Wouldn’t you be able to recognize a good poem in a tweet? If you saw any great work on a postage stamp you’d recognize it as such, you could tell, even from that size that it’d be a masterpiece.
Scale shouldn’t be a factor in distinguishing good art.
…errr, hold on…
Okay but the technicality and inspiration are both present in his art.
Rothko may have a genius inspiration, but technically, he’s shit.
Well, it has its redeeming qualities. I suppose it could be seen as a meta-ironic treatise on wit in that the true irony is in the sarcasm of their lack of self-awareness.
More like a scything down of the modern established art regime, along with its emperor’s clothes, brand loyalty, snake-oil salesmen and filthy lucre, to lift the veil-obscura from the heads of the yes-men to reveal the true nature of art.
Skill.
Surely you jest.
Sure, some literature can work in tweet format. Some can’t. Just like some visual art can work at postage stamp scale, and some can’t.
And representation isn’t the only technical involved in art. There is a lot of technical skill involved in Rothko’s color mixing/theory and texture creation. It’s subtle, but there are a whole lot of creative choices made very well in every inch of Rothko’s work.
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i will dream from now on, Rothkos are just a lot of blurred nipples.
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You mean like these?
If I were in the art world for fraud, I would probably not have returned the sizable advance paid for the paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant. Also, I’d have skipped doing thirty paintings when the expected number to be delivered was seven.
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6 decades after Rothko lifted his brush on this one, people are still discussing it, using a communications medium he likely could not have dreamed of…
while at the same time mocking it as unimportant…
Rothko wins…
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…I don’t think you read my post correctly. I explicitly said I don’t think Rothko is a fruad.
You know who was a a bit of a fraud? Di Vinci.
He repeatedly took money, promising patrons he would do a painting for them, and then years would go by and they would have to sue them before he finally cranked something out (or had one of his students do it, and put his name on it).
i wonder what Rothko thought about himself that made him decide to off himself…i may never understand. just like i may nevver understand (aside from paying the bills) why some artist make a career of doing the same shit over and over with little noticeable progression…
Well, I knew it would be controversial. That’s why I posted it without comment…
First,
and
Probably true, but let me quote a Tamil verse in translation:
[quote="Thirukkural 423 (translated by GU Pope), "]Though things diverse from divers sages’ lips we learn,
'Tis wisdom’s part in each the true thing to discern.
To discern the truth in every thing, by whomsoever spoken, is wisdom.[/quote]
I’m no fan of “two minutes wisdom” stuff that pretends to be a real university course either, but let’s not commit the genetic fallacy and assume that any information that comes out of such a source is inherently wrong. The real question is, does the guy have a point?
I’ll try to answer that…
(note: after this point, I’m just picking different posts and trying to respond to them. There’s no logic to the order)
Which in itself is a problem. I may be slightly biased here because I saw this just as I was editing my photos from Ajanta, but I can show you this, and even without explaining the context, you can appreciate it. Or, this, which is just a piece of decorative filler, which doesn’t even have context to begin with. The issue of whether this is art or not doesn’t even arise. It obviously is.
On the other hand, outside my window right now, I can see people painting a large wall using lime mortar. As it’s being done, different patterns emerge, subtle changes in colour and texture. You say that Rothkos are on a HUGE canvas - well, a two storey wall is an even bigger and more impressive “canvas”, right?
But I know what’s happening here, and though it’s a skilled craft, it’s not really art, is it?
So, what differentiates a Rothko from that huge blank wall? The skill level is the same, the thought that went into it seems almost the same. Frankly, I think the wall had more planning; it’s a hundred year old structure and modern techniques would be inappropriate. We had to recreate century-old techniques to get it done properly.
The only thing that differentiates the two is that the former was done by a famous artist and declared to be art, while the latter was done by hired labour overseen by a contractor who has never heard of the MOMA.
So, is the mere assertion that something is “art” enough to make it so?
I think that upto a point, that’s perfectly true. But the declaration cannot make up for laziness. And to my mind, a Rothko, or many of the other works Mr. Florczak rails against, are inherently lazy.
Again, the truth is, my 6 year old niece can indeed paint like that - in fact, her technique is, if anything, much better. Don’t you think something that sells for $46 million needs to have a higher standard?
Can you really consider a functional feature “art”? In legal circles, something that’s functional cannot be considered part of a trade mark or a trade dress - the closest that law gets to declaring something art. I think that surely a combination of functional features designed to appeal emotionally can and should be recognised as art. But is mere innovation art?
It may be, at the extreme, like Penn and Teller’s experiment with “boutique water” or whatever it was. You know, the experiment where they filled different bottles with tap water and sold it at fancy restaurants claiming it to be from this mountain spring or that? And everyone thought “this one had more life in it” or “that one is more mature” or whatever? Well, people find a difference between identical products in such experiments, merely because of a) the cost and b) the way it gets marketed as being something elite.
If you’re shown something that you’re told is a work of art - even a masterpiece - and you’re asked to comment on it as an expert, you desperately search for some meaning, because you know it’s art. If you don’t agree, you’re no longer an expert art critic. And once you find that, no matter how contrived it may be, you start believing that it’s what you always felt, that it’s a valid description of a huge, blank piece of canvas.
That, I’ve noticed too - if you take note, my first counterposition came from Ajanta paintings, which are about 1500 years old. I think it’s partly because it takes that long to see if someone finds a damning critique of it, and partly because it takes that long to see if people continue to be interested in it. Sometimes, these works are rediscovered long after the creator is gone, and people start getting interested again (literally true again for Ajanta, given that it was lost for about a thousand years).
However, there are those artists who are appreciated in their own times, and who continue to be appreciated throughout history. Michelangelo, Leonardo,… They were quite well thought of in their own lifetimes. Picasso and Dali actually got rich from their art. All of these people are still appreciated as among the best of their time.
It’s not like the past had oh-so-many great artists compared to today. It’s just that their art has survived the test of time, while others’ hasn’t.
Question is, can we discover whether a work will stand the test of time? I think, yes, and the Rothko just won’t.
It seems to me that this, especially your second and third points, constitute a very modern, elite view (much as I hate the term “western” in anything, that may apply too), which certainly wasn’t held by most people over the course of history, or even in all places in modern times. I’d personally define it like this:
- Something made by human hands, involving skill and technique. Or, well, sentient hands at the very least. There must be intent behind it, not mere entropy.
- Something that emotionally connects with the viewer or listener - can we say “experiencer”?
- Something that doesn’t necessarily need explanation, though if explanation, context or back-story enrich the experience, that’s absolutely fine.
If there’s no intent or skill involved, if technique is sacrificed to make a “statement”, it’s not art to me.
To me, that’s art of the worst kind. It had no intent, no creative hand, nothing. It’s just a found piece of entropy that you assign arbitrary meaning to. The fact that you’re constrained to call it art means that the term loses all meaning at that point.
What does “progress” and “forward” even mean in this context? Is there some goal towards which art is trying to evolve? Must we abandon proven techniques of the old masters merely because they’re, well, old?
Was it ever? I see talented artists who will stare at a mountain, try to capture its meaning on canvas, or stone, or even pixels, and then I see someone spread a canvas on the floor and literally tip buckets of paint on it, then make up a story about its meaning. Is that innovation or laziness?
Now that, I don’t agree with - it’s hard to scale some things down, when the whole point of the work is the amount of detail worked into a large scale. And that says nothing about sculpture or music, which are also art, and which definitely cannot be summarised onto a postage stamp!
Sounds like a description of modern art I read somewhere recently (going nuts trying to find out where - maybe Pratchett, but I’m not sure) which went something like “an expression of the artist’s extreme frustration at being unable to draw or paint”…
One of the biggest frauds I know of was this guy. Major architect of Colonial Madras, he was a bloody cheat who stole almost all his early designs lock, stock and barrel. We’re pretty sure he cheated on material and siphoned off not a small amount of money. At one point, while being theoretically employed exclusively by the Government, he was designing and building private buildings with official resources, and at the same time complaining that he hadn’t got his raise.
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So, Impressionism starts the decline. He doesn’t even bother to talk about Cubism or Dadaism. (I guess because he’s scared of going up against Picasso?) I would love to know if this would get Florczak’s stamp of approval. I’m sure it gets Prager’s:
I loath every particle of Jeff Koons’ work; but that doesn’t mean I have to disapprove of all of “modern art” or invent some shoddy construct (like “aesthetic relativism”) to back up my argument. And by the way, I found great beauty in Florczak’s painting smock: if Florczak doesn’t want to call it art, that’s on him.
Of course it’s the message that’s important, not the messenger. But the messenger can never be entirely disregarded. If someone has previously used fallacious arguments, their message should be thoroughly scrutinized.
I lost my mind viewing some of the other “courses” in their “syllabus”:
- Why You Should Love Fossil Fuel. (By an oil industry advocate)
- Are Israeli Settlements A Barrier to Peace? (No way! says Alan Dershowitz)
- Who Are the Racists? Conservatives or Liberals? (Guess.)
- The World’s Most Persecuted Minority: Christians. (Oh.)
- Why America Invaded Iraq. (It was for a good reason!)
- Feminism vs. Truth. (Because they’re diametrically opposed? You betcha.)
- Does Science Argue For or Against God? (You had to ask? For.)
- God vs. Atheism Which is More Rational? (Guess. Oh, ok: It’s God.)
- Do the Rich Pay Their Fair Share? (They already pay too much!)
Surely there are less patently bombastic and biased messengers to have called upon regarding modern art than this sad fount of vituperation. And, personally, I need a more reputable source, the better to buttress my life’s goal of roasting a marshmallow atop a heaping bonfire of Jeff Koons’ collected works.
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Great post.
[quote=“pixleshifter, post:41, topic:57562”] Wouldn’t you be able to recognize a good poem in a tweet? If you saw any great work on a postage stamp you’d recognize it as such, you could tell, even from that size that it’d be a masterpiece.Scale shouldn’t be a factor in distinguishing good art.
[/quote]
To follow the analogy, we take 130 characters of Paradise Lost:
Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
And we take a postage stamp’s size sample of the Mona Lisa (which is the analog of taking 3 lines from Paradise Lost):
And we got lucky here, since sampling the Giaconda’s dress or hand gives us a Rothko-like all black or all white result. Yes, I am being (somewhat) facetious by taking a postage-stamp-sized sample instead of a postage-stamp-sized thumbnail. But either method is insufficient. For me. I must shamefully confess that I cannot recognize a great poem from 3 lines, nor a great work of art from a postage-stamp-sized thumbnail. (Unless that work is previously known to me, in which case it’s simply a lesson in pattern recognition, which is not what is being discussed.)
You only discern great art because you already know it’s great art. What you are describing is pattern recognition.
And, yet it is.
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You miss the point entirely.
From your Paradise Lost quote I can sense instantly there is great art there.
Besides, ‘preview’ of images and text is handled very differently. One cannot shrink all the words of a book into a single preview, and art is never previewed by snipping a piece from it, so your analogy is fatally flawed.
The postage-stamp point I was making was this;
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/78/William-Adolphe_Bouguereau%2C_1892_-Le_Gu%C3%AApier.jpg/84px-William-Adolphe_Bouguereau%2C_1892-_Le_Gu%C3%AApier.jpg
Instantly from this thumbnail one can tell that it is a great painting.
EDIT:
(Bouguereau is my favourite. His light and form are exquisite).
Of course the full size piece will be much more impressive, but if scale is all it has going for it, then it’s lacking.
Similarly a thumbnail from the cave @Shash posted
is recognizable as good art, even at that scale.
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That is probably one of the most beautiful parts of Ajanta. But to be fair, the whole composition is HUGE - it covers a wall something like 30 ft long by 15 ft high, and if you try to reduce the entire thing, well, it doesn’t work so well:
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The point is not to appreciate the art at that scale, but being able to recognise it as art at that scale.
You’re the one who said you could recognize a masterpiece from a Tweet!
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