Dead on.
Or to continue the atheism v. Christian example, “any kindergartner can say obvious shit like ‘love your neighbor’ and just found his own world religion!” You don’t have to be a Christian to see that there might be more to it than that.
A poor analogy. As an atheist, I don’t doubt that many Christians honestly believe that their God is real. I just don’t think their belief correlates with reality.
But in the case of art, belief IS reality. If people belief a piece of art is good, then it IS good. That’s what “being good” means when it comes to art. There is no “essence of goodness” that exists apart from human opinion. There’s no external evidence you can point to and say, “Look, your belief doesn’t correlate with reality. You’re wrong to like this work.”
People have told you that they honestly like abstract art. Are you willing to take them at their word? Or do you still think they’re deluded and/or liars?
Can’t you like something and be deluded at the same time?
fun gasoline to toss on the fire. Make your own Jackson Pollock
Found the above while hunting down a charles csuri computer generated image called Entanglement. Saw it on a PBS show about art and computers. A large wall hanging of Entanglement was the backdrop for the show and it was quite spectacular. Doesn’t really stand out on my computer at all.
Well, if someone says they like a painting because it speaks to them, and they mean it literally, then yes, they’re deluded. If they say they like it because it speaks to them, and they mean that it invokes particular thoughts or emotions, then no, it’s not possible for that to be a delusion.
If they say a Newman is better than an Evil then that is an opinion. And great effort has gone into implying one is better than the other.
We’re now back to “art is subjective and in the eye of the beholder”.
Cute. (Doesn’t really make something that looks like Pollock to me, but fun nonetheless). Thing is, Pollock (and a lot, I’d say most, art) doesn’t quite work for me on a screen or a flat two-dimensional print. It really has to be experienced in person. Even for me as a photographer, it’s one thing to see my photo on screen, and quite another to see it printed, especially at larger formats. I’m not sure what it is. Most of my photos stay in the digital realm, but I still get that tickle of excitement when I see one of my favorite photos printed as a 20"x30" (or whatever.) There’s just a different relationship there. I suppose we can explore that, but the tangibility of a printed work somehow affects my emotional and aesthetic connection to it.
But with painting, there is even more: there’s actual layers of texture, light and shadow falling on the canvas depending on your viewing angle. It’s a different experience. I still remember seeing Van Gogh’s paintings for the first time in person. I mean, they always looked “pretty” to me, but that’s about it. When I saw Starry Night in person for the first time, it was altogether a new experience. The actual three dimensionality of that work is quite important, and experiencing those colors and pigments in person is different than seeing it on a screen or on a cheap 4-color offset reproduction. Those colors just literally don’t exist on screen/print. He’s probably my third or fourth favorite painter, but would have just been “another painter that college kids like hanging posters of” had I not actually experienced the work. I felt similarly about Rothko until I saw one in person, except that I originally thought he was a total hack.
And certainly not everyone has the same reaction. Some people just don’t react as strongly to color or visiual art or whatnot.
Well some of Pollock’s stuff looks pretty darn good on my computer so I accept it’s awesome in person. But the computer generator was interesting. Needs a bunch of switches to make it more useful but you could apply it to a canvas with a cad-cam set up. I was actually surprised with what splattered on my screen. The program needs to lose the ease with which it creates circles.
Not really. You like what you like. You can pretend to like something you don’t. But if you really like something, then, well … you really like it.
That’s nothing. Here’s a device that lets you make your own Norman Rockwell painting!
Yeah, that was kind of what was annoying me, too, the large circles. But I agree that it is fun in an interactive art kind of way. They should increase the options available and then turn it into some kind of crowdsourced art project. I think that might be cool and interesting.
I don’t understand why people watch American Idol, but I’m not going to start a thread about it.
We’re not back to it; we never really left.
The MoMa recently took in four early designs of Paint By Numbers, for what it’s worth.
Absolutely not. I do to think it should be regarded as significant art, and I don’t see why a sane person would pay $44 million for it. I am skeptical on both counts.
That’s more like it.
Absolutely not. I doubt both these propositions.
Why thank you!
I really wish we could do this experiment somehow. I see Evil Captor’s 15 minute imitation and I think it looks like crap, and I see the Newman and think it looks like art. I’m the first to admit I’m almost completely inarticulate when it comes to what makes things look like art to me, but the impression I get in this case is very strong. So strong I am convinced that if you showed this pair to 1000 random people, (maybe limited to North Americans and Europeans, but maybe not even that), 900 or more of them would agree with my impression.
The Newman just has this… shimmer… or something… that the Captor piece completely lacks. The Captor piece, in fact, looks exactly like something someone would slap together in 15 minutes. The Newman piece looks to me like a lot of work and thought went into it. Again, I wish I could say why. I wish we could do the experiment I described as well. I wish this post actually contributed something to the conversation.
I mean look, it’s not just two blue rectangles with a white line in the middle. There’s texture. There’s shading. There’s a messiness to the lines between blue and white.
Can you see how the blue is a little splotchy in a sense? That was a choice. In fact I’d be surprised if it wasn’t a choice exactly where the shade differentials ended up on the entire work. I mean, there’s all kinds of evidence of craftsmanship and care in this thing, in both the conceptual and execution stages. The execution you can see right there on the photo. The conceptual stage, usually with this kind of art the thought and care that goes into that has a lot to do with the artist’s history and the artist’s understanding of art history so that is not as obvious just by looking at the photo.
Sorry for the third post but, again to remind us of what someone said above, the artists who did this kind of artwork did not start out making money off these paintings. In fact they made paintings like this despite almost certain rejection for many years. (Decades?) This is further evidence that this is not slapdash work set down to fool art collectors. These guys really actually cared about doing paintings like this. They considered it important enough to sacrifice careers over. That some of them ended up famous and rich does not change the fact that the movement began very much as an outsider movement meeting with hostility and rejection at every turn–yet they kept doing it!
There’s been a huge number of experiments about modern art and aesthetic judgment. They range from analyses of the heterogeneous prices of art sales to experiments in which viewers try to guess the correct orientation of a piece of abstract art. A recent book pulls together some of this literature and makes some new arguments.
And this paper presents a model of aesthetic appreciation in general, with particular attention to modern art.
I think Evil Captor’s digital sample is just as meaningful and interesting as any Rothko or Newman of this color field variety. They are all exactly the same. If he actually painted it with real paint on a canvas, he’d get texture and some imperfections, and it’d be just like any of the others.
Of course, it wouldn’t be worth millions because Evil Captor is not a ground-breaking artist like Rothko or Newman. In fact, what he did isn’t even art, because it’s just an imitation of an art style that is already ancient and been done a million times.
People whose business it is to describe this work have already done so. Here’s the description of the work from the Sotheby’s catalogue, which follows the exhibition history, provenance, and published literature regarding the piece:
"Onement VI by Barnett Newman overwhelms and seduces the viewer with the totality of its sensual, cascading washes of vibrant blue coexisting with Newman’s vertical “Sign” of the human presence, his iconic and revolutionary “zip.” As a portal to the sublime, the limitless realm of sumptuous color envelops the viewer and brings life to Newman’s assertion that his monumental canvases be experienced up close rather than from a distance. The demarcation of the zip, in its placement, form and complementary hue of light blue, serves both a temporal and spatial purpose in the expansive and personalized experience of this masterpiece of Newman’s aesthetic. By far the most momentous in scale of the six paintings of the Onement series, … "
It then goes on to discuss the importance of Barnett Newman and his works.
If you read that correctly you should realize three very important things about the work:
- it’s blue
- it’s big
- it has a zip.
Everything else in that description is window dressing for the sales catalogue, including the statement that you have to really see it in person to get the full effect.
In short, everything that is important about this piece isn’t really in the piece itself, it’s in the Ongoing Conversation of Art and Newman’s place in it. And, again, it’s more about Onement 1’s mark in the art world than Onement 6’s.
[A side note: our friend John Currin had a bust-length nude titled “Lydian” in the same auction, and it sold for $3 million. It’s a better piece than his Bea Arthur one, but the face is typical Currin.]
So, Frylock, your perceived inability to describe the piece is not warranted. You talked of it’s shimmer; Sotheby’s called it sensuous, cascading washes. It’s the same thing, the professional writer’s just going for the hard-sell.
Moving on to Evil Captor’s piece: it’s not a Color Field piece. It’s much more Hard-Edge movement. A Sotheby’s auction house writer would speak of the notable clarity of its colors, the sumptuous relationship between the field and the line, making much of the fact that Evil Captor’s piece doesn’t quite go all the way to the top and bottom, and finish by discussing the symmetrical mystery of his four blobs.
Your 1000 random people would, in actuality, be faced by a choice between something big and blue, and something simpler and green. For whatever reason, big and blue sell better than simple and green, so even without any other factors to consider, Newman would win.
People with art backgrounds would want to know the history of the works, and so Newman’s work would again be considered the victor.
And, let’s be fair, for a work that Evil Captor dashed off in 4 minutes of Photoshop, it’s not that bad.
This is strongly recommended reading for anybody who has any significant interest in Modern Art.
And here’s a review of Leder’s model and a discussion of how it compares to Scherer’s and others: