The Subjective Nature of 'Art'

[neonlyte]

If I were the Artist I'm not sure if I'd laugh or cry

There is a lesson in this somewhere, I think I'll forget about chapters next time I submit something, they might just go with the ones they like.

 

[Antfarmer77]

"...inconthevable..."

 

[impressive]

 

[rgraham666]

Chuckles.

 

[Equinoxe]

I have created this lovely piece in their honour:
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y256/equinoxe/art.png

 

[impressive]

I have created this lovely piece in their honour:
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y256/equinoxe/art.png

Brava!

 

[CharleyH]

LOL - but I do see their point. I, myself, might tend to look at the plinth support as a better indication of what "Closer to Paradise" means. Subjectively, lol, it is the better piece.

 

[Selena_Kitt]

*snort*

sometimes I think art critics are a little too... um...

 

[ABSTRUSE]

*snort*

sometimes I think art critics are a little too... um...

Pretentious?

 

[Equinoxe]

Brava!

Thank you. I'm sorry it took a while to respond, I had to take a call from MoMA.

 

[ABSTRUSE]

Thank you. I'm sorry it took a while to respond, I had to take a call from MoMA.

I'm interested in the stretcher bars that support the canvas...are they for sale?

 

[Equinoxe]

I'm interested in the stretcher bars that support the canvas...are they for sale?

Yes, but I'm very serious about my art: I'll need a brief 1000 word essay explaining their significance and how they relate to the current trends and movements within the art world, to the history of art in general, and to the world as a whole.

 

[ABSTRUSE]

Yes, but I'm very serious about my art: I'll need a brief 1000 word essay explaining their significance and how they relate to the current trends and movements within the art world, to the history of art in general, and to the world as a whole.

I have cash.

 

[Equinoxe]

I have cash.

Oh. Why didn't you say so before?

Clearly, they symbolise the Founding Fathers, especially good old Ben Franklin.

 

[ABSTRUSE]

Oh. Why didn't you say so before?

Clearly, they symbolise the Founding Fathers, especially good old Ben Franklin.

I'm a lover of all art. Even crap.


Just as I thought. At first I thought they were sticks.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Long, very thoughtful article here: http://www.objectivistcenter.org/showcontent.aspx?ct=958&h=53
"Why Art Became Ugly"

A brief excerpt:
It is easy to point out the psychologically disturbed or cynical players who learn to manipulate the system to get their fifteen minutes or a nice big check from a foundation, or the hangers-on who play the game in order to get invited to the right parties. But every human field of endeavor has its hangers-on, its disturbed and cynical members, and they are never the ones who drive the scene. The question is: Why did cynicism and ugliness come to be the game you had to play to make it in the world of art?

My first theme will be that the modern and postmodern art world was and is nested within a broader cultural framework generated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite occasional invocations of "Art for art's sake" and attempts to withdraw from life, art has always been significant, probing the same issues about the human condition that all forms of cultural life probe. Artists are thinking and feeling human beings, and they think and feel intensely about the same important things that all intelligent and passionate humans do. Even when some artists claim that their work has no significance or reference or meaning, those claims are always significant, referential, and meaningful claims. What counts as a significant cultural claim, however, depends on what is going on in the broader intellectual and cultural framework. The world of art is not hermetically sealed—its themes can have an internal developmental logic, but those themes are almost never generated from within the world of art.

My second theme will be that postmodern art does not represent much of a break with modernism. Despite the variations that postmodernism represents, the postmodern art world has never challenged fundamentally the framework that modernism adopted at the end of the nineteenth century. There is more fundamental continuity between them than discontinuity. Postmodernism has simply become an increasingly narrow set of variations upon a narrow modernist set of themes. To see this, let us rehearse the main lines of development . . .

 

[ABSTRUSE]

Thanks Roxelby, I'll have to explore this further.

 

[Selena_Kitt]

Thanks Roxelby,

can I just say, this is the most adorable diminutive form of "Roxanne Appleby" imaginable???
-----

oh, and yeah, Abs... "pretentious" came to mind...

 

[ABSTRUSE]

can I just say, this is the most adorable diminutive form of "Roxanne Appleby" imaginable???
-----

oh, and yeah, Abs... "pretentious" came to mind...

Why thank you.

its my favorite word for describing those who excell in the art of bullshit.

 

[CharleyH]

Why thank you.

its my favorite word for describing those who excell in the art of bullshit.

Much like you, I gather? lol

I never find insight and knowledge in a particular field (any field) pretentious. In fact, I find critics are often the one's more passionate about a particular subject than most of us (take my grammar teacher for example - she was very passionate indeed!)

 

[ABSTRUSE]

Much like you, I gather? lol

I never find insight and knowledge in a particular field (any field) pretentious. In fact, I find critics are often the one's more passionate about a particular subject than most of us (take my grammar teacher for example - she was very passionate indeed!)

I erroniously generalized by lumping critics who know what they speak of with those who speak out of their collective asses.

 

[Liar]

I never find insight and knowledge in a particular field (any field) pretentious.

Me niether. I only find pretentiousness pretentious. And the art world, as well as most high-brow culture, is shock full of it.



As for the article: *snigger*

 

[BlackShanglan]

A quote from the piece to which Roxanne linked:

The new theme was: Art must be a quest for truth, however brutal, and not a quest for beauty. So the question became: What is the truth of art?

I think this quite right. I would add to it, too, that the recognition that art can serve a political or socially critical function, coupled with liberation from past strictures (like, for example, the British government promising to hang the author of "The Drapier's Letters" if only they could find out who he was), has led to a world in which it is considered not only possible and good for art to be forthrightly argumentative and dogmatic, but in which one is considered unsophisticated and shallow if one's art is not. The one word of which all artists, and particularly the visual artists, currently seem deeply embarassed is "beauty"; to call their work beautiful appears to most of them to be some sort of insult. To call it smoothly executed or polished is tantamount to a glove thrown in the face. Evidently, the modern world, or at least the modern artist, likes its art "raw" - or such was the only explanation the SO and I could find this weekend past for a confessionalistic spew of hunks of cardboard, yarn, and pieces of paper with the words "You deserve less" written over and over on them and slapped onto the canvas. Beautiful it was not.

The cynical amongst us might also call it hasty. To have invented an art that requires little in the way of training or skill in execution (as opposed to conception, which I do grant its own value) may at first seem clever, as it stands out in contrast to the works around it. But as more and more people begin to do it, the weaknesses of the approach, I think, begin to show. One wildly torn and tattered piece in a gallery of smoothly executed works shocks and draws attention to itself; a whole gallery of them is simply tedious, whereas the polished works continue to hold their value en masse, for they can say a very wide variety of things, while those pieces that shock in their ugliness and disarray can really only say one. The other problem, of course, with inventing a form that requires a level of executing skill that nearly anyone can achieve is that nearly everyone will - and so one is soon swimming in pieces that all say roughly the same thing in roughly the same way.

Still, there's some humor to be had from it. When I was living in London I recall seeing a news story on an artist whose previously exhibited works included an unmade bed. When she lost her cat and put up signs around the neighborhood advertising this fact, her enterprising neighbours tore them down and sold them to galleries, over her little-heeded protests that these were not meant to be art.

Shanglan

 

[Selena_Kitt]

The one word of which all artists, and particularly the visual artists, currently seem deeply embarassed is "beauty"; to call their work beautiful appears to most of them to be some sort of insult.

How could we not quote Keats: ""Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

I would add...

There is beauty in everything, and everything is in beauty.

Remember the plastic bag scene in American Beauty?

makes me sad to think we want to take the "beauty" out of art... when you take out the beauty, you take out the truth, as well...

 

[BlackShanglan]

How could we not quote Keats: ""Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

I would add...

There is beauty in everything, and everything is in beauty.

Remember the plastic bag scene in American Beauty?

makes me sad to think we want to take the "beauty" out of art... when you take out the beauty, you take out the truth, as well...

You made me smile here. For various reasons, all this morning and well before I read this thread I have had Mr. Keats's fine words in my head. I'm glad that I am not the only one who remembers them.

I thought American Beauty was an excellent film, and like you I loved the plastic bag scene. The film as a whole seemed to me a wonderful musing on the nature of beauty and the amazing array of guises it can take. I love the variety of beauty, and honestly I can see beauty even in a wildly distraught piece of work. I simply want all of the other sorts of beauty to have their place as well.

Shanglan