I completely agree. But I had to poke this with a stick: "Without exploring feeling, meaning, and imagination" (a) you don't need to drop practical exercises to add theory and (b) how does that compare to other types of "creating". I can't remember the last time I asked myself if I had enough "imagination" in my software code, yet it's true I expect that nearly everywhere else in anything I do. I wonder if this is part of the relative immaturity of software development. I mean, in math, sciences and design, all perhaps far from being "fine art," I can think of plenty of examples where imagination plays a role, if minor. But outside of design or UX, the closest code gets to imagination is perhaps UML, and that ... did not succeed very much. To counter my own argument, after thinking about it more, perhaps refactoring and TDD introduce a bit of imagination -- writing code that doesn't yet work, doesn't yet exist, or can be moulded into something else gradually, instead of treating a first draft as perfect.
... whatever. I've thought about this too long here. Moving on. Can you tell I had two artists as parents? And they both had degrees from the same university yet very different opinions on their art. I can't pretend to understand, I figure, without the background. But I like to consider whatever I'm doing to be in some small part, art. I don't think it's a crime to find math artistic, even. I happen to be in undergraduate Digital Media, half fine arts, half computer science courses. I'm thoroughly confused, these days, because it's untamed territory to combine the two in ways that give both an even shake. I've yet to fully embrace the fine arts side, particularly creating performance art, but maybe I've never taken it seriously yet. I've never liked how subjective its evaluations can be. Go figure, I've subjective evaluations at work all the time, and that's as procedural as it gets. Life is complicated, art reflects that.
There certainly is imagination in creating software, from deciding on architecture, to micro-refactoring and optimisation.
If you just work on the typical websites you perhaps don't see this, because the domain is very well explored at this point. You have frameworks that solve most common problems and you just need to paint within the lines they draw. Hence the emphasis on UX as that is where there is still rapid change and the chance to innovate.
However, change your requirements and things get interesting. What if you want your website to respond within 50ms to anyone anywhere in the world? Suddenly you have a very interesting problem. You had better get creative with your architecture, because a bunch of stateless webservers talking to a relational database isn't going to cut it.
Yes. Yet some people, I found, have a hand for a line that transcends whether they are doing representational art or presentational (aka "abstract") art. They make beautiful stuff regardless. It's probably a gift.
Studying art made me constantly aware of the expanding significance of what I was doing. My engineering courses (although still very useful) tended to limit themselves to teaching cut-and-dried techniques and capacities. And generally they did not engage this expanded critical thinking.
You can teach art like its engineering and you can teach engineering like its art. Maybe we do need to mix it up a bit more.
I know an artist. My favorite statement he repeated was, "It isn't art until it's sold, until then it's a storage problem".
Highbrow modern art has a very very very tiny niche market of people who mainly invest in art of large sums of money for complex and personal reasons that normally boil down to looking for the next Pollock, Warhol, etc. There's an entire ecosystem of galleries, showings, parties, and auction houses devoted to these highly wealthy patrons. It's a pretty insular and self-involved world.
An artists biggest skill in this market has little to do with their technical skill. Technical skill is easy and can be purchased on Fiverr if you need.
Art schools are part of this market.
Most people on the other hand don't go to galleries. They buy prints, hallmark cards, download wallpapers from DeviantArt, etc. Illustrators and graphic designers are thriving in this market, but are totally ignored by the high brow market (unless you get big enough).
Basically, it's just artists following market demands.
I have a relatively simple rule about what is and isn't art. It doesn't have to be everyone's rule--it's just my rule:
Nothing is objectively art; art is always in the eye of the beholder, but it's only real art to someone if they would want it even if no one else ever saw it.
Take a toilet nailed to the wall. If the person who created this thing would have done so if he had known that no one else would ever see it, if he would have nailed the toilet to his own wall at home knowing that he was the only one who would ever see it just because HE HIMSELF wanted to look at it, then it really is art to him. It's not any art that I'm interested in, but that doesn't matter. All art is subjective. It is a genuine expression of his own esthetic desires. It IS art to him.
But if he would never consider such a thing for himself, if it's only part of a show he puts on for others in hopes of getting paid ("it speaks to the inhumanity of corporate greed...blah, blah" he explains greedily), then it's just a commercial product. If it's nothing he would have any interest in without the audience, but it's about getting attention, not money, then it's a publicity stunt, not art. To the artist, it's not art. (If it really is art to the artist, it can ALSO be a commercial product or publicity stunt while remaining art to him.)
And if the wealthy customer would have no interest in it if he couldn't show off his "statement" to others, then it's not art to him, either. It's some sort of signalling, or a commercial investment, or whatever, but it's not art to him. And if potential buyers knew that it was not even art to the artist, what might that mean to them?
Of course, I can't be sure what really is in someone else's mind, but if I doubt that the artist would sincerely want this poo-covered crucifix in his own living room for his private enjoyment, nor that the rich people swooning over its deep meaning would care if they couldn't show off their depth to their friends, it means I'm doubting that this piece of junk is really art to anybody.
> But if he would never consider such a thing for himself, if it's only part of a show he puts on for others in hopes of getting paid ("it speaks to the inhumanity of corporate greed...blah, blah" he explains greedily),
You seem to be referring to Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (the urinal) and if so you are missing the point.
> Take a toilet nailed to the wall. If the person who created this thing would have done so if he had known that no one else would ever see it, if he would have nailed the toilet to his own wall at home knowing that he was the only one who would ever see it just because HE HIMSELF wanted to look at it, then it really is art to him. It's not any art that I'm interested in, but that doesn't matter. All art is subjective. It is a genuine expression of his own esthetic desires. It IS art to him.
Art is a statement and you can't isolate that statement in a vacuum that would cut it from its historical perspective.
> Nothing is objectively art; art is always in the eye of the beholder, but it's only real art to someone if they would want it even if no one else ever saw it.
Of course, but the context around the piece of art is indeed objective.
> An artists biggest skill in this market has little to do with their technical skill.
Would it be accurate to complete the idea and say that it is about marketing & networking instead? The personality of the artist is just as much for sale as the "art".
This is sadly true IMHO. In many respects, the marketing campaign is the artistic endeavor. I can sort of see how this fits into the historical continuum, eg in a few centuries ago the church and the aristocracy were the commissioners and arbiters of art and in that highly politicized context artists produced portraits of the powerful and religious allegories because that was what the market demanded. Nowadays artists produce work that is reflective and glorificatory of global manufacturing supply chains and ultraspecific brand identity and are handsomely rewarded for their personification of otherwise abstract corporate values - Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons being the leading British and American practitioners of this post-modernistic aesthetic.
I think these artists are making a serious and successful artistic statement, albeit a highly indirect one. At the same time I find it sort of deplorable because I think art should be an intimate personal experience rather than a spectacular sociological one. Somehow I derive much more enjoyment from my own failed or inchoate than I do from most of what is promoted to me as art, with artists' statements that read like so much ad copy.
Ask 100 artists what they personally think art or fine art is, and you'll likely get 100 different answers. At least, that's my understanding of it. Artists follow market demands the way entrepreneurs might. Which is to say, very imprecisely. I mean, who can say why something should or shouldn't succeed until it does? All you can do is build technique and keep at it until they buy/bite/like you, right?
>Most people on the other hand don't go to galleries. They buy prints, hallmark cards, download wallpapers from DeviantArt, etc. Illustrators and graphic designers are thriving in this market, but are totally ignored by the high brow market (unless you get big enough).
I have an illustrator friend who would sure love to know how to get paid.
In New Zealand we have two main types of post-secondary institutions: Universities and Polytechnics. Polytechnics used to be technical training institutes offering qualifications up to diploma level (2 years FT study); due to some policy changes and liberalisations in the 1990's however this all changed and they started being accredited to give full degrees (Bachelors and Masters).
A lot of my friends are artists and this has enabled me to observe the results of the different training people received. My friends who have been through their BFA/BVA from polytechnics are much, much more accopmlished now, post-school, than those who went through high-brow, university art schools (particularly ELAM, in Auckland). The emphasis on concept at the university schools is so overwhelming and (apparently) contagious for these students that they forget about craft. The friends at the polytechnics received a more balanced education, with a heavy emphasis on craft while still covering concept, and they're doing far, far better now.
The only ones who seemed to survive the concept-heavy BFA and actually produce sustainable work seem to be those who were so technically accomplished going in that they could afford to take a few years off, thinking lofty thoughts, and not affect their craft too much.
I visited the Tate modern art museum in London while on vacation this summer, and left bothered by the idea of modern art. I could put a collection of furnace ducts in a corner, or hang a mirror on the wall, or bedazzle an internal combustion engine (all exhibits), but it wouldn't be art, because I don't know why it's art, and neither would it take any particular skill. It bothers me that this 'art' lacks both skill and approachability. As a PhD student, I'm no stranger to obscure academic fields that can't be understood by anyone outside your narrow specialization, but at least even the most obscure theoretical work in computer science might actually be useful to people who aren't theoretical computer scientists, and that possible future approachability to people outside the field seems to be lacking in modern art.
Like obscure results in computer science, (post-)modern art requires the observer to actually engage with both the field and the art object in question.
Like obscure results in computer science, few will bother to do so. Of those few who do, even fewer can translate it into something that has any impact on the general populace.
Dali was one of the few surrealists that connected to a large audience. Kandinsky is one of the few Bauhaus people to produce art accessible to a larger audience. Andy Warhol left a huge impact on the public as well - but again, not many pop artists did. All the above qualify as modern art, and all of them are approachable to a wider audience.
I'd argue that we see the same in CS. And I suspect that "approachability" is a function of time - we forget about all the ones who had no success, and remember the ones who did. It'll be interesting to see what people say about modern art 100 years hence.
In computer science, the later approachability comes from people finding ways to use the work, and eventually we get to the point where the people using the work aren't specialists anymore (one of my professors used to say that if you're the first to do something you're a scientist, if you're the second you're an engineer, and if you're the third you're just a technician). With modern art (my impression at least) is that the art is contained in the commentary on society and the dialog with other contemporary artists, and that will never become more relevant or approachable, you'll just need to be an art historian to understand it in a century.
That said, what I find approachable is not a terribly important criterion for art, I just found the it irritating that the actual art was in the process but the context of being in a gallery suggested that the artifact was the art.
(For what it's worth, I also find theoretical computer science papers that produce unimplemented and likely unimplementable algorithms which shave log factors off existing bounds irritating as well, but that is again a matter of personal taste - those at least might give some later researcher a hint about how to actually build a usably better algorithm, though.)
The difference is, if you don't understand or care about the lambda calculus, the computer scientists who do won't judge you. The practitioners and patrons of the arts who go off on these rarified tangents that require "engaging the field" do judge and dismiss those who don't understand or care for the creations of these practitioners.
Thesis: if you did decide to "engage the field" of modern art, it would take about a year (i.e. equivalent of one serious college course of two semesters) plus intermittent reading from a popular journal such as ARTFORUM to stay current.
Related: How to Deconstruct Almost Anything http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html - basically a detailed explanation of the equivalent of modern art in modern literary theory from a scientific person who went to great lengths to dig into it and understand what these people are talking about.
I feel the same way, despite being a fan of Dadaism and Marcel Duchamp. You might find it interesting to investigate the Stuckist movement, made up of artists who are similarly exasperated by institutional hostility to representation.
Let's play devils advocate: If spilled paint on a canvas, and accidentally produced a fresco by Raphael, would it cease being beautiful (because it took no skill to make?). Do you go to art galleries just to be impressed by someone's skill? Is art a talent competition?
Furthermore, what is unapproachable about a collection of furnace ducts? It's not to hard to understand. Just a pile of ducts. Does art always have present you with a puzzle to figure out, or contribute to some theory? Why can't I say "Look, a pile of ducts. Neat, huh?"
If you spilled paint on a canvas and accidentally produced a fresco by Raphael, it would be considered one of the wonders of the world. It would sell for a higher price than any real artwork ever, and people come from all over the world to see it. The occurrence of this vanishingly unlikely event would be a major event in world history, which many would claim as proof of the existence of God, while others would come up with other even more bizarre hypotheses to explain it. Oh, and it would still be beautiful, although it would not be "art". (Though I'm sure many books would be written debating both sides of that very question...)
As a more realistic example, many naturally-occurring things (trees, mountains, women) are beautiful but are most certainly not "art". So I'm not sure what the real debate here.
As for furnace ducts: sure, you can say "look, a pile of ducts!" You can say that for anything. You can follow me around all day and point out random objects and say they're neat, and heck, I'll probably agree with you the first couple of times before getting annoyed. But it's like writing a book consisting of only one word -- it might get you a press release, but nobody's gonna buy it.
I'm not trying to convince anyone that the furnace ducts would be beautiful. I personally wouldn't care for it. But you can't argue, as the OP did, that they aren't approachable.
By that logic, you should come see me play the guitar and sing. I am terrible at both (really, truly terrible; not being shy, objectively, you-would-rather-listen-to-nails-on-glass terrible). But you should come see me express myself and attempt to do this. It will be super artistic, I promise.
The thing is, we agree that there is music and there is noise. People draw the line in different places, but we all agree that it exists. Why is it that I can literally shit on the floor in front of you and when you yell "what the fuck is this?" I can answer "it's art" and have the audience go "oh, he's good!"? Is it perhaps because, no matter what, I can say that my brand of art is just so new, so advanced, that nobody has understood it yet? Then have some PhD candidate years from now write a dissertation on how I managed to portray the human condition to validate the shit I put out.
I define art as creation that does not have to do anything but could invoke some feelings in the recipient.
What's important is that you don't have to like art. If it evokes feelings in you that you don't like then just stay away from it. Appreciating art is not a contest. If someone expects you to appreciate same art as them that's their problem with expectations management not yours with performance. I would come to hear you play but if your music would invoke feelings in me that I wouldn't want then I'd leave. Some other person might like the chaos brought by lack of skills crossed with enthusiasm.
The problem starts when people start talking about art ... they say dumbest things and often get away with it.
That is very close to what I consider art, with the proviso that it should invoke the feelings the artist intent (or tell the story the artist intent) and that simply being annoyed at what people can waste government subsidies on should not be considered a feeling.
I think invoking feelings artist intended or even requiring artist to intend to invoke specific feelings is too high of a standard. I agree with you on the second point.
Your definition is the thing I hear a lot. It makes sense in the abstract, but when you start applying it to actual examples, it breaks down. I will refer you to the "Can you fry that?" skit from The Community: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qcjse8Opobw.
Basically, unlike what your definition suggests, some art is objectively better than other. Some art takes more skill and invokes more and better feeling than other. Take a look (ideally in person) at Rodin vs Shapiro's work. See which makes you feel more and more intensely. Modern artists substitute enthusiasm for skill way too often for my taste.
Skill is not the point of art. Feelings of the beholder are. If you create hyperrealistic portrait then the creation itself is worthless for me because it evokes no feelings because it looks like yet another magazine photo. The process of creating hyperrealistic portrait is worth more as a piece of performance art because at least it evokes some feelings.
I agree that some art can be in some sense better than other. But the only thing you can do is gather statistics about what feelings and how strong any given piece invokes in some population sample. But feelings don't have clear definition of better. Also statistics doesn't have it either. So even objective comparisons are subjective because you have to subjectively choose what you objectively compare.
There are people who have shat on the floor and called it art. And there are people who go to watch it. (google "poop artist"). You don't have to like it (I personally don't) but you're naive to ignore a whole community that upholds pooping as art. And many of those shit artists have classical art training too!
And I'd love to see you play guitar and sing. It may not be "correct" by contemporary standards, but if it's an honest attempt at expressing yourself, and I enjoy it (I personally love to hear bad singers), then why not?
If you accidentally spilled a fresco then it would be pure luck, not to mention astronomically unlikely.
Skill in anything is just a way to screw probabilities in your favor. I am a computer programmer, not a doctor but it is possible that I might be able to save somebody by doing surgery - it is just more likely I kill them, but a doctor would be able to do it safely.
It would be possible for my grandma to write program to do something useful, by accidentally slamming some keys, but I can do it deliberately, time after time after time.
In your case the problem is that there is no objective definition on art, and as such everybody can consider themselves an artist, which means that skills are meaningless (remember a skill only screws the probability of success in your favor, which is meaningless if there is on definition of success).
I would argue no, because those frescos are littered with deep symbology and meaning that are being assembled in one work. The art is in the beauty of the work, the story it tells and what it represents.
I worked for a long time around 1960s/1970s abstract art. Much of it was of questionable quality in my eyes, but there are some really amazing pieces that really make for amazing and beautiful spaces.
My beef with the abstract stuff is that it seems to cut off the oxygen for everything else. Art is fashion, and the patrons of art tend to be fashionable people.
> If spilled paint on a canvas, and accidentally produced a fresco by Raphael, would it cease being beautiful (because it took no skill to make?). Do you go to art galleries just to be impressed by someone's skill? Is art a talent competition?
I'm less interested in the skill than the beauty. But that seems to be missing from a lot of modern works. I don't want my art to be political, or self-aware, or even particularly thought-provoking. Or at least, I don't want it to sacrifice beauty for those goals. Random paint splatters are, I think, less beautiful than Raphael's frescoes.
> Furthermore, what is unapproachable about a collection of furnace ducts? It's not to hard to understand. Just a pile of ducts. Does art always have present you with a puzzle to figure out, or contribute to some theory? Why can't I say "Look, a pile of ducts. Neat, huh?"
You can, but I see equally appealing piles of objects every day on my way to work. If something's worth elevating to a gallery I'd expect it to be better than the things I see out there in the world - otherwise why bother with a gallery at all?
+1 for the correction. -1000 for missing the point. When I last checked, synonyms for modern include contemporary, current, present day... I'm having a hard time drawing a comparison to CS terms, but I'm sure there are at least a few similarly ambiguous to outsiders.
Edit: I'll write here, since I do think it was worth stating, that the original correction was that "modern art" in this context is often called "contemporary art" to distinguish it from art from the period "Modern", which is then referenced in "Post-Modern" art. Yes, history can be confusing, art history just the same. I don't pretend to understand it either ;-)
I think we will probably be fine, for the reason the author mentions in this paragraph:
> Just walking down the halls you could tell which classes were those of the fine art department. They were always sitting in circles and talking. In the foundation, illustration, and design classes the students were working; drawing, painting, designing. I had great students who went on to become successful fine artists, but who had to enroll in the illustration department to get the necessary skills (anatomy, perspective, painting technique) to produce representational fine art. Ironically, but not surprisingly, this famous school's most famous fine artists stem from the illustration department, not its theory heavy fine art department.
I.e., skill in representational art is still being taught and valued. It just changed label, from "fine art" to "illustration".
It seems that the modern idea of "art" is something that (a) has not been done before and (b) something that makes you pause and think "is this art?" To me this is a very bad way of separating art from failed attempts. First, I do not think that you can objectively call something "art" just because it's creator called it that. They can be an artist and call it whatever they want, the same way that I can write a bunch of 1s and 0s and say "that is a beautiful computer program"; in other words some stuff artists create is not art, it's attempts at art.
Secondly, art need not be novel. I enjoy sculpture, such as marble and bronze statues from Ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the Renaissance era Europe. There are lots of very similar pieces here. They all use the same mediums, similar techniques, very similar themes, and share an overall style. Yet, I enjoy this type of art. Why? Because it is so difficult to make rock look like a moving human body. Throwing dog vomit on the floor of an art gallery as commentary on the current geopolitical situation may be novel, but it is not art in my book.
Edit: as an exercise, compare Rodin's sculptures to those of Joel Shapiro. Can you really say that these are somehow on the same level?
Is Joel Shapiro special and famous? His work looks boring but there is more than enough aesthetic mastery in art today, someetimes on par with Rodin. Abstract, surreal, real, take your pick.
Just took a quick scroll through a popular portal:
There is so much of this it will take one weeks to wad through just the quality work. And then there is a huge sea of ugly dog vomit. Just as with any product category, if you put enough crap out there, someone will bite. If everyone sees mostly crap, they think this is as good as it gets and bite en masse.
The schools producing dog vomit artists are providing a valuable service to the art market by adding variety.
Most contemporary art needs to be illuminated by some mumbo-jumbo narrative about what it "means" before one can appreciate it. I get the fact that one of the things that makes art great is that it pushes the envelope on accepted norms - stretches the bounds of tradition. To have mere skill and craftsmanship and no individual vision does not make great art. But for me, the reverse should also hold - you can't have a total lack of coherence or skill and just get by on a pretension of "edginess." Unfortunately that is all that seems to matter in contemporary institutionalized art.
I am repeatedly surprised by how contemporary early modern art (a.k.a. renaissance art) -- both literature and the visual arts -- seem to me at time and how they can combine truly radical innovations with an unwavering commitment to basic skills. Write that searing tragedy about the frailty and absurdity of the human condition ... but make sure you absolutely master your iambic pentameter first!
I'm surprised by this repeated statement that modern art doesn't hold skill. Most of the artists I know have enjoyed a very good education in the underlying skills, but then chose to break the rules.
Is there a lot of pretense trying to sell art? Yes, absolutely - but it never lasts. Good contemporary art is exactly what you ask for. A solid foundation of skills used to completely abandon any conventional display of these skills.
Let's get concrete; do you have examples? Particularly painting. I went to the Pinakothek der Moderne a few months ago and was really struck that, whereas in most "modern art" galleries I can find paintings I like, in one that restricts itself to post-1920 there was really nothing thought-provoking, nothing beautiful, nothing that even seemed like an expression of skill. There were interesting works in other media, but it really seems like painting has fallen by the wayside.
If you're seriously judging all post-1920s art, or painting ... take a step back. There's plenty of art out there, more everyday. A short search on Google helped me discover this one, for instance: http://fineartamerica.com/featured/arc-de-triomphe-leonid-af... Not to mention all the examples presented in this huffington article. There's plenty of skill in painting, the question perhaps remains, and has for some time -- if you have new tools, like computers, photoshop and photography, does that change the skill or quality of a painting or other artwork? Does it devalue it? Place greater emphasis on it? Perhaps what's sad is that universities are required to produce fine art in the first place, now that we've so many new models to follow for education...
I'm judging the paintings in that particular gallery, and more widely the academic and gallery culture - of course there are beautiful paintings being made every day, by people with or without artistic education.
If you can recommend a gallery of pictures like that I'll add it to my visit list. It looks like Afremov went to a technical university, which is in line with the sibling thread where te_chris is arguing that (grossly oversimplifying) polytechnics give a better-rounded art education than academic universities.
Sadly, I don't know art galleries. That was Google, after all. All I can say is, every visit to the Art Gallery of Ontario, near my place, nets me 95% "not my thing" to 5% "wow". All it takes is one "wow" each trip and it's worthwhile. The same is probably true of many art galleries, hence why people then try to collect the art they like, forming their own gallery. I wonder how the concept of galleries will change as VR technology takes off? Right now reproductions are two dimensional and cannot be interacted with in their original space. But what happens if we "fix that"? ;-)
I've had a similar 95/5 (I'd like to say more like 80/20) reaction to a lot of galleries, but most modern galleries I've been to (the Tate, or the one in the Centre Pompidou) include some late-19th at least early-20th century stuff. And until recently I'd have been a big defender of the value of these over older collections.
I was struck because the Pinakothek is the first I've been to that makes a three-way-split - the Alte Pinakothek for pre-19th century stuff, the Neue Pinakothek for, I don't know the terminology, but the time in the middle, and then the really contemporary works in the Pinakothek der Moderne. And I absolutely loved the Neue Pinakothek - loads of really beautiful paintings, with a variety of styles but almost all of them being the kind of representational/skilled work the article's talking about (or your link). Really recommend it if you're ever in Munich. And then I walked across the road to the Pinakothek der Moderne, looking forward to a real treat, and I was just really struck by how bad it all seemed, how much worse every painting was than any of the ones I'd just been looking at.
I'll definitely have to see these. I'd perhaps point out that there was a lot of older, bad art. It just didn't survive. ;-) And that a lot of post-modern art really does require ... either reading the labels or finding other ways to understand the art conceptually as well as from a technical perspective. Consider the entertainment value of critically acclaimed Hollywood blockbuster versus a new, experimental film: The older works tend to work better because they fit into patterns. "They are what they seem." The new ones take some getting used to: what you see isn't always what you're supposed to get. Neither has anything to do with fine art markets. Frankly, most fine art valuation seems to be like any other resource -- priced for its scarcity. Sometimes, an artists' works, and I really should look it up to see if this is true, an artist's works will increase in value when it's clear there will be no new works forthcoming. Which makes no sense if you consider that famous artists had other artists working for them, and if Apple can continue to produce great works after Steve Jobs, why can't we have a Picasso Inc. doing the same? But that's a different point entirely.
Trying (and failing) to get back on topic, 95/5 was probably unfair of me. Part of why I skewed to 95 was that I've seen most of the permanent collection at the AGO enough to discount it for that overfamiliarity alone. I mean, I'm still struck by minimal, early Canadian works by the Group of Seven, yet since that part of the gallery never rotates, it becomes part of the 95% eventually.
Pinakothek der Moderne is a lot of post-moderism, which is... mixed. There's a lot of conceptual art there which is brilliant, but in a cerebral sense, not visceral. It's not representational, though - that's the point of a lot of post-modernism, to rebel against established art ideas.[1]
They still do have stuff that might appeal to you, IIRC - August Macke, Franz Marc, Miro, Emil Nolde come to mind.
[1] That doesn't mean it's unskilled. But the skill is hidden in the breaking of all rules of skill, and it's occasionally hard to tell if it's incompetence or deliberate, unless you spent a lot of time on art history.
Van Gogh did pretty decent :) Assuming you meant 20th century modern art, here's a short list.
Skill: Dali. In terms of being "thought-provoking", I consider much of his stuff tripe, made to pander to mass tastes, but he most certainly had skills.
Skill & thought-provoking: Picasso. I don't - again, personal taste - find beauty in his works, but they sure make you think.
Skill & beautiful: Kandinsky, and Miro. It's too abstract for me to really consider it thought-provoking, but the pure beauty of it, to me, is almost mathematical in nature.
All three: I'd probably go with Magritte. YMMV.
If you want to go postmodern, it's getting difficult - not because it doesn't exist, but because I'm not that well-versed. Marcel Duchamp's painting are certainly there. "Nude Descending a Staircase" is, to me, an amazing painting.
Based on your preferences, I'd suspect classical realism would appeal more to you - try Parrish, or Jacob Collins. (I find them boring, but as always, the eye of the beholder is what counts)
I visited the David Hockney gallery in Salts Mill recently, and came away a big fan. His works done in Yorkshire are beautiful (to my eye) even from a superficial level. I'd say there is skill in each of his paintings, but to clear any doubt, his Bigger Trees Near Warter (http://britishartresearch.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/bigger...), which is 12 x 4 meters large and painted en-plein-air, are undisputedly the product of real talent and technique.
Some examples of Hockney's Yorkshire work that appeal to me:
I could be off base here, but perhaps Hockney is the exception that proves the rule. I've been led to understand that his position is currently pretty unpopular in contemporary art discourse, and that he is viewed as a bit of a reactionary.
I however find him and his work really inteesting in the context of this discussion though. Particularly for his detective work and reverse engineering of the use of optics by the old masters.
I can't tell if this is snark or serious, so I'm going to reply as if it's serious.
I was a music composition major (and a religion minor, aka traditionally seen as unemployable). My focus in college was mostly romantic and neo-romantic choral and piano + voice works. I never pursued it as a career, and a few years after college, I fell into (and in love with) programming. The very, very first thing I noticed as I was learning various paradigms was the unbelievable similarity between writing code and composition. I'm not going to belabour that point because I feel that it's been expounded upon enough (code is a creative art, etc.), but what astounded me further was then having code discussions with music colleagues of mine that have minimal exposure to any sort of programming / computer skills whatsoever, and having them keep up and contribute as if it were just another division of the arts.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that intelligent people with creative, inquisitive minds can totally hold their own in conversations about topics they may not have a background in because when it comes down to it, there's a whole lot of similarity between art and code. Don't write folks off just because of their collegiate foci.
I disagree. The conversation here isn't analogous to a bunch of fine arts majors talking about programming languages, it's analogous to a bunch of fine arts majors talking about (say) iPhone vs Android user experience. Their opinions on that are valuable because they're talking in their role as customers, just as our opinions on art are valuable in our customers.
If we started talking about the relative merits of different types of paintbrush then it might be more analogous to fine arts majors talking about compilers. That's a discussion for producers, not customers, but the quality of art on the market is a question for customers, not producers.
Art that can only be "appreciated" by other artists is a bit of a wank, and I guess the analogy is programs that only a programmer can appreciate [1], like an Ook compiler written in Brainfuck or the Obfuscated C contest. It's okay for the occasional kick, but if you spend your entire career making stuff that has no utility and no appeal outside your immediate in group then you're wasting your time and might as well be making lolcats.
It should be noted that the vast majority of visual artists working today aren't producing wanky stuff that gets exhibits in galleries and never finds actual paying customers. They're out there producing pleasant-looking landscapes and things that people pay good money to hang on their walls. Or else they're graphic designers or working in the advertising industry, making good money doing something useful to somebody. Sticking a dead horse on the floor of a gallery gets you more headlines than flogging off a load of $200 watercolours of beaches, but the latter is the majority of the actual art industry.
[1] Note: not the same thing as a program that only a programmer finds useful, just something useless that amuses other programmers.
Thanks for announcing that, in case it ever had a chance of going a different way. Anyway, how could fine arts majors ever become programmers, or CS majors ever become fine artists? That's just crazypants.
Programming languages, like art, or concepts, don't spring out of nowhere. Both end up specializing to better solve the problems they're oriented to, and the biases of the person employing or creating techniques for them.
That said, there's a counter to this "everything matters" argument -- that nothing matters, perhaps especially in art. I mean, while artists may invest personally in their works, end users or viewers will make up their own minds. The same can be true of software works (software works of art?).
And yeah, sadly, I had two artists for parents; plenty of crazy to go around there, and theories at University didn't help any. ;-)
The variance in field of competences in commenters is tiny here, and to add injury to it, there's a strong sentiment of "STEM == Good, all the rest is crap"
The irony though, is that thanks to both selection bias and HN's strong cultural norms, we've actually had very interesting posts and discussions, this being one of the few self-fulfilling exceptions.
I think it all comes down to "what gets measured gets managed" of unknown origins[1] where if we have English and Math tests for middle and high school, we in turn value it more. Particularly during budget discussions. The opposite is true in university, though once you specialize, it's easy to see the other specializations as "not as useful" as your own, an entirely different bias perhaps.
> Maybe worst for me personally was most all straight forwardly representational work was labeled "illustrative" and discounted as "commercial."
While I find the "deskilling" of arts to be troubling, and experienced frustration at the lack of technical education as a fine arts student, this line made me realise that what might be deep underneath this is a rejection by those in search of "authentic" art in the face of rampant commodification by advertisers.
In a world where the true human value of art is judged by the proxy of commercial value, and many of the greatest talents are using their abilities not to further human culture but to sell products, it's not irrational for people to seek art that cannot be commodified. It's a collective search for authenticity that's unfortunately flailing and grasping at straws instead, of unpacking the deeper causes caught up with larger social and economic currents.
This doesn't have anything to do with "modern art" it is a backlash against accuracy, precision and at the root, intellectualism and power derived from skill. Pol Pot and Punk Rock have a lot more in common than one would first notice. Originally, Punk was about the message and the adherents looked past the technical flaws, they viewed have skill as an un-necessary toll on communicating your art. If you are "raw" your message will shine through the flaws. But this rawness became calcified in the genre causing it to be a core tenet rather than an artifact. One could not be Punk and be good (skillful) at the same time.
Maybe it's unrelated, but I have a real beef with modern flat UI design and icons.
For worst examples, look up the modern Microsoft production, such as VS 2012 or Lync 2013. Is the future really that ugly?
These just seems to me, compared to old, nice colorful icons, as drawings of 6-year olds. I can't shave off the feeling that they are just cheap. Or maybe it's the consequence of de-skilling the article is writing about?
