Any condescension is in your head, and I think this thread will remain afloat longer without such attempts to divert the focus to personalities rather than the subject under discussion.
The fact remains that it can’t be up to any one individual to arbitrate whether a piece is or isn’t art, based solely on their personal understanding of/identification with that piece. If you really think that the statements “it’s bad art” and “it’s NOT art” are equally reflective of the subjective nature of such judgments, then I don’t think we have enough vocabulary in common to hold a rational discussion.
Shodan, explain in what manner those two statements back there were contradictory: a few of us are apparently too dense to follow your logic there. Perhaps we’re missing some definitions you’re working with? (of art?)
MGibson: is music without any discernable subject ‘art?’ Is a painting of a black square on a white field representative enough to count as a subject? Do we have to include a cow or something? Am I missing a definition here as well?
The statements are only contradictory if you fail to differentiate opinon from fact. I suspect that **Shodan’s ** post is his cite. :rolleyes:
*Or * to know something about art history.
Why is art the only thing that everyone thinks they’re qualified to judge, without any knowledge or understanding of its history? If someone said “I don’t understand all these troubles in the Middle East. I think those people are all just stupid.” no one would dream of taking their opinon seriously, and rightly so.
I’m suspecting this thread could use a move to GD, but anyways.
The break from realism, that I can tell, never accomplished much. We went from hard pictures to things not even pictures and at any point, some artists were actually able to make pictures where people saw it and felt something, and then there were the vast majority who could not do this.
Theoretically, breaking away from realism would give artists more freedom to create meaningful work, but really so long as 99% of art is all in the same style and 99% of artists not very skilled, this doesn’t matter much.
But I do think that at the end, the idea of art has never been found or promoted. First it was to make paintings which looked like a photo, because people wanted photos. Then it was to represent the world in a blurry of colors. Then to simply put colors down in a way that was visually satisfying. And now, as a way for the artist to express himself–which only does any good if you know the artist that well and further if you agree with him.
True, some artists become famous simply because they developed a technique first, but most are known because they were able to create art that made people feel something. Lacking that, regardless of whether it is the most technically great or technically unimpressive, art is only a method for the artist to fob something off on someone else.
Personally, I would say that Miro looks to have farly good technique, but I can’t say that I feel much emotion in them and certainly not in the OP’s hated one. Unassuming hanging in an office waiting room, and few other virtues.
One relatively painless way to learn about an abstract artist and his work is to view the movie Pollock. You may just find that there’s more to his paintings than you thought – I know I did.
Beats me. Non sequitur of the year award? A reputation for being all mouth, perhaps? A tentative ‘yes’ to your pleading invitation to your next latex-fetish tea-party with the conditional assent to your repeated requests to let you rim me?
[quote=Shodan]
Look, most modern art is a put-on. You don’t need any creativity; all you need is the salesmanship to get your “art” labeled as “ironic” or “post-modern”. And the only thing being communicated is “if you don’t like my work, it is because I am better than you”. Some art critics buy into that, or fall for it. Doesn’t mean anything - as you said, it’s all subjective.
[/quote
I’m not an authority by any means, but here’s my take on it. First of all, you need to shed your preconception of art as a descriptive term, and the idea that objects need to meet certain criteria to somehow “qualify” as art. The word art is essentially meaningless. It has no set definition. It exists purely to describe the near infinite set of objects which, throughout human history, human beings have chosen to view artistically. By ‘view artistically’, I mean view with the aim of satisfying their own subjective aesthetic sensibility.
What this means in practical terms is that the word art can cover quite literally everything. All it takes for the word ‘art’ to be expanded to cover a particular object is for someone, somewhere, to view it artistically, to have their aesthetic sensibilities satisfied by it. This leads to a number of disturbing and rather counterintuitive conclusions.
Firstly, it means that quite literally anything can be termed ‘Art’. If the keyboard you are typing on resonated with you to the extent that you were no longer able to think about it as a mere functional object but something which communicated a more impressionistic personal message, you could justifiably say “I find this keyboard to be a work of art”. I would have no grounds on which to contest this opinion.
Some may say that taking inclusivity to the extreme like this robs the word art of all its meaning. I agree. But that’s OK, because the word art never really had any specific meaning in the first place. Any meanings people attribute to the word art are due to societal pressures.
Secondly, it means that there is no such thing as objectively good or bad art. This is absolutely true. No piece of art is objectively better or worse than any other because no objective standard for judging art has ever been found to exist.
And that really is the crux of the matter. I could find your taste in art juvenile or repellent, but I would have absolutely no objective basis whatsoever with which to discredit your aesthetic, nor to exclude the works you prefer from the artistic pantheon.
As for which works end up in galleries…well, those that tend to wind up on display normally continue a trend set by other artists. The work in the Met or the Tate Modern is objectively no better nor worse than anything I could create. It does, however, fit better into the discourse of modern art. It has its place within the locus of complimentary meanings constructed by contemporary works.
In a sense, its very existence is proof of its own relevance. It certainly cannot be discounted as art just because its forms and themes are unfamiliar to the majority of art lovers.
George K–
You have much more patience than I do, but I’ve gone through this argument so many times I’ve run out of steam and have settled for showing 19-year olds 16th century printed pornography and making immaculate conception jokes in class to keep myself sane.
By the way, for what it’s worth I hate Bouguereau and I despise William Holman Hunt with a passion no one can imagine, but it’s all still art. Boy, do I like Mark Rothko, though.
This reminds me of something that always bugged me as an art student. In my art history classes I would learn to accept things that seemed totally ridiculous to me as art. At the same time in my drawing and painting classes, the professors would insist that the idea that art is subjective is a myth and that some art was indeed better than other art. Of course, it would have been a pointless excercise for them to teach us to be abstract expressionists. I guess it helps to know the rules before you can break them.
Wow! I didn’t realize I was going to ignite such a debate. I think this might be my most-replied-to-post ever!
Some of those are really cool. Not exactly my taste, but I can certainly see the talent required to create them. I never said I didn’t think the guy had talent–simply that works like the two I referenced and others of similar type mystify me as to why they get to be famous and get hung in museums while other artists’ work never gets seen.
BTW, this is probably clear from my OP, but just in case it isn’t: I have no intention of criticizing anyone’s taste in art. If a piece of art speaks to a person, then (at least for that person) it’s valuable.
fluiddruid has already warned one person, but I see that even following her admonition, we have insults between posters going on. That is NOT permitted. You may insult the artists all you want, but you may NOT insult other posters for holding whatever opinions they hold.
The thing about art/entertainment is that perceptions are very subjective. Each poster is entitled to their taste and their opinions. Insults are NOT permitted.
Congratulations! Your prize for your thread hitting 50 replies is a framed, original painting by Miro!
Isn’t it kinda obvious that insulting people based on what art they enjoy is like insulting people based on whether they love, hate, or could take or leave lima beans?
Baine-- it’s both ways. Those ridiculous things ARE art. But your art teacher might be right-- it might be BAD art or GOOD art. Some art IS better than other art. But that doesn’t make bad art NOT art. See the difference?
Exactly. Art is a very personal thing and some people seem to think that just because something looks like a formless blob of shapes to them that everybody must view it that way. For example, Magritte and Klee speak to me, but Dali…meh. I can do without Dali. I guess I wouldn’t go so far as to say he sucks, but I simply don’t like his work. But, yeah, of course it’s art. It’s silly to argue otherwise.
And another thing that non-representational art bashers don’t realize is that many of the canonical abstract artists (Picasso, Kandinsky, de Kooning, etc…) were competent draftsmen and did have the ability to paint representationally. But the question is why? What does bother me in modern art is when the idea suffers from poor technique. For me, good art is the marriage of great ideas and technique, and the artists I enjoy, whom I’ve mentioned throughout this thread, clearly exhibit both, with Wassily Kandinsky most perfectly representing what I consider the ideal abstract artist.
I think it’s interesting to note the the only people saying “I could have done that with a bucket of paint and my own snot” are the ones who have never actually painted anything in their lives.