I don’t think you get @pixleshifter’s point point - even when summarised into a Tweet, Paradise Lost is still a masterpiece. But if you’re just going to snip 120 random alphabets from it, it may not work. Summarising is an art in and of itself.
I kind of agree with him, but not entirely… That’s exactly where art becomes subjective… 
No I didn’t. @Kevin_Baker asked if true literature could be recognised in a tweet, I asked him if he couldn’t recognise it. And as I’ve already stated, I could recognise art in your short quote from Milton.
I don’t have to be able to recognise the artist themself, nor the title of the piece, just recognise that there’s art within.
Ya know, one thing you can say about this was that a Fox station won’t see the need to blur the nipples.
No, one most certainly cannot. The reason you think you can is that you have already seen it at a legible size.
Saying that scale is unimportant to visual art implies that you can fully appreciate a complex symphony — that you’ve never heard before — coming out of a tinny mono cell phone speaker on a noisy street. Or that you’re equally immersed watching 2001 for the first time on a good theater screen as in ASCII animation on a 9" monochrome monitor. Or that you can know what it’s like to walk through the Taj Mahal because you saw a scale model of it. It’s utter nonsense.
Of course blowing crap up to monumental sizes doesn’t automatically make it not-crap, but it by no means follows that scale is not a factor in the perception and therefore the quality of the work.
Again, the point is missed entirely. Am I having trouble explaining myself cleary?
I could easily spot a good piece of music coming out from a shitty little speaker, it’d prompt me to seek out the original work. Same with the thumbnail. Same with a good movie.
If you can’t tell from that thumbnail that it’s a great piece of art with a lot of skill, even without having seen it before I’d suggest upping your focal prescription.
No, I read your post correctly, I was giving an example of “I’m not a fraud” behavior by Rothko.
He’s wearing haute couture.
The character is somewhat dismissive - but of all the art she has viewed that day, it is the Pollock that inspires her to make something when she’s home.
You’d end up with awfully toxic marshmallows. Plus, all those assistants would be out of a job and have to find work at McDonald’s; on the upside, that’d probably be a raise.
You really think so? Give your niece a few 15’ canvases, a set of oil paints and brushes, shut her in a studio for a couple of weeks and get back to us with the results.
Art critics, academics, and artists are not concerned with defining art. They leave that to the freshmen having stoned late-night group discussions in the dorm common area. Art is what it is. Your critic would be commenting on the qualities of the art, not whether it fits a nebulous definition. To insist that one of those qualities must be meaning is a callow impulse that dismisses most all nonrepresentative art. Art can be effective/affective without even obliquely telling a story or being a picture of something.
Francis Bacon was a heavy drinker who got into debt, expected his rich friends to bail him out, and blackmailed at least one person into sadistic gay sex. I met him once, I was terrified. Lucien Freud actually got into debt with the Krays, and had numerous children by different women. Its perhaps a cliché that great artists are amoral, but an awful lot of them seem determined to prove it.
In the case of poetry it depends what three lines we choose. I’m pretty sure I could choose 3 lines from Dante, Eliot, Yeats or Pushkin that would serve as an ex pede Hercules. But I tend to agree this doesn’t apply to a painting, because the eye takes in a picture at once and then focuses on the details, whereas with a poem we start with the details and only gradually build up the whole picture.
I once went to a lecture by Gyorgi Ligeti. He said that under Communism Western radio was jammed, but they could just about get some idea of what was being played through the interference, and from this he and his fellow composers got some ideas. When he came to the West he discovered that they had been able to hear only the high notes; they had no idea what the bass was like at all.
I suspect on your tinny little speaker you wouldn’t be able to tell the opening of Also Sprach Zarathustra from Verdi’s Dies Irae. But I may be wrong.
So, the standard now is that the physical work involved in painting 15’ canvasses is what qualifies?
I thought we’d agreed that scale wasn’t the thing that made it art?
FWIW, what she does on notebook-sized paper is definitely of a higher grade.
You’re not getting my point. It’s not that I insist on every piece having meaning. OK, I’ll use your term - “qualities of the art” - which is what I meant by saying “meaning” up there. The point is, if I told a critic that x is a piece of art by a great artist, and asked him to comment on it professionally, I’d probably get a response that attempts to find those qualities in x, regardless of whether it was an art piece or not to begin with. The mere fact that it was presented as an art piece means that the art critic would necessarily have to find some artistic quality in it. Because the dogma is that everything can and should be accepted as art if it’s presented as art.
If you think of it as a kind of double-blind test, the critic has failed in discerning any artistic qualities in what was presented to him - rather than a “made” piece, where his interpretations of the artist’s intent may actually have some substance, it ends up being a “found” piece, where it’s just ex post facto justification. So, what’s the value of his critique now?
I don’t see what’s so horrible about that. You don’t need a hard art/non-art binary distinction for meaningful differences in artistic value. You can also view artistic value as a quality that every intentional act posesses to some - widely varying - degree.
Context is important and necessary. You can see WHY they are painting like that. At the same time, much of art by early man is crap. Pictographs literally could be done by a 4 year old. The Pree-Renasassiance had issues with perspective. Many of them were extremely formulaic, where one would have trouble telling one artist from the next. And of course the subject matter was very limited. (Hope you like religious stories). So again, I can appreciate the early art because I know what they were trying to accomplish.
[quote=“Shash, post:53, topic:57562”]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?[/quote]
You seem to think making modern art is a lot simpler than it really is. Note that most artists from the Modern Art movement were classically trained and could draw circles around the average person.
But yes - a craft can be an art. Just like graphic design can be art. Folk art can be art. That is why we find pottery and baskets and bottles from past cultures in art museums. Though the forms are often simple and utilitarian, they are also beautiful in a way.
Again, you sound like an elitist with no actual clue as to what was going on at the time. I bet on ebay you can find some modern art history text book for $5. Indulge yourself. If you think what Rothko did too no time, skill, or planning, then you are woefully ignorant of the process.
Again - I will point out that not all of it is GOOD art. Certainly you can have your favorites and those you don’t care for. What you ENJOY is subjective. You can not care for something and still respect it for what it is. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t make it crap. Your belittling of some of them is unfounded.
For example, you may not prefer the Honda Civic, but still acknowledge it is a generally well made car.
…which would come in very handy if they moonlighted as murder scene detectives.
Oh, you meant “run rings round”.
It’s of a piece with Duchamp’s Fountain though. It’s still a valid criticism of a lot of modern art; it’s only art because it has been signed by and officially attributed to a legitimate artist by approved art critics.
There’s always a tension between the wilder fringes of the art world and the general public announcing “crap”. The amount of stuff that actually survives long term suggests that most of the time the general public is right. Not always. Personally I find Duchamps’s complex relationship to art very illuminating.
I suspect I could tell that something special was going on, and that I’d like to check out the full resolution piece.
That’s the point.
You don’t need a binary distinction, but surely, at the extreme end of the spectrum, there’s “not-art”, and somewhere, there’s a point where the “art value” drops below the 20-decibel limit. A point where you can meaningfully say “that’s no longer art - at best it’s something that pretends to be art”.
Which is irrelevant when the end result is indistinguishable from… nothing…
So, now who’s being elitist?
Early pictograms are simple, but they’re hardly random splatters of paint on canvas. Pre-Renaissance lack of perspective is not even a question of underdeveloped technique - it’s a technique that gives importance to other things. In those times, artists didn’t even think to sign their works; we don’t know the names of a single one of the creators of Ajanta for example. Formulae existed because there was a grammar to it. It still exists in different art forms all around the world in the same way. But that doesn’t mean there was no creativity. Every grammar allows space for expression within it.
Limited subject matter? If you think the scope for subjects in religious art is limited, you’re sorely mistaken. In the rest of the world, we’re still looking to religion for inspiration, and we haven’t come close to the limit!
Yet they didn’t…
You don’t have to tell me about folk art or craft from past cultures - I’ve used designs similar to those in museums as a part of my day to day life. I can pick out a dozen from the room I’m in without even trying. Yes, they can be well-made and pretty artistic too.
They’re still different from a blank wall. The craftspeople and artists who made these things would feel insulted if you suggested such a comparison to them.
Sure. I’ll do one better and learn from some great artists who happen to be good friends too, shall I?
See, I’ve seen such people work. There’s a clear difference between that and what your impressionists do.
Time, well, obviously - painting a five-foot canvas isn’t instantaneous. Skill, I’ll grant you even that. Where I get hung up is a) intent - there seems to be no real plan behind it besides the filling of the canvas with two colours, at least to me - and b) emotion - it just doesn’t connect, doesn’t trigger any feeling in the mind; not even the negative. It’s just neutral.
It it were just that, I’d leave it at that and go my way. The problem is, I find what I see as intellectually and technically lazy and unappealing held up as equal to or greater than works that have had careful planning, confident execution and that connect very strongly to the brain in a fundamental way. To me, this comparison with modern art belittles those works unfairly.
Pretty much exactly what I’m getting at…
We agree to agree.
ART, n. This word has no definition. Its origin is related as follows by the ingenious Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J.
One day a wag—what would the wretch be at?—
Shifted a letter of the cipher RAT,
And said it was a god’s name! Straight arose
Fantastic priests and postulants (with shows,
And mysteries, and mummeries, and hymns,
And disputations dire that lamed their limbs)
To serve his temple and maintain the fires,
Expound the law, manipulate the wires.
Amazed, the populace that rites attend,
Believe whate’er they cannot comprehend,
And, inly edified to learn that two
Half-hairs joined so and so (as Art can do)
Have sweeter values and a grace more fit
Than Nature’s hairs that never have been split,
Bring cates and wines for sacrificial feasts,
And sell their garments to support the priests.
The Devil’s Dictionary - Ambrose Bierce
