I think modern art is what happens when your "understanding art" circuits get into a feedback loop of some kind, there's something going haywire in there. Modern art is the mental equivalent of an allergic reaction. So we get these famous artists who made things like big canvases of entirely purple, and we say it's art because art critics sneezed out a bunch of reasons why it's art.
Laypeople look at Rothko and wonder why a guy who made rectangle blobs on canvas is better than all the other guys who thought of making rectangle blobs on canvas. And then you wonder what's the point? The point of art is, depending on your philosophy, variously to improve the mind or the spirit or to provide aesthetic pleasure; it's not to satisfy the intellectual pretentions of art nerds. The obfuscated C contest is a difficult intellectual pursuit and this wouldn't be hard to understand to someone who doesn't know C, but it is hard to explain how Rothko's rectangle blobs or Pollock's scribbles improve the human condition more than anyone else's blobs or scribbles except that these artists happened to fall in the right confluent streams of intellectual nonsense at the right time. The obfuscated C contest is not a thing where you say, "my five-year-old can do that", or that any other Joe could do that should he rub the intellectual establishment the right way. But we live in a world where we take stuff anyone can do and put it in a museum because it has some neat context behind it or something. And so the layperson is completely nonplussed.
By "like big canvases of entirely purple", you're probably referring to Yves Klein, who I think is actually a bad example for what you're getting at. Klein was interested in a kind of total, pure experience of color. He worked with a paint chemist to create an especially vibrant blue color ("International Klein Blue") which, to a pre-television era, would have actually been quite mesmerizing. Klein was also a legitimately fascinating and eccentric character who I think would interest anybody that studied him.
I have a rule about art. It doesn't have to be everybody's rule; it's just mine.
If the artist creates something that he would want for himself, for his own living space, even if he knew that nobody else would ever get to see it, I'll accept that it's art, even if I can't stand it. If the artist is working on commission, the rule applies to whoever commissioned it. If it's something he would want for himself for his private island hermitage, okay, it's his art. Different people have different tastes, and this is his. And I'm fine with edge cases such as making things such as children's art under the sincere belief that he would have wanted it for himself if he were a child. I'm not trying for a legalistic definition, just a general principle that, to be real art, it has to satisfy the artist's personal esthetic desires in the complete absence of social payoffs such as statement making, money, being the center of attention in order to feel more significant, trying to build a reputation, etc.
If it would be something he would want for himself--a vibrant blue canvas in a color the artist finds mesmerizing, for example--then I consider it art even if he intends to sell it, get attention, build a reputation, etc.
I doubt most modern art could pass this test. I think most of it is just cynical manipulation of the pathetic and pretentious by the narcissistic and manipulative. If the artist wouldn't have any interest in it in the absence of an audience, it's just a product.
Of course, I can't know for sure what the artist's motivations were for a piece, but that doesn't matter. My definition of fraud doesn't require me to be able to spot it.
When M Duchamp put a urinal on display in an art museum it made a novel point that we perceive quotidian things differently just because they're in an art gallery.
When [help me here] "installed" a live donkey "to symbolise his inability to come up with a good idea" that's piss.
That said there is plenty of excellent modern art. If you live in/near a wealthy city, this is easily verified.
living on a street with 8 contemporary art galleries I can say that 90% of contemporary art sucks. It's just like startups, 90% of them fail. But people who love startups or art keep making more regardless.
I think a lot of the irritating attitude is the support of people who all do the same thing. Same way when your friend makes a new web app you're not going to say it sucks even if it does because (a) they're your friend and (b) you are going to want moral support for your next web app at some point.
Almost right. It goes both ways. I'm not talking about making things in general. I'm talking about things you make as art (or craft, I suppose, where part of the design is chosen based on your own esthetic preferences.) If you design it in a way that satisfies your own esthetic desires--it's art that you would enjoy for yourself--then it's your art, even if I don't like it, and even if it will end up going to someone else or bringing you fame and fortune.
But if it's not something you'd ever want yourself but, for example, you made it as a vehicle to gain notoriety or money, then it's not art, as far as I'm concerned. I don't owe your childish demand for attention or $20,000 "statement about capitalist oppression" any reverence just because you claim it's art.
I don't know man, I probably wouldn't even want forks (picking something of "obvious" utility) in my house if I were the ONLY one in the world who knew about them. What would guests think? That I'm some kind of weird food-impaler, maybe a closet Sadist. If people didn't use forks, choosing to have forks wouldn't be a foregone conclusion at all. Even all by myself.
You entirely undervalue the social context of objects, including objets d'art.
> You entirely undervalue the social context of objects, including objets d'art.
A lot of people might value something because it goes against the grain of social and cultural context. Those things might be more interesting or provoke different thoughts or perspectives.
That's the thing with totally out there, nutbar work. Usually there's a story that makes it all make sense, in relative terms.
A lot of artists strive very hard to produce something new which is, at its essence, nearly impossible. The distance you have to go to get somewhere uncharted is vast indeed.
If people think art is easy they should struggle to create some themselves. It will take years to be able to produce something that isn't immediately recognizable as either too unrefined for serious consideration, too obviously derivative, or so done to death it's a cliche.
It captures the essence of the struggling artist, and their perhaps seemingly mediocre output, better than anything else I've ever read before.
Also keep in mind that when people look at art, they're often placing the artist somewhere along this path into the uncharted; appreciating their struggle and being curious about where they will move next.
I think what you are describing is "art I don't really see the merit of". Modern art - as understood by most people - encompasses Van Gough through Matisse, Hockney through Warhol.
Is the work of Dali an "allergic reaction"? How about Roy Lichtenstein? How about Jackson Pollock? How about Tracey Emin? Where do you draw the line here?
If you draw the line at the point where you stop seeing the artistic merit, and if you start defining art from that purely subjective view point, you're surely missing out. What about artists who fall just past the line where you see the artistic merit? Is it possible you just don't understand that work? Will you start to define art as purely mechanical skill? If not, where will you define it?
That's an interesting and excellent question, strawman though it is. The thread you're replying to is an exploration of "Can you distinguish between art and non-art purely via the subjective merit and appreciation of the result?". But the question you're (really) asking is: "Given an attempt to define art, can that definition be widened to include everything, rendering it useless?"
I'm not trying to construct a straw man, I'm trying to talk about the lay of the land. If I have a beef it is with the irrational, undisciplined, non-illuminating, petty dullness of the whole argument.
Because in the many times I have seen this argument, it always seems to go the same way. There is a Philistine sneering at some boring or obscure objects, and there is an angry Defender of Art who treads a fine line between (on one hand) a bland modern schoolteacher's orthodoxy which says nothing can be excluded and (on the other hand) a haughty attitude that the boring object is really better than some other boring objects - you know, to those with REAL discernment - and that the Philistine probably loves airbrush art and Thomas Kinkade and the pre-Raphaelites (hee hee hee). There is a huge dogpile of smug people on the Philistine, whose populist persecution complex is encouraged. The Defender (who often enough is just an undergraduate with a little art history or a 35mm camera), is just fueling the Philistine, and the Philistine is fueling the Defender, and so on forever.
If I am bothered by any specific art, it is the pieces which use yet another random object to draw out this same discussion we have been having for over 50 years.
I don't really object to a totally stoned view of the world where everything is interesting period, and maybe it really is useless to talk about art. That seems to me at least consistent, and not a perpetuation of the same crummy drama used to endlessly propagate the modern orthodoxy. On the other hand, if someone wants to actually try excluding something from art then that also provides a starting point for an actual discussion of some kind.
A little off-topic, but why is your xkcd link using ssl? Really curious, since I didn't think xkcd ever exposed https links, can't see any reason for it, and not sure how you got it.
Did you add the "s" manually, for, I dunno, the sake of art ;) ?
And that's why I dislike "art" - because too often the only thing that makes something art is a label. Without it, it would be a skippable youtube video. His comment about the photo of a woman sitting in a chair is spot on. Nobody would give it five seconds if it was in somebody's summer collection, because it does look like a boring holiday photo. The article's author may have cherry picked, but it's true that art lacks fundamental safeguards against crap. If you have a reputation, you can post almost everything in the art thread.
I value aesthetics more than art. It's much better defined. Not everything that looks nice is an art, but in worst case you're left with something that looks nice ;-).
> value aesthetics more than art. (...) something that looks nice
"Aestethics" doesn't really require anything to look good.
Personally, I think LMFAO[1] and Robyn[2] looks absolutely terrible. But that tickles some part of my brain, and I enjoy the aestethics of it, in all it's uglyness.
The OP point was not about art being mere satisfaction for art nerds, but that there may be an effort to appreciate it. That's true of most art forms. It just happens that which effort depends partly on the person. It seems that for some reason, people are put off by what's around modern and contemporary art (the social aspects of people participating in it, etc…). Nothing prevents you from going beyond that, appreciate what you like, and expand your taste to new things.
The whole "my five year old can do that" argument is a bit tired. That's similar to the arguments that music using electronics is not art, etc… By itself, why should the amount of efforts necessary to produce something matter at all ? Besides, a lots of people engaging in "garbage looking art" were actually very skilled from a traditional POV, but went a way where they would not use it conventionally. Note also that similar issues arise for older art forms: it is fair to say that most people are put off by classic zen gardens (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryōan-ji). There is much less social proof at work there, and yet, couldn't you make the same argument about them ? Would you dismiss them as easily ?
Regarding Rothko or Klein, some people really like his art, without claiming to be particularly knowledgeable about art. Don't forget also that the famous stuff is generally a limited period of an artist production. Rothko did not just pain rectangles, Pollock dripping period was relatively short, etc...
Except Rothko was a lousy artist before he hit on the black on black rectangle thing. A study of his development as an artist shows somebody who is almost talent free.
I think the point is that much of modern art is so self referential that it has become almost devoid of any sort of external meaning. This is easy to observe. Sit for a few hours in the modern art wing of your local free public museum and observe as the man on the street barely holds back snickers and gafaws at the absurdity of some of the work.
I'm reminded of a tour through the Vatican art collection, perhaps one of the finest in the world. The crowds were bunched around some of the great statuary and paintings (even ones they didn't formerly know). Near the end of the tour, the viewer is thrust into the modern art collection. The crowds suddenly stop bunching and most people can't wait to get through it.
This seems on its face backwards. What should be more relevant to the modern viewer, statues of a dead religion in a language nobody natively speaks or religious art made by their peers and contemporaries?
"Except Rothko was a lousy artist before he hit on the black on black rectangle thing. A study of his development as an artist shows somebody who is almost talent free."
I accept that you think he was almost talentless, but he wasn't. I think he was a great talent long before he became well known for the typical rothko stuff, and it wasn't just talent in the modern sense but also in the craft sense, when he was a figurative painter especially of new york scenes (try googling his painting of the new york subway).
Your anecdote about the vatican collection is a good one. But it doesn't mean that modern art is worthless, or even suggest that it is.
There's a lot of subtlety in rothko's brushwork that most people don't pick up on. Really they're large, complex pictures but on a different level from most painting. I saw about 20 of his paintings in the turner/rothko exhibition in London about three years ago, and seeing them in a space that suits them brings out their impressive quality, and it became hard to see them as "just rectangles" or however you want to put it.
Sorry this is going to be long, but I'm going to try and explain my...perhaps provincial and unfair...way of thinking about Rothko...
First off, there is some truly great modern art being produced these days. I really think it has to do with the maturing of modern art as a field (see #2 below). Some of the recent Russian surrealists are producing astonishing stuff and there is some absolutely wonderful, delicate, sculpture art coming out of Japan in the last 20 years.
Something I've tried to do when helping my friends to try and appreciate modern art is to explain it in two ways:
1) It's important to understand a work of art as part of a continuum of the artist's individual work. I usually use Picasso as a frame of reference. He started off with a fairly traditional style, some really great stuff, and at a young age. He had a genuine interest and talent for the field. Ciencia y Caridad and even La Salchichona are quite good stuff. So when you look at Picasso through his career, and the transition into his later forms, you can generally see the progression and how he arrived where he did.
2) It's important to understand a work of art given the confluence of history and the actions/reactions of artists. Major shifts in art styles are quite often a reaction to a perceived dead-end to an older form. An older form may have evolved to the point that there simply is nothing more that can be said with this form...it's become an intolerable box of so many arbitrary rules that everybody's work ends up like everybody else's work. To jump out of the box might mean inventing a new form or new direction. Often works of art that are near the beginning of an immature style seem simple, silly or even childish. But those produced as the style matures can end up as quite wonderful. I find the music world provides several great examples of this happening, Classical music (e.g. Mozart) was as much a response to the cruft that had built up around Baroque (e.g. Bach) as anything. A more modern take might be minimalism. One of my favorite composers in the style is Steve Reich. His early stuff I can take or leave, endless experiments with phase and looped recordings blah blah. But some of his later stuff is sublime. Minimalism had matured sufficiently during his own lifetime that it went from screwing around with the interesting rhythms that appear when two pianos play the same phrase slightly out of phase...to intense, layered tapestries of sound that can fill a concert hall.
Try as I might, I can't seem to apply either of these very successfully to Rothko without ending up cynical. If I go with approach #1, I can't seem to come up with a narrative that shows a steady progression. Instead it seems like he simply bounced around from fad to fad, selecting whatever was fashionable at the time that seemed both impenetrable to the layman and required as little effort as possible on his part to paint. His responses to criticisms are usually layers of indecipherable Yoda-like nonsense. He didn't start as an artist very young, and after he did decide to take it up (in his 20s I think!) he didn't really seem to make a serious go at it. He did the equivalent of taking a couple of correspondence classes and hanging around with the currently fashionable crowd. When fashion changed (e.g. Salvador Dali's triumphant shows), Rothko simply switched to a hack tale on whatever was drawing the crowds. It doesn't seem to be a man driven by an insatiable passion to find his own voice. There just doesn't seem to be any sort of recognizable innovation in his work arguably until he starts painting big monotone rectangles. But that's like saying framing a paint sample the last time I painted my living room is "innovative".
Applying #2 is almost as bad. He seemed to be more of a hanger-on to the fashionable club of the day. In startup-ese, he seemed to pivot to the best selling, least effort fad of the year. "What's fashionable this year? Moderne or Abstract Expressionism? Which is easier? Abstract Expressionism it is! I can crank out like 20-30 of these puppies a day!" There's no real progression from his subway figure paintings to his surrealist period to his abstract expressionist period. He just bounces from one to the other. Art appreciation commentators and textbooks try and retrofit this into a narrative of him "stripping away the unnecessary" or "simplifying his work" but it seems like he just came full circle, from somebody who wasn't ever particularly interested in art, and didn't want to put much effort into it, into somebody who just couldn't be bothered in the end. He doesn't seem to fit in as part of the evolution of art since he bounces around between movements (but with the same hamfisted lack of polish or style) and doesn't evolve with them and he definitely doesn't appear to set a direction for the art world to follow in it's next evolving step.
Other than volume (why bother naming them, I'll do colors, then numbers for a while, but then I'll get bored and just not bother) there just doesn't seem to be any skill or point to his work. And there's nothing wrong with that, but we call those kinds of folks "house painters" not "artists". The East wall in my dining room doesn't need a title either.
(full disclosure, I've seen Rothko's work at the National Gallery in the specially constructed Tower exhibit, at the Leeum's small but really well curated modern art collection (though I don't think they displayed his works as well as they could have), the MoMA (of course), the Guggenheim in NYC and Venice, and I think the Musee D'art Moderne in Paris and have really tried to get with it w/r to his body of work including reading a biography about him at some point and watching a documentary about his life)
Sure, art is subject to personal taste, and I'm not saying that anybody is wrong in liking his stuff, it's just that I end up decidedly not enjoying his work and always leave with a cynical taste in my mouth no matter how open minded I go in. But as always with art, it's up to the individual to interpret and enjoy the art. Here's somebody who obviously does http://fuckyeahmarkrothko.tumblr.com/
That's the perspective from which I think it's totally legitimate to say: this is shitty art. Not the initial, "I don't get it so it must be crap" reaction. But trying to see so deeply into it that you can see the fraud or the idiocy.
That is why I really love Banksy in general, and especially Exit Through the Gift Shop. He has such a keen nose for fraud and pretense.
Right. When I see a Rothko in a gallery I know pretty much immediately it's one of his before I walk up to the info card. And my immediate gut reaction is usually one of incredulity. But like most modern art you have to try and learn about the context of the piece to appreciate it. And the more I dive into the context around his work the less I like it.
I generally like Banksy too. At first glance I like the aesthetic, and then when pondering a work, I enjoy the satire, symbolism, the cultural references and imagery.
And even if the final work is made in a few moments, I know that he spent time, perhaps hundreds of hours building out the stencil set, planning the piece, choosing a subject, etc. for the final image.
Contemporaries for sure, but probably not peers. The world that created that art is far removed from the world of the visitors. Art has its bubbles too.
I'm sure 99% of HN knows about J/K navigation and appreciates when websites implement it. But it's unknown outside the world of software development.
There's a bubble at ConceptArt.org, CGSociety, and every other place where people gather to talk about something. Art bubbles and tech bubbles have a similar problem: convincing people in other bubbles that what you value has value. The art in the article makes more sense when you see it as the product of a bubble. You would need to peer inside the bubble with a guidebook to know what you're looking at.
But I think there's another term for these bubbles, "echo chamber". They exist in every shared activity if no new input is brought in to keep the family from getting incestuous. The more I think about the concept of the "meme" as an analogue to genes, the more I see parallels.
The old statues are more relevant to many people because it is so amazing that they have been preserved and it gives them a window into old things, and because old things achieve a sort of special-object status especially in connection with religion (relics...) Moreover, the old things have already been through ruthless filtering, and the things which remain tend to have more inherent interest than the average recently-created thing.
That last bit makes perfect sense to me. Look at science or math. What's more comprehensible to the modern layman: something that we learned decades to centuries ago? Or work that's being published this month?
If you go to a general-interest science museum, they mainly cover science's greatest hist of yesteryear.
Not saying "some five year olds can do that" or even that the argument is ever meaningful. Just a cute video.
Too bad she'll either die of the chemicals or spend the rest of her life hiding from the fame of the past while trying to define herself, or worst, spend the rest of her life trying to retrieve the joy and vision of her former self.
If you don't know the story behind obfuscated C, but only look at the code listing as art, then many people would say "my five-year-old can do that", since it just looks like a bunch of random characters.
It is totally fine not to like art, and not wanting to invest time in understanding it. But there is a difference between not understanding something and proclaiming it "humbug" because you dont understand it.
Though I agree that modern art is mostly pointless, I actually have prints by Rothko and Pollock. I've dashed through countless modern art museums around the world, but there are a few artists and styles that consistently make me stop and stare. I can't explain why I like these works. I didn't know nor care about the artists' background or philosophy. I didn't buy it to impress anyone or make myself look artsy. Oddly, I don't like most other color field art. I don't even like Rothko's darker work. There's something about his big bright color fields that appeals to me. Is that art?
Actually, a lot of modern art IS intellectual games; not spirit or aesthetics. Look at the readymades of Marcel Duchamp (early 20th century). And these intellectual games apply to modern literature and music as well.
Many people broke down and cried when looking at Rothko works. Certainly it doesn't have that effect on me (mild boredom), but you dismiss their effects to easily.
I think you're nitpicking pointlessly here. Rather than seeking interpretations that you can be snide and cranky about, seek interpretations that make sense.
Literature is art, but literature isn't just a bucket of statements. Indeed, plenty of interesting literature makes use of things that aren't plain statements. If Upon a Winter's Night a Traveller, for example. Its title alone isn't a proper statement, and the book plays with that kind of incompleteness throughout.
The statement version of the book might be something like, "Incomplete statements can be interesting." But that's not art.
I don’t see an interpretation that makes sense. In fact, I don’t think there is one. I guess you define a “statement” to be a complete sentence, judging by “its title alone isn’t a proper statement”, but titles are rarely statements anyway and the actual contents of the novel, I am sure, are full sentences. We need to use more precise language, instead of hiding behind vague terms like “statements”, if we hope to evaluate the argument.
I am not nitpicking. I honestly don’t think any sense can be made from leot’s statement. If I am wrong, I invite you to refine it in a way that makes sense. Your earlier refinement (text is not the best medium for every message) makes sense, but the point is that art is not defined as “mediums other than text”, and therefore it isn’t relevant to the previous discussion about art.
Another (less lyrical) way of phrasing it might be:
"P1: There exists X in the set of (ideas, notions, feelings, etc.) s.t. X cannot be expressed as a combination of statements.
Humans get around P1 by using more than mere statements to express themselves. The consequences of their doing so might be called 'art'."
The word "statement", as opposed to "phrase" or "sentence", was used to draw a distinction between mere statements about facts-of-the-matter and literature. The implication was that "statements" are things like "the sky is blue" or "war is bad", from which semantics can be derived through syntax and the grounding of referents. In other words, I'm implying, here, that "literature" is not a simple collection of statements.
But regardless of the status of literature, i.e., even if literature were a mere collection of statements, are you claiming that every feeling, notion, idea (etc.) that can be expressed† can, in fact, be expressed via text/words/phrases? In other words, are you claiming that (a) language can express everything felt, thought, experienced? Or, alternatively, are you claiming (b) that no non-linguistic medium of expression can express that which is inexpressible by language?
†I'd use "communicated", but I fear someone might take the position that "communicate" only has a technical information-theoretic definition.
I thought he was was drawing a distinction between literal communication and evocation of experience and feeling. E.g., "war is bad" vs Guernica. I take it as linked in that I saw it as an argument for a broad understanding of art. E.g., if a big purple square of Rothko's is evocative, it's still worthwhile art even though any reasonable translation of it to unpoetic statements of it is either null or dull to the point of idiocy.
They do so using metaphor, simile, plot and character, but very rarely direct argument. Remembrance of Things Past is not the same as "nostalgia is powerful."
But what's really going to bake your noodle later: Is it more sophisticated to have broad acceptance of contemporary art or to call out bad attempts at art that are relying on your need to feel sophisticated for acceptance?
What separates Rothko and Pollock from the artists in the link is that other people have tried to capture what they captured, and failed. I never got it until I finally saw other rectangle blobs and other paint drippings. There is at least something there to be felt.
Laypeople look at Rothko and wonder why a guy who made rectangle blobs on canvas is better than all the other guys who thought of making rectangle blobs on canvas. And then you wonder what's the point? The point of art is, depending on your philosophy, variously to improve the mind or the spirit or to provide aesthetic pleasure; it's not to satisfy the intellectual pretentions of art nerds. The obfuscated C contest is a difficult intellectual pursuit and this wouldn't be hard to understand to someone who doesn't know C, but it is hard to explain how Rothko's rectangle blobs or Pollock's scribbles improve the human condition more than anyone else's blobs or scribbles except that these artists happened to fall in the right confluent streams of intellectual nonsense at the right time. The obfuscated C contest is not a thing where you say, "my five-year-old can do that", or that any other Joe could do that should he rub the intellectual establishment the right way. But we live in a world where we take stuff anyone can do and put it in a museum because it has some neat context behind it or something. And so the layperson is completely nonplussed.