Why don’t you bend over, put your head between your knees and play with your asshole, you ignorant cunt.
Why not, is not that a legitimate use of a Message Board? We argue over Sports, TV, and Movies etc.
There are people on this board that think Arrested Development is the best and other you think it stinks. People passionate about Baseball and others who Yawn.
Why isn’t art open to the same criticisms?
Jim
Others do, though. Have you ever seen one of those threads?
Seriously, there’s a lot of people out there who try to defend the moronic notion that they’re perfectly able to evaluate things that they simply have no understanding of. We have developed something of a cultural opposition to aesthetics in the United States, a strong urge to somehow put the high-falutin’ in their place. What’s sad is how many people somehow think they’re being clever when they go around repeating the same idiocy they’ve been stealing from derivative stand-up comedians and actually act as though they’ve said something clever or intelligent.
Bad analogy. Does the Dope offer classes in analogies where posters learn that an analogy is nearly equal to fact?
Not so.
I’m short of being a wine snob, but I know a bit. My take, and the take of many people who enjoy wine, is that you buy and drink what you like. If you prefer a $30 bottle, or even a $10 bottle, you should buy it and not listen to anyone who tells you that you should have a preference for pricier wine. I’ll let you figure out how that translates to 1.5MM worth of Mating Blue and Green Amoebae.
It is. But the trouble you don’t seem to understand is that the same ground rules apply. Just like everyone else laughed their asses off at Candid Gamera in that thread when he decided to pop up to give his opinion of a bunch of movies he hadn’t seen, you’re not going to be any use in the argument if you’re talking about something you don’t know about.
If you haven’t studied the genre of art, your opinion is not relevant. If you have studied it, feel free to start the thread explaining why “The Bay” deserves to have gum encrusted over the entire surface. But if you’re just talking out of your ass about a subject you don’t know about - like (it appears) most of the people making fun of the artwork in this thread - then don’t flatter yourself by pretending you’ve made some valid point.
Like I said, I don’t know much about abstract art. I don’t care for it; I don’t pretend to understand it because I simply haven’t even seen much of it. But I’m not so arrogant to assume that my entirely uninformed opinion of it is somehow equivalent in value to the opinions of people who know something about the subject.
The funny part, though, is that even though wine snobbery is entirely subjective, in theory, it happens that there’s an amazing degree of agreement over what constitutes a great bottle of wine. I have little appreciation for wine, but my father’s quite the oenophile and I’ve been subjected to many a bottle of wine, and they don’t taste all that different to me.
If you really like a $10 bottle of wine, go for it, drink it. Most wine afficionados I know drink plenty of $10 wine, but most of them also don’t claim it’s equivalent to the $400 bottles they pull out on special occasions.
Either way, taking your view of wine and applying it to the painting is instructive. By your own argument, you might not feel the painting is worth $1.5 million, but just as - in your claim - aesthetic impressions of wine are entirely subjective, aesthetic impressions of paintings are too. So, once again, you don’t have to like “The Bay”, but for you to suggest that others shouldn’t like it - as you’ve been doing for the whole thread - is entirely contradictory to your suggestion that taste is entirely subjective. You can’t have it both ways, Waverly. Either taste has an objective component, in which case the evaluation of the experts is something worth considering - or it’s entirely subjective, in which case your continued insults to the painting are entirely irrelevant and you might keep them to yourselves.
The notion that taste is entirely subjective is moronic, but that’s a larger issue and I don’t wish to discuss it here.
That is fair and it does not deserve to have gum put on it. However, I think even with my non-critically trained eye I have the right to make fun of a painting.
I am not a Thespian or critic but I gladly comment on TV, Movie and Plays I have seen.
I am not a politician or pundit, but I will comment on what I perceive as bad politics.
So if I see a picture that is valued at 1.5m and I think it has minimal value, I will deride that just as much as the $10,000 Comic book or $100,000 Baseball card.
I do not expect you to respect why I would consider $10,000 for an original printing of the “Hobbit” would be a bargain. You are welcomed to your opinion without studying Tolkien and Middle-Earth.
Jim
Agreed. But that’s not what’s going on here. Nobody is telling you that you’re a fool for not liking the better wine. It’s you who is telling people that they are fools because they appreciate the better wine.
But you will agree that there is a difference between a $300 wine and a $30 wine? I might not be able to taste it, but for some people the difference is real. Or do you think wine coinosseurs are just deluded snobs?
That’s the point of my analogy. **You ** might not be able to tell the difference between a Frankenthaler and a four-year-old’s random splotches, but the difference still exists and some of us are capable of seeing it.
Without meaning to sound like a snot (which I’m going to, I’m sure) - you do recognize that there are people for whom $1.5 million isn’t actually all that much money, right?
If Bill Gates (for a totally lame, obvious example) checked out “The Bay” and really liked it, and it spoke to him, do you really think that he would quibble over the price if it were to come up for sale? Or would he just buy it because he liked it, in the exact same way that you buy your $30 bottle of wine because you like it? For some people spending $30 on wine I’m sure seems extravagant.
I have lots of art (none of it worth $1.5 million). I’ve had friends come over and say “Why’d 'ja spend so much on THAT?? My kid could do that!!” Well, good for you - apparently you’re going to be wealthy in your retirement. It’s as stupid a thing to say as “I don’t know why anyone drinks wine at all! Beer is just as good and way cheaper!” It’s just plain dumb.
The problem, Wave, is that you’re going into this with the wrong set of assumptions. You assume that all art speaks in the same language. You only need one language to read most of the books you’d encounter, and that language is pretty close to universal in most of your contexts, and mine. A great deal of art can be appreciated based on a single, simple approach too; to that extent a lot of art speaks in the same language.
But to a certain degree, abstract art is explicitly subverting that paradigm. It forces each viewer to learn a new language in order to “get” it, or even just to feel what the artist was feeling when he/she painted it. It’s a pretty radical reworking of the entire concept of language, even visual language, to suggest–and then to demonstrate–that raw, powerful human emotions can be conveyed with an entirely new “language.”
Now, if you’re not interested in taking that ride with the artist–if you’re not interested in new ways of thinking, and you’re happy sticking with a language that’s comfortable and familiar to you–that doesn’t make you stupid, or lesser. It’s a choice you make.
Some people choose to “do the homework” to take the ride; to learn a new language. Some people choose not to. For you, who’ve chosen not to, to entirely dismiss the understanding of someone who has arrived at a DIFFERENT understanding of a painting than the understanding you have arrived at–THAT’S where you come off looking stupid.
You’re basically saying a novel written in French is stupid because it’s not presented in a way that is conventionally understandable to you. You’re kind of saying, “Bleuh vonh szhay bluh bluh bluh parlay voo bluh bluh–see? I can make the same sounds, doesn’t take any talent at all!”
The trouble is that most people in our society have a pretty solid grounding in TV and movies from having watched a lot of them over the years. The same can not be said of paintings, which are inherently less accessible since they’re not created with the intention of being immediately pleasing to mass audiences. Combine the fact that paintings are harder to understand with the fact that most people have seen fewer and thus don’t have the context required to understand them, and the opinion of any random person on a painting is considerably less likely to be reasoned and intelligent.
That’s not to say that I particularly care about most people’s comments on TV or movies, either. The most popular movies don’t tend to be particularly good; that’s a signal that most of the public’s opinions on movies aren’t worth much.
This is an entirely separate matter. The painting has value as an aesthetic work. An expensive comic or baseball card or first edition, first impression book has some aesthetic value too, no doubt, but that’s not why people collect them. After all, if you’re keeping your comics in mylar in a sealed vault, you’re not saving them for their aesthetics. I was only commenting on the aesthetic value of the artwork - by raising the issue of “collector’s value”, you’re talking about something entirely different.
Bad example. Gates would simply hire amateur painters to make cheap copies, then flood museums with them, rendering the original obsolete. He’d then happily pay $1.5M per day in fines for doing this.
lissener: That sir was a great example. I think I understand what everyone is trying to beat into my head.
You did a far better job of explaining it then several other attempts that were made. No discredit to them, just all the more to your credit.
Jim
hehe. That’s funny. 
(And true!)
Yep, kudos to him for such a lucid and convincing explanation.
Another graduate of inane analogy school. Football has specific, objective rules. Theoretically, you could watch a full game in slow motion and never get a call wrong.
I hope you just missed the mark with your analogy, and don’t honestly believe that art is evaluated objectively.
First off, you are putting words in my mouth. Secondly, the color choice is stark, nearly bi-chrome, and relies on primary colors. I’d say that color choice is central to the painting, and valid criteria for evaluating it. Are you so pretentious that you’d not only disagree with a subjective opinion, but also the means of arriving at it?
Waverly, aren’t **you ** not only disagreeing with **Excalibre’s ** subjective opinion, but also his means of arriving at it? Even though his means of arriving at it is through education, and yours is through ignorance? Dude, you totally lost me here.
Read **lissener’s ** post.
Why thank you both. Careful though, you can get tarred and feathered for agreeing with lissener around here! 
No. I have jokingly made fun of the painting, and at least once explained in clearer terms why I don’t like it, but I have not: seen an explanation as to why Excalibre likes this painting, made fun of that non-existent explanation, nor told anyone they weren’t entitled to enjoy anything in their own way. Quite the contrary, I told chairman moo, or whatever his name is, to “go for it.”
I realize we aren’t in the Café, but if it’s verboten to debate the merits of a piece of art unless you have proper credentials, send the memo to my bathroom so that I can wipe my arse with it.