no…no… Hillary is only Seven letters…
I guess I’ll come back to this one
Removing her contribution is also part of the collaboration, as is other visitors’ refusal to insert words. Everyone is involved, thus we all own the collaborative work.
Anyway, the museum should certainly put up a sign at the entrance clearly stating “Don’t obey signs.”
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It’s not cause and effect.
Say there’s two people - both with great ideas - at the edge of a large, noisy crowd. One speaks his idea aloud, and not eve his neighbor can her. The other person, she has a megaphone, and everybody hears her identical idea above the auditory scrum.
The megaphone allows a choice. The idea could be crap. Or there could be two people with megaphones – one good idea, one crap idea. But without the megaphones - nobody would know.
Ditto for publicity. If nobody knows about your better mousetrap, it is valueless – nobody will buy it.
But if I pick up a pencil and write several words on your moustrap and tell everybody in court about with a megaphone, then… er…
where was I going, again?
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I mean, it’s still stupid, but art is worth exactly what someone will pay for it. The exact same painting may be worth millions, or worthless, depending on whether it’s believed that Michelangelo created it. The quality is irrelevant–a splatter that Michelangelo slapped out while blind drunk is worth more than a beautiful painting by someone no one’s ever heard of.
The art world is very silly, basically. It pretends to care about quality, but only really cares about reflected prestige. So anything that adds public interest to a piece can, indeed, directly increase its value.
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The thing about BoingBoing art threads is it makes me wonder if every other thread is equally filled with such ludicrous levels of proudly uneducated ignorance paraded as superiority.
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well, germany may have come up with the concept and put a word to it, but we have definitely perfected the form.
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Pretty much, aye.
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While an unfilled field in a crossword clearly is…
How does that work with sheet music, btw?
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This actually reminds of something Stephen Colbert might do. I would say that she made an actual “artist” move by doing this, adding the words and claiming rights to it. If she signed the crossword “R. Mutt” or “LHOOQ” then it would have been even better, if derivative.
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I don’t like it that much as an art piece, but the whole thing has imo enough individuality to stand as copyrightable work
a single chord or a simple scale are not copyrightable, see also the Kraftwerk case
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Since it’s part of a response to accusations of damage (that may include demands for money to cover restoration costs), I’m not sure how serious to take it. It sounds to me like, “I owe you money? No, you owe me money! Let’s call it even, shall we?”
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How does this intersect with the teenagers “improving” the 50,000-year-old rock carvings lower down the blog page?
Do the kids now own copyright on the carvings? Is the vandalism now a part of the objet d’art, like Napoleonic graffiti on Egyptian pyramids, or like Roman graffiti on older Roman ruins? Which is more valuable to our history, an untouched artefact, or one with a history beyond that of its original creation?
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A good practical definition of “art” is “something you can get enough other people to believe is art.”
That really is all there is to it, at least from a public/commercial standpoint. Absolutely anything can be art as long as you can talk enough folks into calling it art. There are several ways to do this, actual skill being one, and charisma+audacity being another; if you’ve got enough of one, the other is not required. Also, the more people consider your previous works “art,” the easier subsequent efforts will be to pass off: Andy Warhol could scoop up some gravel outside a gallery and put it on a pedestal, and it would be “art” because Andy Warhol did it. Proximity to the right kind of celebrity can substitute for anything else.
(Of course there’s another, completely orthogonal definition of art, having to do with beauty and meaning and creativity and etc. That’s a perfectly valid and lovely definition, but it doesn’t put money in anyone’s pocket.)
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I think that neither the public/commercial standpoint nor the orthogonal definition you propose are really practical. The actual practice of art I have always defined as being a type of creative process engaged in by an individual or group. Except for certain kinds of performance art where the involvement of spectators directly feeds back into this process, I would say that what non-participants think of the work, how they classify it is mostly irrelevant. Spectators are more likely to conceive of art as being a static artefact which can be commoditized rather than a process in which one can participate. Art as commodity appears practical mainly to non-artists.
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Our art teacher at school, who subsequently became head of art teaching at the GLC, was of the view that it’s art if people generally agree that it is in 150 years time, because that’s how long the public takes to catch up.
I thought at the time he was being provocative (something he often did) but then Victorian watercolours became a thing after people had been leaving them to moulder in attics, so there is that.
Of course, this would present a problem for gallery salesmen if widely adopted. It might lead to a general perception of imperial nudity in the vicinity of MOMA, Tate Modern, and Cork Street.
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That’s ridiculous. The painting I bought has objective value. The fact that it’s a genuine Antrios has nothing to do with it.
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…and Pluto so is a planet!
I have exactly the same thing with Wikipedia. The articles on which I have exact knowledge all seem to have so many mistakes that I distrust the whole edifice.
But
That’s more or less how my 6th form art teacher - himself a successful painter - described the majority of art critics. “Ignorance masquerading as superiority” - his precise words. Are you saying we’re all critics?
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In an art world with diamond-encrusted skulls and carcasses dropped from helicopters, this is art as a response to art that I can really get interested in. I hope the original artist will get involved as well. I am excited to see what happens next.
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