Art’s a crock.
Lissener:
You miss my point. Context alone does not make art. If a piece is mostl contextual and only slightly artistic IMHO it is not particularly good. There’s no contradiction. Nice try though.
I’m sure Gaudere can take care of herself, but if you’re confused, silence is generally interpreted as tacit agreement. I made a sweeping statement of generality and she pointed out a particular in which I was wrong. She made the point and I didn’t see any need to argue it further. Why do you?
If you’ve got a problem with me, take it to the pit, otherwise stop being such a nitpicker and kindly get off my back.
Apparently, you’re confused: I brought up your lack of response to Gaudere’s poem as an indication that you agreed with her.
Everything I’ve said here that’s been directed specifically at you has been in direct response to your hollow contradictions directed specifically (and childishly) at me, and have been at the expense of my focus on the main thread.
My intention when you entered the thread was simply to ignore you, but you of course began combing through my posts specifically trying to find some little hook, any little loop, that you could snag a tooth on.
Your empty little contrarities were insubstantial enough I thought I could just divert a little attention to them and then return to the actual discussion, but of course I forgot your capacity to keep on chewing long after the fragment you’d got hold of with your dull little teeth has been worn completely away.
I apologize for having forgotten this, and for having nibbled at the ever-dwindling bait you’ve trolled. I must hand it to you: you’re certainly a master baiter.
Of course I have no intention of inviting you into the pit; nor would I wield a baseball bat against a fly, however obnoxiously it bit. Instead I resolve to be better at ingoring you.
Lissener:
you said:
“Apparently, you’re confused: I brought up your lack of response to Gaudere’s poem as an indication that you agreed with her.”
I see that now, my mistake. I apologize.
“Everything I’ve said here that’s been directed specifically at you has been in direct response to your hollow contradictions directed specifically (and childishly) at me, and have been at the expense of my focus on the main thread.”
Quite seriously. I have avoided threads with you in them, mostly because you’ve been nasty. I found this one interesting, and I stated my opinion. I also pointed out a flaw (as I saw it,) in your “art as documentary” defintion. You chose to take that personally and attack me. I tried to respond humorously, and you get incensed. This is your problem, not mine.
"My intention when you entered the thread was simply to ignore you, but you of course began combing through my posts specifically trying to find some little hook, any little loop, that you could snag a tooth on. "
I’ve done no such thing, and I resent what you imply.
"Your empty little contrarities were insubstantial enough I thought I could just divert a little attention to them and then return to the actual discussion, but of course I forgot your capacity to keep on chewing long after the fragment you’d got hold of with your dull little teeth has been worn completely away. "
This is just a pure insult. Why?
“I must hand it to you: you’re certainly a master baiter.”
and another.
“Of course I have no intention of inviting you into the pit; nor would I wield a baseball bat against a fly, however obnoxiously it bit.”
And a third.
This is specifically why I asked you to take it to the Pit. I didn’t say I’d join you there.
You accuse me of “hollow contradictions.” You claim I’m not worthy of insult, and then you insult the hell out of me.
It is interesting that we are having this argument in the first place, since we substantially agree that the urinal piece isn’t particularly good/significant.
Now to address your point which I misinterpreted:
The poetry quotes Gaudere provided exist just fine as excellent examples of craftsmanship if you strip away their context. The urinal doesn’t. Again this is my opinion.
::fweet:: OK, time out, you two. Lissener, it might be better if you could cool it a bit; you’re avoiding directly insulting Scylla, but don’t think the “master baiter” dig swooshed me. 
However, Scylla, I must disagree with you and agree with lissener that art does not have to exist without context. If fact, without sufficient context, art does not exist at all. Take the “bison rocks”: rocks found in caves that already resembled buffalo altered somewhat by primitive man to enhance the resemblance. Now, if you are unaware that the rocks were modified by man, and thought that they were just rocks that coincidentally resembled a buffalo, you would not see them as art at all. Without the context, there is no art. All art cannot exist without context, without at least the context of a belief that a consciousness created the work. Without some additional context, as well, it is often difficult to extract the true meaning of a work. Would Degas’ “The Absinthe Drinker” have as much meaning without knowing both the title and the social context of absinthe in that time period? Does Van Gogh’s “Self-portrait With a Bandaged Ear” make as powerful of a statement about Van Gogh’s obsessions and depression if you don’t know he cut off part of his own ear after a fight with Gauguin? Similarily, the artists who peed in “The Fountain” would still have created art if you knew they were intending to do so–probably we would have assumed they were making some statement decrying the “lack of fucntionality” of most “high art”, or somesuch, if we were unaware of the context–but without knowing Duchamp’s original purpose for creating “The Fountain” we would miss the true meaning what they were apparently trying to do. And that’s just a part of what art is; it depends utterly on context and personal perception.
I’ll go one step further, and contradict (!) entirely the stated contention that the more a work depends upon context, the less “artistic value” it has, and say this: to the degree to which a work is independent of context, to that degree is it, IMHO, “bad art.”
Consider art that requires no context (beyond the minimal, Gauderian awareness that it is in fact an artifact): a stained-glass flower hanging in my grandmother’s kitchen window; a poodle-motif kleenex-cozy on the back of her toilet; the faux Hummel figurines on her coffee table. Seen without context, as my irony-blind grandmother does, these items really have no “artistic value” at all. The only artistic validity that can be wrenched from these items is by laying over them a cultural context in which they are awarded, after the fact, a kind of nostalgic, ironic iconography.
Or perhaps the pleasure they give to the owner?
Like I said, art is in the eye of the beholder. I guess it’s more about personal taste.
Dammit, if I think my mousepad is art, then it’s art!
I mean, what’s the sense of being a snob about art?
Gaudere:
I agree that art doesn’t have to have context, but that context can enhance art. I’m not disagreeing on this point.
In the two links you provided clearly understanding the context enhances appreciation, and gives you better insight.
Both those works though stand alone without context. The expression on the women’s face in the Absinthe drinker is incredible. I am most intrigued as to the relationship she has with the man she’s seated next to.
As for Van Gogh’s work, well it clearly stands by itself on artistic merit.
My point is that the “The fountain” is pretty much 100% context.
Take it away, and there isn’t much left.
Can you make art out of pure context? It soesn’t seem to me that you can.
Both “The Crone” and “The Fallen Karyatid” are two wonderful works of art, where I think appreciation suffers greatly if you don’t understand the context in which they were created. But they still stand by themselves.
I see “The Fountain,” and the subsequent pissing as basically an inside joke. Is the joke an art form? Sure, I’ll concede. Is it particularly good, or worthy? I don’t think so.
Lissener:
You said:
“Consider art that requires no context (beyond the minimal, Gauderian awareness that it is in fact an artifact): a stained-glass flower hanging in my grandmother’s kitchen window; a poodle-motif kleenex-cozy on the back of her toilet; the faux Hummel figurines on her coffee table. Seen without context, as my irony-blind grandmother does, these items really have no “artistic value” at all. The only artistic validity that can be wrenched from these items is by laying over them a cultural context in which they are awarded, after the fact, a kind of nostalgic, ironic iconography.”
I see your point. I’m not sure what to make of it, though. It seems to me in your example that much of the artistic content of the “poodle cozy” is added after the fact, not by the artist.
If the art is in the viewing, not in the artistic creation then mightn’t I see a aesthetically pleasing pattern in a cloud, and clai that as art as well?
I’m not disputing this. Remember, it’s my grandmother we’re talking about here.
Again, I don’t think any of this is being contested here. Surely in a discussion about as ineffable a subject as the nature and validity of art we don’t have to preface every single statement with a disclaimer that it’s all subject to personal opinion? I’d have assumed we were starting with that as a given.
Well, as the former partner in a mousepad company (the late lamented NicePad,Man[sup]TM[/sup]), I may be biased in agreeing with you wholeheartedly.
This is a whole nother debate. First off, we’d have to spend about three pages defining snob. And then, I’d have to say that one has every right–I might even say responsibility–to be a snob about art. I think I have a responsibility to judge the validity of a work of art. I don’t buy your suggestion that I would be a better person if I accepted any (as Zenster said) steaming pile of sh!t that came along as a valid work of art, and insist that it be awarded consideration equal to, say, Guernica.
Art–at least some art–has a vocabulary, like poetry; like Latin. I’ve already said that I’m interested in art that speaks in a more widely familiar vocabulary, but that doesn’t mean that I discount art that is more rewardingly viewed from the other side of an arts-aware education.
Well, I don’t know about that; context is necessary for the “message” of the art to be effective, but unneccesary for the aethetic perception (well, the “taught aesthetics” we pick up from our culture are a sort of context, too, but not precisely the sort of context we are taliking about). A piece of art that can be purely aethetic and does not depend on context does not have to be “bad” art; Cezanne’s “Still Life with Apples” is defintiely “good” art in my opinion, and it needs little context. The amount of context required for true understanding of the art does not affect the degree or quality of “art” in a piece, IMHO.
??? I specifically said art must have context to exist.
For me, yes. And if one accepts that peeing in “the Fountain” was done for some sort of meaning, you do not necessarily need to know the rest of the context to gain something from their work. Of course, without knowing the context you’ll likely get it “wrong”, but that’s a possibility with any sort of art. Heck, people sometimes see all sorts of stuff in my work that I didn’t intend, which means I either was too subtle or they’re less than perceptive.
Art seems to have two components; the aesthetic and the message. You favor pieces that have a strong enough aesthetic component that they could still please you even without knowing the context necessary for the message.
I have to admit that I favor these sorts of art as well (although this doesn’t exclude abstract or modern art, many of which are beautifully composed and colored). Nevertheless, I do not see as “lesser” art strongly-messaged pieces that require a knowledge of context to be truly effective, like performance art.
Yes. I believe art is in the perception, although what the artist does is provide a context for that perception so that the viewer can “see” the art. (And of course, art is always art to the creator, since they created it.)
No, art must be perceived to have been created by a consciousness. (We’ll leave God out of it for now.)
Gaudere’s definition of art is almost wholly in the eye of the beholder, not the creator; my paradigm is almost wholly from the perspective of the artist. The one technicality they share is that they define something created by a human being (leaving aside for now, for the purposes of this discussion, gorilla-made finger painting). The clouds are excluded by a technicality. But as soon as you describe to another what you see in the clouds, you make art. I might even go so far as to say that as soon as you ascribe language to your impressions, even in your own mind, you’ve made a kind of art.
The cultural overlay I used to make my grandmother’s tschotschkes (sp?) into art is indeed after the fact. It doesn’t change them into art; the overlay itself is the art. This is the essence (well, an0 of postmodernism, and of “found art.” Found art, of course, is simply altering an object’s context: the alteration is the art. This is of course highly relevant to the “work” that started this discussion. Although I don’t think they altered the Fountain’s context; they just emphasized it, and reminded their complacent fellow museum-goers of its original, obscured intention.
Gaudere said:
“??? I specifically said art must have context to exist.”
Oops, sorry.
Does it? I’m not sure. If you showed Still life with Apples to an alien who had absolutely no context to put it in would the alien not place it within its own context and perhaps derive artistic merit from it? If this is so, then art and context are seperate. Context is needed for the preception of art, but is seperate, right.
::trying to understand::
If when I was a whee child my father would gesture dramatically at the skies, proclaiming he was shaping the clouds, and if I beleived this then the clouds would indeed be art, right?
So by this rationale anything I consider to assist me in my understanding of the universe is worthy of artistic merit, whatever that thing is. So basically anything goes, right?
BTW: I’m not having a go at modern art, I just don’t really get it.
Didn’t see Lissener’s post.
So okay, in that example my father would be creating art, by implying he was shaping the clouds. Got it.
You need at least the context that it was purposefully created by a consciousness. If, by some bizarre coincidence, you saw some buckets of paint fall off a ladder and splatter on a canvas in a manner that exactly looked like “Still Life with Apples”, that paint-splattered canvas would not be art. It would just be some random splatters, and if an alien just saw them as random splatters there would be no art for him, either. If you realize, “Hey, those splatters look like apples! Way cool!” and titled it and hung it on a wall, you’ve just created “found” art, solely by consciously putting the paint splatters into an context where other people can see them as art.
Yes, they would be art to you. And once you realized that the cloud’s shapes were not consciously created, they would cease to be art to you.
I live in Philly and have been to the Philly Museum
Of Art a few times. Each time I am struck by how talentless
some of the work is. While many of the works show a mastery of technique, they are sterile and lifeless. I think that many pieces are revered simply due to their age.
On a trip to NY, I saw the Frick Collection. Again nearly all the pieces were inert and undeserving of their status. One statue,however, was spilling over with motion and feeling. This was truly a great work. Looking at the pamphlet, I saw that it was Hercules by Michelangelo. Hercules is a masterpiece. All the other works in the collection are crap I’d pass up at a yard sale.
To me (Visual)art is the arrangment and or creation of colors, and or objects to create something that is either visuually stunning (Gorgeous, horrifying, etc), meaningful, emotionally moving or all three.
My favorite is Van Gogh. To me each of his paintings captures his pain, isolation, and his search for beauty and acceptance. And they look great too.
IMHO, yes. I think it’s a great deal harder to find something that isn’t art than something that is. I feel that almost any form of human communication is art. Strike “almost.” The word art is, IMHO, one of the most fluid and inclusive words I can think of.
I believe (with some hyperbolic bifurcation here) that humanity can be divided into two kinds of people: artists and those who do not allow themselves to be artists (and I believe the latter is very rare indeed; in fact you could probably convince me that such a person doesn’t exist at all this side of organic brain disfunctions). I believe that artist is the natural state of the human being; I believe it’s what makes us human.
Lissener:
So what you are saying is that even something like my Chem lab notebook has artistic content whether I intend it to or not, and it is “art” on this basis. And in fact, if I strive to make that notebook as dry and devoid of artistic content as possible, that in itself is a significant artistic statement.
Is this correct?