What People Call Art Never Ceases To Amaze Me

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

This one may get me in trouble, but as one who considers himself an artist I feel morally compelled to jump in here.

What is the weak argument about the inability to define art? (That’s a rhet. ?; so please save the GD links) It is easily definable as “Creative activity or expression, the intent of which is to define, describe, allude to, portray or capture one or more aspects of the human condition at a given point in time.”

The problem is, no talent, self-obsessed “artists” and their negative talent art history/art theory groupies have to change the definition to “everything is art” so that they can call what they do “art”, or they have to assign it some mystical quality akin to the Unspeakable Name of M-ke in order to justify what they do.

It’s pretentiousness in its lowest form. There is certainly a great range of art that doesn’t do anything for me or that I just find aesthetically unappealing (Ginsberg, Kandinsky, Pollack, Dos Pasos, Tan and lots of others), but at least what their work is art. De Grazia, for example, was not an artist; he was an illustrator. The person who throws feces at the audience is not an artist; he’s just a health risk.

Just to keep the accusations of hypocrisy to a minimum, I use this definition on my own work. There are poems and stories that are art, and there are some that are activities/exercises, and there are some that are just pieces - little stories created for my amusement with no artistic qualities or value. Everything I create is certainly not art, and I think that makes the art I create more worthwhile because I know the difference, and I believe the reader would as well.

42

I’m not saying that any given person has an “inability to define art”, I’m saying that any given person has an inability to define art for anyone besides themselves.

43

A couple points, if I may:

I don’t think that anyone is making fun of Thomas Kinkade for being popular. No one makes fun of Rembrandt, and his paintings will always sell for many multiples of what Kinkade’s will. I would bet that a sketch on a napkin by Rembrandt would sell for the cost of a new, full-sized “painting” by Kinkade, just because of the association with the quality stuff R. did on canvas.

What makes K. a bunch of crap is NOT being popular. It’s the fact that he has the imagination of a first grader. Look at a page-a-day calendar of his. All the pictures are of these bucolic setting with “quaint” cottages and misting streams, etc. If he’s going to run with this technique of “painting light”, then at least dream up some different scenes, for crying out loud!

Where are the candlelight Christmas services, the White House glowing and lit at night, the Vietnam Memorial lit and visited at night, etc? These are just my ideas from half a minutes thought, but apparently Kinkade is more interested in churning out yet another iteration of what even he’s done a hundred times before rather than think of something interesting to do.

Norman Rockwell has enjoyed a resurgence of respect in the art community in recent years, but you can bet that a lot of it has to do with the fact that not only could he paint Ike so that he looked like Ike, but he had some real imagination, and could tell an entire story with one picture. AND IT WASN’T THE SAME STORY OVER AND OVER.

The other point is something I got out of the magazine “Brill’s Content”. Art today has turned into literature. The entire point seems to be the statement, not the art form as such. So, you get people who will do anything to get across their intellectual/emotional point.

Personally, I can understand the idea that anything is technically art, but some of it is still junk art. What kind of tortured decision making process was necessary to choose to throw paint at something, or pee in a jar (or whatever)? It seems to me that a careful decision process is intrinsic to the process of making art. Just setting up a camera and letting it film for 24 hours is so lacking in actual need for a human brain that it pretty much falls off the scale of “being art” for me.

44

Now, I’m neither a biologist or an art critic. But this guy jerked off for seven days straight, only to produce 6 flippin’ milliliters of sperm?

What a wimp! :stuck_out_tongue:

Oh, and don’t be dissin’ Rembrandt, dammit. That’s pure craftsmanship, whether you think it’s pretty or not. Jerking off in a tea cup isn’t.

45

All of us have an idea of what art is, based on conditioning and past experiences, and, yes we ALL have an ability to define what art is, but mostly based on that conditioning.

What art is, is defined to a large extent, by art history, human history. Most have not reflected and challenged the idea of what art is that was given to them .In other words, their concepts of what art is, was not born from them.
Art cannot be defined except in retrospect, like everything else, its future and potential is unknown.
Is there a point being make, or not being made with the semen piece?

Forty million human sperm, per ejaculation.
Dead sperm, and its connotations.
Semen, related to human emotional and sexual intimacy.
A male bodily liquid, that is the seed of human procreation.
The penis, a body part loaded with references, to a wide range of issues.
The penises reference to the vagina, clitoris, and the femyle.
The human orgasm.
Masturbation, a human behaviour, permeated with emotions of shame, guilt, pleasure, lose, hope, companionship.

Etc…

This work is loaded with issues. Its many varied meanings are yet to be expounded upon, but if you cannot see them, or refuse to see them, it is more about you and not the work.

If you cannot see past the stereotypes and clichés in you own thinking, try to imagine that other people can, or at least make the attempt.

46

I’m of the opinion that if someone has something they want to say, to express, to convey, and they do so, it’s art. That’s the common denominator between all painters, sculptors, writers, musicians, actors, directors, etc etc.

I don’t think Kinkade has anything to convey or say, except, “I want money! MONEY! MONEY!!!” I guess in my totally subjective opinion, anybody who creates something for the sole purpose of making a million dollars is not an artist.

47

Not arrogance, just fact. Some art is not targeted at the public. To give a similar example, I can find sublime beauty in certain complex equations, but 99% of the people on earth can’t see the same beauty because they have never studied calculus. And it is the same with art. Art is more than paint on canvas, it is a world of ideas, and those people who are unfamiliar (or unwilling) to take the time to understand the language of the art world are just plain not equipped to handle it. This is not to say that are not equipped to handle it, but have not developed that capacity.

I will give an example from my own work, and present a new original conceptual artwork of my own, right here in this message:
o o
There it was. Did you like it? Of course not. But that doesn’t make it any less effective. I have been producing these artworks for nearly 30 years. I have places thousands of pairs of two little black dots in places around the US. The basis for the artwork is simple. The human brain has an involuntary response whenever it sees any two dots, it tries to interpret them as two eyes. Just viewing those dots will invoke an involuntary neurological response, your pupils will dilate slightly and your nervous system will become slightly aroused. This is all thoroughly documented in neurological research where I got this idea from in the first place. So wherever my little dots are present, people will have a subliminal feeling of being watched, they can not prevent it. And now that you know the rationale behind the artwork, perhaps you can catch just a glimpse how it fits into the world of art, especially the postmodernist genre that is concerned with the significance of signs and symbols in public spaces.

You accuse artists of being elitists. What rot. My painting professor once dealt with this issue, he said he decided to look up elitism in the dictionary. He said it defined elitism as the holding of exclusive knowledge for the use only by a select group. He said that if anyone bothered to ask him about his artwork, he’d talk their ear off, so nobody could ever accuse himself of being elitist.

And that’s the crux of the issue here. The only elitists here are the anti-art gripers and whiners. They hold artists like Kinkade or Ross as the only legitimate art. However, those “artists” are using styles developed out of the Impressionist era. Back in those days, Impressionist artists were considered by the masses to be just as offensive to commonplace sensibilities. Impressionist artists were reviled in the press, burned in effigy, riots broke out at exhibitions, etc. But now it’s the “cultural standard.” Perhaps in about 25 or 50 years, people will be deriding artworks NOT made out of bodily fluids, and denouncing the new movements as offensive. And they will be just as convinced as today’s public that art always has been this way and should never be anyway else. And the artists will continue to progress, despite the public’s ignorance.

48

am I the only one who saw the piece on CNN about the
“Soap with Pubic Hair”
I’ll try to find a link.

49

Thank you for you support, officer Moderator.

The “American Heritage” dictionary defines a philistine as " A smug, ignorant, especially middle-class person who is regarded as being indifferent or antagonistic to artistic and cultural values." I confess to being smug and a fairly recent entrant to the middle-class (from below, as ChasE would likely guess correctly). I was an audio visual technician, an art “enabler” in some sense.

I worked at the National Gallery of Art for 4 years, and I have heard hundreds of “sophisticated” analyses of art from people with impeccable academic credentials.

To give an example of art interpretation that I found outrageous, not in its conclusions but in its methodology… A graduate student was giving her dissertation on the “Bullseye” series of works by Jasper John. Her interpretation was that the bullseye represented a “glory hole” , the waist-high hole drilled through mem’s room stall deviders to facilitate anonymous homosexual encounter. She had some documentation that Johns has acknowledged his sexual orientation, and was sexually active among the culture that used glory holes. Actually, it sounded perfectly plausible to me.

During her oral defense, which she handled very well, no one asked the question I wanted asked, “Did you ask Jasper Johns about this?” He is living, though he is (or was at the time in 199?) a somewhat notorious recluse.

So I asked her afterward, and she gave me that look that ChasE probably had on his face when he read my earlier reply. “No, why would I do that?”, was her answer. I was so shocked that I asked one of our curators about academic rigor in art interpretation. It would seem (to me) incumbent upon the graduate student to seek out information from THE primary source of her subject matter if possible, even if there was no reply to the query. And imagine my surprise to learn that, no, the ARTISTS’ opinions are not really germane to the interpretation of their art, in the opinion of the academic community.

So I pretty much lost all respect for “informed” opinion about art. Then I worked directly with Robert Rausenberg on a multi-media installation at the gallery, where he gave a lecture while so obviously drunk (drinking Jack out of what looked like a 32 oz. tumbler on stage), that an audience member asked him why he appeared in public this way. His reply was, “Why are you such a bitch”?

I don’t have much respect left regarding art. I am opinionated and blunt, but not ignorant.

I wouldn’t have replied to this message if there hadn’t been several other voices raised in my defense. Thanks all.

By the way, I myself dissed Mr. T. Can we trash celebrities more freely than each other?

50

Uncle Beer:

Phil·is·tine (n.)
1.A member of an Aegean people who settled ancient Philistia around the 12th century B.C.
2. a. A smug, ignorant, especially middle-class person who is regarded as being indifferent or antagonistic to artistic and cultural values.
b.One who lacks knowledge in a specific area.

Is there some issue over whether my characterization of Yojimboguy is correct or not? I believe it was accurate. Or perhaps you believe “philistine” is a devastatingly pejorative term like “nigger?” That would be quite a stretch.

My statement was made in the abstract. I expressed my opinion that these sorts of statements outrage artists, and artists perhaps would metaphorically act to deliberately outrage their audiences in return. Perhaps I phrased it badly, but geez, this was not an invective-filled flame directed at one specific person. I merely singled out one set of statements as representative of a class of people who just don’t get it. So I humbly request for you to lighten up on me and not be so ready to see egregious insult where it was not intended.

51

Flashback:

In college, I met a guy who told me and a buddy that he used to mold his turds into animal shapes and give them to his mother.

He (wisely) did not describe this as art.

Chrome

52

Chas E.

I think the thing that annoys most people is that what is displayed in art galleries is just not good art. It may be art by your definition but it is truly awful art. Yet it still gets plaudits from the intelligentsia even though it requires absolutely no skill and craftsmanship to make. It’s seven glasses of wank on a string.

You may say that it’s having the idea that counts but I’m sure that loads of people have ideas like that, they just don’t put them into practise because they are sublimely ridiculous.

Here’s my idea for an art exhibit. Buy one newspaper featuring a story of a particularly traumatic event on the front page. Piss on it. Keep piss sodden newspaper in a cardboard box (or whatever’s handy) for a month or so or until the initial shock of the incident has died down. Take steps to ensure that the newspaper doesn’t become too damaged.

The piece would be called oh, I dunno…The degredation of social memory. The idea is that the piss defiles the newspaper in the same way that the passing of time attacks and destroys our initial feelings of shock and horror upon learning of something terrible. It makes telling points about the old maxim ‘Time heals all wounds’, showing the underlying sentiment in an ironic light whereby the comfort one is supposed to feel from hearing that statement is replaced by discomfort when one realises that the act of mass forgetting and gradual acceptance of tragic events is as harmful to the impact and legacy of the event as the ammonia in the urine is to the newspaper.

Or you could just say it’s a tabloid rag soaked in piss. I don’t really care. I just made all that up just now. It took me 5 seconds to think of the idea and about ninety to phrase it in suitably pretentious terms so as to wring a meaning out of it. Question: If I did that and if my art were displayed would you (a) consider it to be art (b) consider it to be good art © consider me to be a good artist (d) consider my idea to have any sort of artistic merit even though I made it up in ninety seconds for the purposes of debate including typing time.

Basically, if you don’t consider it good art, or not art at all I’d like to know why. If you do consider it good art then how do you explain how a garden variety schmuck like me can produce it. If someone like me can do it (have the ideas, I mean), what’s so special about any of it?

53

Its up to you.
If you want to showcase that work as a representation of an idea, feeling, intuition, statement of yours, go ahead.
But obviously not.
Why not take your 406, posts on this site, and write a book, called, my straight dope, dope.
If you are not serious, and you are not, nobody gives a shit, including you.
If an artist out in the real world, is not serious and doesnt give a shit, then whats the point, who cares?

But if one is serious and trying to develop their ideas, then it is a different story.
But just because you dont understand or connect with the semen work, doesnt mean the artist is not serious and sincere.

54

…that would be

Gomez…

55

but is the sincerity of an artist enough to warrent his work beling labelled “Good art”.

Let’s say for arguments sake that I was a struggling artist fresh out of art college who had just come up with the Pisspaper idea and was serious about pursuing it and selling it and getting his work publicised. Would that change your estimation of my work? If so, why? The idea is the same but all that’s changed is how determined I am to make it a success. Would that qualify my work with greater merit? If so, why? And why is the amount of work I am prepared to put in so inextricably linked to the idea itself?

56

I never said that the artist was insincere or cynical in any way. I never even said that his work wasn’t art. Just that I felt his art was bad art. I feel it’s bad art because it is simply an idea (and an obtuse one at that, far as I can tell) yet the idea is executed with the absolute bare minimum of craftsmanship and skill.

The idea I got from posts like Chas E.'s was that the idea was more important that the craftsmanship. I disagree. I consider a Rembrandt self portrait infinitely superior to Seven levels of cum or whatever it’s called but basically, once you strip away the fine craftsmanship and brilliant artistic skill, what is it? A picture of himself. Hardly an original idea. Basically I think that any definition of art should be more skill oriented than the one we are presented with in this thread by such people as Chas E and yourself. Otherwise, what’s the point?

57

I don’t mind what people do and what they call it in the name of art, usually. I just think it’s an injustice that they get recognition, respect, or money for moronic stuff like this. Especially when truly talented people seem to get pushed aside because they aren’t drugged up enough to come up with shitty ideas deliberately designed to shock.

58

[Morticia voice] Gomez, darling! [/Morticia voice]

You’ve very eloquently expressed one of the ideas that rattle around in my head - that art, by it’s very definition, has to have some element of something that is done very well. Thank you.

jinwicked - your commentary on Rockwell is hilarious! I don’t necessarily agree with it, but it is very funny, and I’ll probably never be able to view a Rockwell piece the same way again!

59

I object to the adjectives bad and good when describing art. Art just is, as far as I’m concerned. It doesn’t need the modifier.

60

Look, there’s plenty of bad art, and plenty of bad art criticism and bad art grad students. There’s an old rule, 90% of anything is crap. You’re lucky when encounter the 10% that is worth your consideration. So don’t flog all 100% over the worst 10%. Sometimes progress doesn’t come from the 90%, it comes through the small 10% who want to go their own way. Hell, even I think, just from the description of the “semen artist” that it’s probably crap, but that doesn’t mean I’m prepared to completely dismiss the whole concept as invalid just from some flamebait report on the press wires.

Just to give some more examples in related genres:

In Japan last February, a jeweler in Japan offered custom glass pendants in the shape of a heart, with a center containing a DNA sample extracted from semen. A creepy gift if you ask me, but then, it probably sold like wildfire.

Art consultants are now offering to extract DNA from blood and liquify it into ink for signing and authenticating artworks. The DNA can be compared to known samples to prevent forgeries.