This is why I hate postmodernists. Incoherency is not a strength, and effective communication is not a weakness.
I didn’t say effective communication is a weakness, and I didn’t say incoherency is a strength. Nor did I imply these claims. (And what I said has shit-all to do with postmodernism.)
Obviously I’ll point to any great work of art and say this about it.
The discussion would go forward more effectively if you pointed to a generally acknowledge great work of art and explained to me who has finished understanding it, and what it was they understood. 
My wife says I’m giving Escher short shrift, not seeing his greatness because there’s a lot about perspective that I don’t know. If you do know some of this technique stuff, she says, Escher’s stuff isn’t just “a neat trick” but really amazing. For her, it seems, Escher’s greatness resides at least in part in the way she can sit there looking at it forever and still not have a complete grasp on how he did what he did.
Which is in line with what I said makes for greatness, but of course contradicts what I said about Escher.
He’ll likely be considered one of the greats by the general population, but not by the self-appointed artistic elite since they tend to think that anything popular is by definition not any good.
Yep, those Impressionists aren’t popular - or the critics think they stink…or…something. :smack:
I think you’ve nailed it.
My still-in-progress definition of Great Art is that it’s something
(1) that gives us some sort of insight about life/human nature/the universe.
and
(2) that has so many layers of complexity that you can only discover some of them after repeated readings/observations/listens (and sometimes never or not all of them, indeed).
Think of it as a spring that never stops flowing and that is always changing, constantly offering you new “patterns”.
In that respect, Escher’s works may fit the first criteria (not even sure about that) but definitely not the second. I mean, there’s no hidden wisdom, no subtle knowledge to discover. Once you’ve understood the trick, it’s all there is to it.
And I’ll point out immediately that I’ve loved his works since the late 80s. I just don’t think it’s Great Art.
That’s exactly what Barry Goldwater wrote in his review of Frank Stella in the June 1965 issue of Artforum.
Huh? You made the claim - you support it.
It doesn’t work the other way around. 
Once again, I’m interested in examples. What “hidden wisdom” is there in a Bach Concerto, that does not exist in Escher?
At least some people have found them comparable (and found lots of ‘hidden wisdom’ therein):
Wait a minute. You mean I wasn’t the only college kid with an Escher poster on my wall??? 
I think his point is that the purpose of Art is to separate the intellectuals from the hoi polloi.
Similar to Giuseppe Arcimboldo. I consider his work great, but who today even knows of him?
OK, “hidden wisdom” is a little bit corny. Sorry if I cannot really articulate my thinking as well as I’d like :(.
Bach: every time I listen to a Bach piece, I hear something new. Sometimes, it’s a little grace note that I had not heard before. Sometimes it’s a modulation that I had not really paid attention to. Sometimes, it’s the interplay of different voices that I had been unaware of. It fills me with wonder everytime. Truly an “Aha! moment” that happens each time I listen to a piece, even one I know well.
I don’t get that with Escher. Or more accurately, I got that “Aha! moment” 25 years ago. I love his works but I don’t discover anything new everytime I look at them. They gave me all they had to give the first time. The trick is great but it’s a one-shot if you will.
If you imply that I want to feel superior to people who like Escher, then you’re wrong. I said earlier that I do like his work. I just don’t consider it Great Art, that’s all ;).
Its all subjective, De gustibus non est disputandum anyone. Your reason is fine but its only your opinion. If you only see the that aha moment once with Escher’s work then its a shame but just remember that others won’t agree.
I see new stuff in Escher all the time - because as I have aged, I change in what I know (for example) about perspective and the mathematics behind tessilations and ‘strange loops’. I do not appreciate Escher in the same way now as I did 25 years ago. Indeed, 25 years ago I was completely unaware of the similarities between the math behind Escher and the math behind (say) a Bach “Crab Canon”. Check it out.
I myself think the notion that a piece of great art contains ineffible “newness” is incorrect: rather, it is simply a function of the “newness” that the individual brings to the art.
Are you assuming the greatness is constituted entirely by the artwork itself, and not at all by its audience or their reactions?
I’ll provide an example, at the bottom of this post, but first to address this point about dialectic:
I’m making a universal claim. “All great art has such-and-such characteristic.” Pointing to examples doesn’t support a universal claim, because no matter how many examples I point to, a single counterexample will suffice to falsify the claim.
This is why I suggested it would be more to the point for you to provide the counterexample. Not that I consider my claim proven, but rather, that we’d be able to get down to business more quickly if a single counterexample were provided for the claim. I say we can “get down to business more quickly” because if I provide an example, it will now be “up to you” to explain why it’s not a good example, in other words, to show how that piece has in fact been completely understood, and by whom. But then, why go through the process of me giving an example? It’d be faster for you to just give us the counterexample in the first place.
Moreover, universal claims don’t have existential import. Take the following argument: “Unicorns have a single horn, but antelopes have two horns, therefore, antelopes are not unicorns.” The first premise in that argument doesn’t commit me to the existence of unicorns–yet it is, for all that, a true claim about unicorns. Similarly, for you to ask me for an example is to assume that I think there is such a thing as great art. I haven’t said that there is, and the force of my claim about great art doesn’t rely on my thinking that there is any such thing.
In fact, I’m not totally sold on the existence of great art. There are things we call great art, but I am not completely convinced that we apply that label to a single phenomenon.
Having said that, I also don’t intend to positively argue there is no such thing. I just mention this to further explain my earlier hesitation at providing an example. I hesitated because it seems inefficient, and ultimately irrelevant, for me to do so.
So why do I say, anyway, that you can never finish understanding great art? Having thought about it some more, I would have to admit I was telling you what it is that makes art worth coming back to for me. As to whether this is what art historians mean when they talk about “great art” (assuming they really do use that phrase!), I can’t claim to know the truth about that. Having said that, there’s some logic to the idea. After all, if an artwork’s greatness has something to do with the fact that the art historians and/or future artists keep coming back to it in their own works, then it would appear they’re finding something new and worth saying (or in the artists’ case, doing) about it. If it didn’t provide new things to say and do continuously like this, then it would fall by the wayside. People would stop writing about or responding to it. It would no longer be great. Once people are finished understanding it, in other words, it loses its greatness.
Okay so anyway, you want an example. I’ll give you a couple: The Rothko Chapel, and Nighthawks.
So now I think, if I understand your own claim correctly, you’re going to either acknowledge neither of these have been completely understood and ask for more examples (this can go on ad inifinitum!) or acknowledge neither of these has been completely understood and give me your own example of great art that has been completely understood (and tell who has understood it and what evidence we have that they have a complete understanding of it) or else say which one of these has been completely understood, by whom and how we know.
Um, yes?
Huh? If you are going to carry out both sides of the argument and put words in my mouth, I’ll leave you to it. You obviously don’t require my participation!
My point is a simple one: if you make a claim, you should provide evidence to support it - or it isn’t a very convincing claim.
As for your examples, I’m not very familiar with them.
Maybe they have ineffible qualities when viewed first-hand: I’ll reserve judgment until I actually see the works, which I have not. What about Robarts Library?
It inspired Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Does that make it “great art”?
To my mind, great art is not defined by being referenced or parodied by other artists: it exists on its own merits. It has objective value. That’s why it is “great art” and not just “great (to me) art”. There isn’t any one path to greatness - sublimity of composition and execution, unique message, inventiveness (or in contrast: mastery of the known) - all play a part.
One thing is for sure - the adulation of critics and imitation of art trendies doesn’t make something “great”, because art, above all human pastimes, is subject to the “Emperor’s new clothes” effect. Bach would still be “great” even if every critic hated it.