun with conceptual art that plays with ideas of context, why not try to find something that you do like? There is a lot going on, and I’m sure you can find something out there that speaks to you.
And perhaps that’s because art critics are more interested in discussing specifics - the drift of a particular artistic movement, the effects of a particular work - than in making firm, clear, fixed-for-all-time determinations of What Art Is and Is Not. In his surprisingly insightful Art for Dummies, Thomas Hoving (former director of the Met) throws around a number of past ideas along these lines, finally concluding that one of the most definitive statements is simply that “Art is.” In my experience (and in this thread), the only people demanding that we nail down an absolute definition of what art isn’t are those with an axe to grind.
If any lay person wants to understand and appreciate any particular discipline of art that they don’t understand, they need to invest a bit more effort, than 5 second viewing, learning the language and history. There are so many different discipline/form of art you can’t expect general audience to understand and appreciate all art forms without some knowledge of the lineage and the intention of the artist.
When a blank canvas is presented as a work of art, art world has to acknowledge it as an idea that no one presented as such before in art history and record it as such. However no one really gives credence to the artist as a great artist unless he continues to amuse art world like Duchamp, not “anything and everything is art”.
“Art” flows through some strange waters at times because it can and these are uncharted territories that “Art” needs to ‘cover’ at some point whether you like it or not… whether something may come of it or falls to the wayside.
Wow, monstro FTW! Very well said.
Here’s my criteria for good art v bad art:
Good art: It’s non-negoitable amongst the majority of observers - Boticelli, the Guggenheim (and I’m not even a fan of that one), Klimt, whatever.
Bad art: It could easily be a gimmick, your six year old could do it, it would only sell on Etsy because your auntie purchased it, or you need to be stoned or under the influence of a drug to ‘get’ it. (Like the whoopie cushion display at the Denver Museum of Modern Art…barf.)
Ok, I decided I’m going to behave myself from now on in this thread. No more snide remarks or personal insults. The thing is, I have a lot of pent up annoyance and frustration from having to deal with people on a daily basis in real life who are very like some of the posters I pitted here, but in contexts where I have to be calm, polite, and respectful. It gets old. Thus, I took the liberty of venting a bit. To everyone I offended in this thread: you probably deserved it.
This is what I will also say: there is a lot of rubbish art. Some of the modern art I’ve defended here I think is absolute rubbish, almost as worthy of mockery as the people I’ve pitted. But being rubbish art does not make it not art.
If I were curator of a museum of modern art, a lot of the art you guys are complaining about would not be in my museum, either, but some of it would be, whether I liked it myself or not. Stirring debate, challenging aesthetic assumptions, recontextualizing objects in surprising or even shocking ways: these are all legitimate and actually quite valuable reasons for art to exist. And, in a very literal sense, without rubbish art, truly great art would never flourish, because great artists inevitably stand on the shoulders of others, many of whom are very, very lesser. Without new and ever-changing, bold ideas, whether very good or very bad, art would be stagnant and ultimately worthless as an expression of the society that formed it. And here’s the crux of the matter: contemporary art’s main purpose is to exist. Simply, it must be. And it will be, *whether you like it or not. *
What people value in art of their own time is often strongly at odds with what future generations value, and that’s because they use it for different purposes. But contemporary art, as infuriating, challenging, and wonderful as it can be, simply must exist, because without it human society would be unthinkable and ultimately unendurable. So, in my hypothetical museum, I would absolutely include art that I don’t necessarily like, because I know that a greater good for the purpose of a livable society is being served.
One experience with new art might be, “yikes, that’s rubbish and please never do it again.” But a second might be, “WOW, that’s amazing and wonderful and more beautiful or more interesting than anything I’d ever imagined.” But until you give new art the opportunity to be, even if there’s a chance it might fail and utterly disappoint a lot of people, you’ll never have the chance to experience the second example. You’ll be stuck with only the things people have already imagined and recycled. That gets old, too. Worst, you will never get the chance to enjoy something new, transcendent, fascinating, and beautiful.
Take someone from “hoi polloi” - just any random peasant from ANY period of human history.
Show them a Rembrandt. Ask them two questions: 1. whether they think it’s art 2. whether they like it and would like to have it.
Show them a Jackson Pollock. Ask the same question.
You KNOW that you would get a hugely more positive response from Rembrandt vs. Pollock.
Why do you think that is?
I don’t know that, and neither do you, and anyway it’s irrelevant. Jackson Pollock’s paintings are still art, and still greatly valued by many. I’d rather own a Pollock than a Rembrandt, myself (of course, can’t afford either.) But whether someone wants to have something has nothing to do with whether it’s art or not.
Your question is very, very silly.
It may be very, very silly. But you saying that you “don’t know that” is, frankly, dishonest - you know it very well. The “irrelevant” part here is you claiming that Pollock’s paintings are still art - since I didn’t say they weren’t. And you still didn’t tell me why you think the response would be so much more positive toward Rembrandt.
Odds are that if you were to summarize Twilight vs. To the Lighthouse to “any random peasant,” they’d prefer Twilight. I’m not sure what significance you attribute to this.
Absolutely, I do not. And neither do you.
Apparently you failed to notice what thread you were in. What was your point? More people like Pollock than Rembrandt? Or vice versa? So what?
I have no idea whether it would be or not. But I also don’t care.
First off, I don’t think it’s that certain. Muslim peasants might be all over the Jackson Pollock, because paintings of people are an affront to God and at least Jackson Pollock isn’t blasphemy. African art has historically been extremely comfortable with abstraction and not particularly interested in realism. They did not make these beautiful stylized sculpture because they were technically unable to make representative art. There are plenty of fine example of early African representative art. But African cultures overwhelmingly tend to be more interested in stylized renderings. They might not get the Jackson Pollock, but they might find it more interesting than a boring old picture of people- I mean, you see people every day, right? Big whoop.
Ancient pottery in Asia shows a keen interest in the abstract play of color and pattern formed by glaze and the firing process- which is pretty darn close to what an Jackson Pollock painting is about. Japanese ceramics, in general, show a lot of concern for abstract color and form, the randomness created by the materials, the way that process is embodied in the finished work and how the hand of the artist shows through. Those are basically the same points that Pollock was making, hundreds of years later. People in ancient Japan may well have thought the Rembrandt was a good parlor trick, but didn’t really have a lot of artistic merit.
Tell me Incans wouldn’t think Jackson Pollock was cool. And look at cave paintings!
It’s European art that got all caught up on this idea of perfect representation. Everyone else has been happily playing with abstraction since prehistoric times.
Second off, so what? Give any random peasant a Mr. Bean video or a Shakespeare play and they are almost certainly going to prefer the Mr. Bean video. Mr. Beans simple physical humor translates amazingly well in different contexts- he’s HUGE in China. Does that mean make Mr. Bean better than Shakespeare? God, I hope not.
This thread has too much animosity, and I apologize for my part in that, but statements like the above simply drive me nuts. How can you presume a purpose to something if you can not state what that thing is? Why even use the term at all, why not just say that the purpose of things is to exist? If everything and anything is art then you might as well leave the word out.
No we’re getting somewhere. I’m actually feeling kind of proud of you. By the way, I’ve never argued that art is undefinable, you might notice. I’m argued only that it can’t be limited, and to try to do so is deeply stupid. The reason for this is there is no apparent limit to human creativity.
Things exist. In so far as things exist, their purpose is to continue. Some things have imagination and creativity. Therefore, creative works exist and their purpose is also to continue. Art is a vehicle (space/container/frame/opportunity) for creativity.
Cool. Programs are “creative works”. Programs run on CPUs. Thus CPUs are vehicles for creativity. You didn’t know that your CPU was “art”, did you?
So then would you say that art is the process by which creative
ETA: people hit submit before they have completed their post 
I saw a display a few months ago where thousand of thumbtacks created the illusion of a Persian rug when viewed at a particular angle, yet looked like nothing at all when seen from any other perspective. It was beautiful, interesting, and thought provoking I could not have thought of doing it nor carried it out given 100 years. The artist clearly pushed the limits.
I also have several thumbtacks holding up newspaper clippings on my bulletin board. I am willing to go out on a limb and classify one as art and the other as just “stuff”.
I’m so sorry that my aesthetic appreciation for combinations of melodies, harmonies, counterpoints, etc. does not extend to a complete absence thereof. 4’33" simply is not music, because it has no qualities–none, zip, zilch–in common with what the word “music” means.
Now, maybe the performance of this creates “art” in some (very broad) sense. But the whole point is to subvert expectations, and so the audience are paying for something they are not receiving (i.e. music), instead getting a performance piece performed by the audience itself. In common parlance, this is called “fraud”.
Or take the piece I mentioned earlier–the overalls and paint roller. If there’s any “art” in it, it’s in the act of recontextualisation. So if I buy this piece, I get a pair of overalls and a paint roller–suddenly the objects are again recontextualised and the “art” has been destroyed. Again, I’m not getting what I paid for, and again, this is an act of fraud.
As I said, it’s a complete sham. It’s deliberately self-referential, and so ultimately an empty statement.