Amusing incident proves that modern perception of "Art" is crap

[Drake Tungsten]

Black Square

It really moves me...

[Thorgal]

Suprematism is the plasmation of an idea started by the Da-Da movement carried to the extreme. It is supposed to be the final liberation of the real objective world, so the artist tries to avoid any influence from the real world. The idea was to liberate the artist´s mind of any influence reduction or representation of the real world. Malevich works are important since the POW of the history of the art or of the philosophy of the art. You cant look at a Malevich and compare it with Michelangelo or Botticelli, since the intention and finality are totally different.

[Richelieu]

Originally posted by Thorgal
Suprematism is the plasmation of an idea started by the Da-Da movement carried to the extreme. It is supposed to be the final liberation of the real objective world, so the artist tries to avoid any influence from the real world. The idea was to liberate the artist´s mind of any influence reduction or representation of the real world. Malevich works are important since the POW of the history of the art or of the philosophy of the art.

Posts like this are rare. I actually found myself agreeing with Asher on something.

Not too sure about the meaning of that last sentence though.

You cant look at a Malevich and compare it with Michelangelo or Botticelli, since the intention and finality are totally different.

You can look at Michelangelo or Botticelli and know that it is art. That's where the intention and finality differ.

[mactbone]

It's interesting that people don't usually complain that context helps people understand literature and other mediums better, but art is different.

I read the LotR back in Junior High, then years later I read it again with more knowledge of Tolkien (where he was from, his language influences) and it became a much more deep and rich work. I was able to enjoy it both times, but in slightly different ways. All forms of art have that same quality. Anyone can appreciate it on it's face but knowing the context makes the audience better able to appreciate it. The Simpsons is funny at it's face, but if you get all of the cultural references it becomes that much better.

I guess I just don't understand why so many people think that art can only be appreciated on it's face. Even going so far as making up some "cultural elite" that wants everyone to know the depth of what makes a piece of art good. Everyone faces art on their own and in their own manner.

[Fake Boris]

There is no possible essentialist definition of art that would establish a list of sufficient and necessary conditions. Analytical philosophy in particular has a long tradition of doing it. And every attempt ended up failing, when someone else published an article defeating a condition with an empirical example taken from a well known work of art generally accepted as such by the competent people.

Right now, there are two popular conceptions of art subsisting alongside each other. The modernist one, which is that of the masses, sees art as a clear cut domain limited by transparent criteria. This is also how artists and critics thought in the "Age of Manifestos" (mainly the 19th century and first half of the 20th); they dismissed works that didn't follow the rules of their school as 'non-art', or, supreme insult, as being 'decorative'. By doing this, though, they were simply being ideologically stubborn and created definitions that weren't terribly succesfull at fully englobing contexts and thus had little explicative value, which ultimately is how a theory ought to be judged. This is also the reason why it is widely agreed upon nowadays that the Age of Manifestos produced a very interesting wealth of aesthetic judgments, but not categorial ones. It is also the time when people started to notice how arbitrary the premices behind certain schools of art were, and that we would eventually have to review the idea that art had an 'essence' that developed its potential through a natural, historical evolution.

When it became clear that modernist thinking was hitting a wall - roughly in the 50s - philosophers, art critics and artists started producing works that reflected this state of mind. Self and inter-reference, the death of representation, and deliberate absurdities all reflected a new, postmodernist intuition, that demasking the arbitrary of our customs and metaphysics is a worthwile enterprise. This period (roughly speaking) is also that of structuralism, the second Wittgenstein, Derrida's deconstruction, and George Dickie's institutional theory of art. All are very different in methods and ideas, but they all share, to a certain level, this common objective of 'purifying' our ideas of the useless crap and constructs. Postmodernist thinking in art has abandoned the pretension of finding a stable essence for art and has rather made of the discipline an exercise of 'applied ontology', where 'whatever' becomes a viable criteria for membership in the world of art. This also marks the shift from essentialist definitions towards institutional ones, where art is a 'world' in which the rules are internal to the practice rather than emanating from an axiomatic, truthfunctional system.

Going back to our modernist/postmodernist example, it is quite clear that the masses tend to reject most postmodernist ideas (out of ignorance IMO) for modernist ones. Modernist thinking does offer an opportunity to make the world a naturally significant place, where people can 'hook' themselves to 'essences' and thus find a cure to the intolerance to semantic uncertainty that is pathological in some (well at least according to a Stanford psychological study that I read a few years ago).

So we have an art for the elites, and another one for the masses, with a clear dichotomy between the two. Elitist art usually see mass art as inferior, but rarely denies it the status of art. OTOH popular art squarely denies elitist art any artistic status on the basis that it is 'whatever', meaningless, etc (I already addressed those issues above). Even though I can concede that true, genuine masterpieces usually find their way to the heart of the academic as much as to that of the peasant, I HIGHLY doubt that immediate comprehensibility and clarity is a requirement for something to be called a work of art. After all, a majority of people were illiterate at the time Leonardo painted his masterpieces. And incidentally, I doubt they had any idea what were the new ideas of the Renaissance, or what was the profound philosophical reflexion driving the Quattrocento.

[Thorgal]

Posts like this are rare. I actually found myself agreeing with Asher on something.

Not too sure about the meaning of that last sentence though.

Well, since ancient times the art have been based in the interpretation of the real world. However it is the personal component that the artist adds to his work that makes it "art". In the XIX century the artist began consciously to diminish the objective componet in his work and to increase the personal component. The Da-da movement went way beyond claiming that the objective component was superfluous and proposed the "destruction" of the art (poluted by the rules of the objetivism since the Egiptians times) to rebuild it again with total freedom and independence from the real world. Malevich´s Suprematism is important because it is the final product of this line of thinking, however many people believe that it has never achieved his goals totally.

[Nostromo]

It's interesting that people don't usually complain that context helps people understand literature and other mediums better, but art is different.

I read the LotR back in Junior High, then years later I read it again with more knowledge of Tolkien (where he was from, his language influences) and it became a much more deep and rich work. I was able to enjoy it both times, but in slightly different ways. All forms of art have that same quality. Anyone can appreciate it on it's face but knowing the context makes the audience better able to appreciate it. The Simpsons is funny at it's face, but if you get all of the cultural references it becomes that much better.

I guess I just don't understand why so many people think that art can only be appreciated on it's face. Even going so far as making up some "cultural elite" that wants everyone to know the depth of what makes a piece of art good. Everyone faces art on their own and in their own manner.

True enough. But LOTR is conservative, popular litterature. Tolkien does it by the book. He conforms to the "codes" and "rules" of fiction writing of his day (with a retro twist). That's why anyone can appreciate it fairly easily, because they're familiar with those codes and those rules: they know what to expect. But if someone starts to question these codes and rules, it gets harder and harder to get into and appreciate it. Its a lot harder, for example, to appreciate Beckett than Tolkien.

[lord of the mark]

im with molly, on this one, I think.

Painting and sculpture should be kewl to look at, basically. It can tell you a message, it can give you a purely sensory pleasure, or it can make you think, like a puzzle. Or it can just surprise and amuse. Or it can express emotions. Plenty of representational art does those things, plenty of abstract art does those things.

In the first half of the 20th century, abstract art had some tendency to focus on either A. expressing emotions or B. questioning the definition of art, either seriously or to amuse.

Some of the works under A worked very well at that, some didnt, but much of their expressive potential was lost through repitition - abstract expressionism was TOO dominant, I suppose. As for B, taking a found object and putting it in a museum to question what art is is VERY interesting the FIRST time - after that its only interesting if its particularly well composed, an interesting object, etc - which it isnt always. Similar for most performance art.


So moving past that, Im no longer looking for abstract art that speaks to "the nature of man" as abstract expressionism tried to, and im not wild about most found object type sculptures. But theres plenty of abstract painting and sculpture that I find just amazingly cool to look at. Im sorry if that makes me pretentious (sp?).

[The Emperor Fabulous]

Originally posted by General Ludd



Art does not have to have a human part.

When did I say it did? This particular piece had a human part, but it was removed and the stand was put on display. THAT is what I found artful.

[Nostromo]

im with molly, on this one, I think.

Painting and sculpture should be kewl to look at, basically. It can tell you a message, it can give you a purely sensory pleasure, or it can make you think, like a puzzle. Or it can just surprise and amuse. Or it can express emotions. Plenty of representational art does those things, plenty of abstract art does those things.

In the first half of the 20th century, abstract art had some tendency to focus on either A. expressing emotions or B. questioning the definition of art, either seriously or to amuse.

Some of the works under A worked very well at that, some didnt, but much of their expressive potential was lost through repitition - abstract expressionism was TOO dominant, I suppose. As for B, taking a found object and putting it in a museum to question what art is is VERY interesting the FIRST time - after that its only interesting if its particularly well composed, an interesting object, etc - which it isnt always. Similar for most performance art.


So moving past that, Im no longer looking for abstract art that speaks to "the nature of man" as abstract expressionism tried to, and im not wild about most found object type sculptures. But theres plenty of abstract painting and sculpture that I find just amazingly cool to look at. Im sorry if that makes me pretentious (sp?).

No it makes you open-minded

[The Emperor Fabulous]

DanSed in my head. I thought I was getting a thumbs-up...

[lord of the mark]

Why is that we can accept a symphony as art, even though its totally abstract, or a building by an architect, but we have trouble with an abstract painting? Is a Brahms symphony less "art" than a Wagner opera?

If with music we can appreciate the notes for their own sake, why cant we do so with lines, and brush strokes?

[Barnabas]

I think the issue for many people with little to no artistic background, is that much of the modern art doesnt look complicated to paint or produce.

Holbein´s painting of Thomas Moore looks like something very few people could do.
Black circle looks like something from a geometry book for 6 years old.

Modern art often doesnt look very skillfull.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Brachy-Pride
Holbein´s painting of Thomas Moore looks like something very few people could do.

Yet we have to pay experts big money to detect copies of great masters.


The technical skills are clearly NOT what sets great old masters apart. Its ideas, visualization, composition, for the most part. Which are also part of abstract art, even if you dont have to know how to draw to execute it.

The thing about an idea is, it looks easy AFTER its done. Put a urinal in a museum and call it art - well, I could have done that. Take 42 minutes of silence, and call it a piece of music, well I could have done that. Decide that software can be written for free, by a community that would share its ideas, and constantly improve it? I could have done that. Build a chain of restaurants based on a limited menu, standardized quality, simplified to idiot proof standard preparation methods, and low prices, well I could have done that.

But I didnt. Cause these ideas werent obvious before they were actually invented. Thats why im not Ray Kroc, or Linus Torvalds, or John Cage, or Marcel Duchamps.

and of course an imitation Duchamps, can be as pathetic is the umpteenth fast food concept.

[General Ludd]

Originally posted by The Emperor Fabulous


When did I say it did? This particular piece had a human part, but it was removed and the stand was put on display. THAT is what I found artful.

I misunderstood you, then.