rant about "art"

What Alcove said.

The word "art" means nothing by itself. Works of art can be anything. There is a lot of shit out there, it's true. What's amazing to me is the amount of things I used to consider shit that I now love, like John Cage. Or Henry Miller. Or Peter Brotzmann. Or Wilco.

My advice to anyone, when considering any work of art, is to ask yourself one thing: "does this elicit a response in me?" Doesn't matter if it is good response or a bad one. If it elicits a response, find out more about it! You might learn something. You might learn something about yourself. You might find the only reason you previously dismissed an entire section of the art world is because of prejudices you were holding on to but didn't even know about. Or you might find out that you are truly looking at a piece of shit.

It's a big world out there. Lots of valid paths of expression.
 
Alcove Audio said:
The job of the artist is finding a "language" common to the artist and the audience. One of the problems is that art is very rarely taught; the focus is on technique. And the fault lies with the audience as well, appreciating art takes work as well.

...

What annoys me about most artists as that they spend all of their time on technique, force an artificial meaning upon their work after the fact, and then sneer at those who fail to understand. I will take the time to study their work, but it is their job to communicate with me in a language that I can understand.
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Wisdom. Coming up with a 'greater meaning' for your work? Creating a universe? Populating it with believable, interesting characters? Weaving them together through a fascinating sequence of events? Easy. Communicating it all in a way that is both aesthetically pleasant and comprehensible? Skill at this is what separates the merely good from the truly great.

Personally, I think anything can be art if it is presented as such, and that there are no objective criteria for determining artistic quality. The same is true for opinions about art, too, but if your reasoning for disliking art is something like "it's crap" then I think you have a crappy opinion.
 
When I was in grade school I had an art class project due for the Art Fair. I asked my parents to buy me some new supplies and they replied that there was nothing wrong with the stuff that I already had. I threw a tantrum and broke all of my supplies. My parents said that it sucked to be me (paraphrasing) and to use what I had. I took a bottle of Elmer's glue and a sheet of hard board and glued my broken art supplies onto it then spray painted it gold. I did it because I was pissed off at my parents and figured that I would show them exactly what my broken crap was worth. I stopped paying attention to where that piece went after it won the regional art fair. All of the judges gushed about the use of found objects (this was 1980 or 1981) and the unifying blah, blah, blah of the gold paint and the artist's meaning of that one man's trash is another's treasure and other such pompous (and completely wrong) BS. For all I know, that three minute hunk of crap could be hanging in a museum somewhere and I might have a giant assed trophy waiting for me somewhere in Washington DC. Someone once said that art is in the eye of the beholder, I guess I couldn't see my own art and misunderstood what I was saying as an "artist". :lol:
 
Lucky Hardwood said:
When I was in grade school I had an art class project due for the Art Fair. I asked my parents to buy me some new supplies and they replied that there was nothing wrong with the stuff that I already had. I threw a tantrum and broke all of my supplies. My parents said that it sucked to be me (paraphrasing) and to use what I had. I took a bottle of Elmer's glue and a sheet of hard board and glued my broken art supplies onto it then spray painted it gold. I did it because I was pissed off at my parents and figured that I would show them exactly what my broken crap was worth. I stopped paying attention to where that piece went after it won the regional art fair. All of the judges gushed about the use of found objects (this was 1980 or 1981) and the unifying blah, blah, blah of the gold paint and the artist's meaning of that one man's trash is another's treasure and other such pompous (and completely wrong) BS. For all I know, that three minute hunk of crap could be hanging in a museum somewhere and I might have a giant assed trophy waiting for me somewhere in Washington DC. Someone once said that art is in the eye of the beholder, I guess I couldn't see my own art and misunderstood what I was saying as an "artist". :lol:
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:lol: What a little bastard you were. :lol:

I'm also from the school of "Why do we need art appreciation classes, unless you are really trying to get me to join the Borg Collective because resistance is futile" I like it or I don't academy.
 
Uranium City said:
What Alcove said.

The word "art" means nothing by itself. Works of art can be anything. There is a lot of shit out there, it's true. What's amazing to me is the amount of things I used to consider shit that I now love, like John Cage. Or Henry Miller. Or Peter Brotzmann. Or Wilco.

My advice to anyone, when considering any work of art, is to ask yourself one thing: "does this elicit a response in me?" Doesn't matter if it is good response or a bad one. If it elicits a response, find out more about it! You might learn something. You might learn something about yourself. You might find the only reason you previously dismissed an entire section of the art world is because of prejudices you were holding on to but didn't even know about. Or you might find out that you are truly looking at a piece of shit.

It's a big world out there. Lots of valid paths of expression.
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I agree art is subjective and your appreciation of different forms vary. From movies to music to sculpture, photographs and paintings. We all have what appeals to our eye based on our experiences, world view, influences and what gets us excited. And those tastes change and evolve as we go through life.

That said, I spent my years in art school as well, and definitely on the student level I remember the high level of pretension coming from some of the most untalented of the lot. Not that their "art," didn't fill something in themselves I imagine, but I remember people doing half assed random work and then getting fluffy and condescending if you didn't "get it." When I was studying animation I remember a girl that forgot to do her assignment so she cranked something out the day of which was nothing more than shapes and scribbles blinking on and off. No motion, no movement, just flickering. When the instructor called her on it she got really bent out of shape justifying it as "art," and how dare he try to tell her what art was and a bunch of other crap. Everyone else in the class was sitting there with their squash-and-stretch bouncing ball animations, walk cycle or other mundane first semester assignment, just staring at her. Think she dropped not long after that. Probably felt artistically oppressed.

But yeah there are a lot of things that I find just beautiful and wrapped with meaning that my wife would likely not even let in the house. :)
 
The only thing worse than bad art is the gushing babble used to describe its meaning and importance.

The art world is filled with pretentious posers trying to justify their existence by making their work appear deep, and bloviating academics, curators, and critics nurse this process with their tortured, nonsensical prose.

Art means nothing unless it affects you either emotionally or intellectually. And while learning art history and technique certainly goes a long way toward appreciating some of art's subtler points (and I think it's something everybody should know something about), if you need an art degree to "get" a work of art, then on some level that work has failed.

I love some (but not all) of Warhol's work, by the way. He's following in the footsteps of Duchamp. Like with many artists' work, I didn't really appreciate it until I saw it in person.

I was in Barcelona recently, and looked at as much of Gaudi's architecture as possible. The interior of the Sagrada Familia cathedral actually made me weep in awe, and I'm an atheist. I'm always looking for that kind of experience with art. It doesn't come often.
 
In my opinion something like "bad art" doesn't exist. It either is art or it isn't.
One of the basic rules of aesthetics is the balance of form and content. If the work fails to communicate the intended meaning to the viewer it's simply not art or in other words: if the artist has to explain what he was trying to say, he has failed. If a work is technically perfect but is without any inherent meaning it's also not art.
In my experience there are basically three types of "artists", those who focus on technical perfection and don't care about meaning, those who don't care about the "crafty" aspect of art and real artists.
 
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The most fascinating and surreal aspect of art to me is how it defies mathmatecial description like few other things in this world. For example, a frame of Avatar was typically the work of dozens if not hundreds of good artists working together, but would never sell for the price of a single Matisse. Starry Night or The Revelation of St Peter are both great paintings, but if combined would be garbage. You can take a picture of Marylin Monroe, and it's valueless, or you can take any image and color filter it, and that's valueless. But if you take 8 pictures of Marylin Monroe and color filter each one and arrange them in a sequence, that sequence has great value.

I guess I like art because it doesn't make any sense. For an engineer, that's the greatest challenge, chaos.
 
With the gold art supplies, it almost seems as if the act of defiance infused the 3 minute piece with an artistic life of its own ;) Perhaps the judges could feel it.
 
knightly said:
With the gold art supplies, it almost seems as if the act of defiance infused the 3 minute piece with an artistic life of its own ;) Perhaps the judges could feel it.
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I was just being an asshole. I had no conscious artistic meaning. The piece was meant to be bad. I still cannot believe that people read so much into it. I was at one of the competitions and tried to tell one of the judges that they were wrong about the meaning (or absolute lack of one) of the piece and he actually told me that I could not possibly know what was in the mind of the artist. :hmm: I just laughed and walked away.
 
Two words: Thank. You.

A perfect example of this, to me, is Nigel Tomm's "The Blah Story", an excerpt of which follows:

"In a blah she was blah blah blah down a blah between blah roses blah blah blah, her blah blah hair blah blah gently the blah blah trees, most blah blah blah, she thought, as blah blah he blah the nice blah blah she blah felt with blah that blah should blah blah blah have blah such blah and blah blah blah enjoyment, the blah had both blah and blah blah the blah things in her blah blah occurred to blah that he blah taken this blah blah blah several blah blah before blah blah she always blah to blah from blah blah blah at a blah of her blah blah or a blah of her blah blah blah her blah blah told to blah, which blah within blah blah like a blah blah blah and blah as a blah blah from blah, suddenly blah blah a blah to blah her blah as they found a blah in blah of the blah, blah blah silently to the blah, they waited blah blah blah while he blah blah a blah toward the red blah blah, she blah him blah blah blah among blah blah things, very blah blah and with a blah blah blah that blah a real blah blah..."

How is that art? On all the press release things about the book, they mention this being his "masterpiece" and how the book "transcends the meaning of structure" or some bull$#%^ like that. Seriously?
 
Imagine a world in which people who did not like somebody else's art did not proceed to tell that somebody else that their art was not art, did not assert that that somebody else is not a real artist, or did not assure that somebody else that their art was as fake as they themselves are.

Puh. Why can't the critic be satisfied with saying, Hey, I don't like your work. It's crap. It's not for me. It's not my taste. It's bad art, etc... ? Instead, that's not enough for some people. They have to go beyond that and actually divest that somebody else's art of meaning, of the very identity of being art. The critic in that case wants not only to tell "the artist" that their art is bad, but also that their art is not even art, which is an unkind pill to push, since the sincere artist closely identifies with his or her own art.

Okay, that's not to deny that there are fakers out there. There are people who put no thought into something whatsoever (if that's a litmus test?) and then call it art, and I'm sure they can have some very sketchy motives for doing so. But too often, it seems to me that art critics who simply don't like a piece of art want to go further and deny that a piece of art is even art; they want to actually disenfranchise the artist from being an artist. But who gets to decide? You? Me? Your neighbor?

Sure, three scribbles of crayon on a piece of paper. Not my thing either. But, for example, I once heard a painter telling a photographer that his photography was not art…because photography is not really art, ya know. It’s a craft, maybe, but not art. Really? I don't trust other people's definitions of what art is. The definition of art is probably terminally subjective, and probably happily and divinely so too.

To each his/her own. :)
 
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aceofspades70 said:
You could throw sh!t on a wall and call it art.
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That is, more or less, the foundation of conceptual art.

The real argument, I think, is not whether something is "art" (because since Duchamp, art is whatever the artist says it is), but whether or not a given work is a good or valid or truthful or clever or deep idea.

In this sense, I find the term art meaningless, with the exception that "art" shares a root with "artifact," and thus indicates human agency or meddling at some level (i.e. it needs to be a deliberate creation of a human mind).
 
aceofspades70 said:
You could throw sh!t on a wall and call it art.

Whether or not anyone agrees with you is another thing.
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No.
A true artist video tapes himself naked, bending over a tombstone while his "significant other" spits on the tip of a tube of oil paint and inserts it in his rectum, he jumps up on the tombstone then defecates the paint onto the t-shirt another significant other lying on the ground over the deceased.
This process is repeated with assorted thematic colors on various t-shirts.
The t-shirts are displayed behind the HD TV showing the video running in a loop.
The TV display is "the art".

:rolleyes:
 
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We-are-in-New-York-right-now-and-I-half-expect-to-see-this-actually-happen.png
 
rayw said:
No.
A true artist video tapes himself naked, bending over a tombstone while his "significant other" spits on the tip of a tube of oil paint and inserts it in his rectum, he jumps up on the tombstone then defecates the paint onto the t-shirt another significant other lying on the ground over the deceased.
This process is repeated with assorted thematic colors on various t-shirts.
The t-shirts are displayed behind the HD TV showing the video running in a loop.
The TV display is "the art".

:rolleyes:
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:lol:
 
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