We shall talk about this more 
(I am getting home from a gig ATM)
I know what you are getting at, but when it comes to mastery of subjects in art⊠Tom waits and Iggy pop hate each others music. Steely Dan hated jazz improv (though they used tropes from it). And I doubt johnny cash had many Ornette Coleman records.
The technical mastery of bringing a scene to life like the Dutch masters is genius. Similar to Liszt, Chopin, Debussy, etc. But that doesnât mean The Pixies diminishes Schubert. They are just different things.
I care for âshock artâ as much as I care for music that is just a crescendo (as in I donât). And I am not trying to change your opinion on pieces (the Masters are also my favorite). But I donât think Kandinsky, Mapplethorpe, OâKeefe, and others diminish visual arts.
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I want to try to explain to you what I have come to understand about art after really thinking about it for most of my life. Your attitude is quite hardened about this, though, which makes me feel like I am wasting my time and opening myself up to snarky put downs that stop way short of respectful. I take this question very seriously and have devoted most of my work and time to it for the balance of my life. I started out a skeptic, and still am one. I am not cynical though and respected some of what I saw and was pulled toward art and found like minded people there so I took the time and the necessary patience to figure out what was going on. A lot of contemporary art leaves me cold, not most, but a lot. I apply Sturgeonâs law and keep looking. Sturgeonâs law, named after the science fiction author who popularized the idea, states that 90% of anything is crap and you must look for the good if you want to know what people are attracted to a subject matter. My corollary is do not characterize a field by its failures. Historical art has the advantage of having been already separated from the junk. One of the exciting things about viewing contemporary art is that you have to decide for yourself since there hasnât been time for a consensus to emerge. Guess what? This means wading through a lot of failure. This is the cost of participating.
I will jump right in; art is an evolved behavior. This is what I meant by comparing it to your liver. Your liver solves problems. More than one, by the way, which is characteristic of evolved things. It is fiendishly complex and not completely understood. Yet it works. Language is another example of an evolved behavior. We donât completely understand how it works, how we acquire it, where it came from. Understanding how to make or look at art also evolves. It requires many attempts and re-attempts and course corrections, but at some point it clicks and then, WOW, a rich experience, complex and rewarding, emerges. This is not some sort of elitism. Would you say someone who speaks Chinese is elitist because you canât understand them? (Provided, of course, you donât speak Chinese. Substitute another language if necessary.) No.
Interestingly, there is thread running through a lot of Modern and contemporary art that questions the entire premise and success of this program. How much does bias contribute to what comes to be considered successful? To an astute observer, participant, there are major flashing alarms warning you to look out for your bias. Much of art, Modern especially, is saying in part, that what you think art is is just your bias controlling your judgement and you are wrong. It is something deeper and more mysterious. Mysterious? Yes, because it is an evolved behavior that is answering questions and solving problems we donât even have conscious awareness of. This is the nature of evolved things. Chinese sounds like gibberish to someone who hasnât heard it before. So does gibberish. You need to do the work to be able to tell the difference.
What artists and art lovers do understand is that work that is made with too much consciousness of what is going on, too much planning, is flat and uninspired. This is why we have the idea of the muse. It is an acknowledgment that the work, when it is good, comes from somewhere else. You will hear artists, writers, composers talking about a feeling of not being responsible for the work. that it just came out of nowhere. The work pulls you along. It is evolving, and you learn to nurture that. Allowing the work to show you where it needs to go. I used to say that we are better judges than creators. So you need to start by making a mistake and then the mistake will make it obvious what to do next. This is not far off.
Modern art was the emergence of the artist as the main motivator of the work. The annoying and crippling need to satisfy a patron was put aside and the artist insisted that âthe processâ should direct the work. Progress, if you can properly call it that, came fast and furious. Pollock was way down the line. It may look like gibberish, but it isnât. His canvases sing with energy and determination to figure it out. It is pure joy to stand in front of one and feel that. Some splashy paintings are gibberish. This is just the truth, not a contrivance.
What troubles a lot of people about art is that you canât explain it. This is, in fact, part of what makes it so glorious, and worth devoting a lifetime to or some leisure time.
Thatâs all for now.
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I had hoped that everything else Iâd written would have added nuance to my stance, but apparently, notâŠ
I personally find Sturgeonâs Law to be a bit too cynical - Iâd bring that level down to about 10% at most - the rest may be average, but thatâs not âcrapâ.
However, that bottom 10% is the lazy, attention-seeking work, work done purely for shock value, work with no discipline or dignity. I canât really accept those as being the same as the rest.
Thatâs another one of those things thatâs really only true if youâre coming from a Western background, with almost all historical art having been selected and curated in museums. Most of the historical Asian work that I see is not really in museums - itâs out there in temples, viharas, stupas, caves,⊠And we do often find work thatâs old, but not necessarily great.
The thing is, I agree with almost all of that. But I also see it being used to justify things that are in no way deserving of the space theyâre given. Chinese - heck, even whalesong for that matter - is one thing, but someone feeding a random number generator through a speaker and insisting that the output should be considered at the same level as a language is entirely different.
It cannot be a blanket dismissal of everything by a certain school - which is where the guy in the video gets it badly wrong. But even going case-by-case, we do find crap-masquerading-as-art that we clearly see is only given status because itâs a famous artist who made it or a famous critic whoâs batting for it.
The first part of that statement, I agree. There is indeed a lot of subjective bias in what we appreciate. My grandfather could never understand what I saw in modern music, for example (he - like me too - was a Carnatic music fanatic). I posted earlier (somewhere) that until people like Ananda Coomaraswamy and Rodin exposed the Western public to its better features, Indian art was considered gaudy stuff with too many limbsâŠ
But some of that bias is not necessarily wrong either - some of it is bias against absolute junk. Without that filter, you just end up treating the great works and the junk as being exactly the same. The trick is knowing when itâs which one.
Personally, I wouldnât make a blanket statement like that. Especially in architecture and design (which, Iâm sure youâll agree, is also art) meticulous planning can lead to beautiful and inspiring results. You canât exclude that!
I think thatâs another thing thatâs kind of West-centric. For most of history, traditional artists, folk artists and others never really had much by way of patronage. It was for themselves and those around them that they created, not for a patron. Even when there was a patron, often the art itself took centre-stage. Art for artâs sake has a long tradition in every part of the world.
As an example, I can point to my grandmotherâs Kolams - diagrammatic patterns drawn with rice flour on the ground. Theyâre a tradition in South Indian culture. Smaller designs every day, with more elaborate ones for special occasions. The techniques and designs are handed down from generation to generation, but no two are ever exactly alike. There is no visible patron - at most, you may say that a daughter or daughter-in-law tries to please the matriarch, but thatâs about it.
I can find a plethora of such examples. Thing is, none of those people ever felt the impulse to produce blank canvases, randomly splash paint or can their own bodily wastesâŠ
Maybe thatâs why Iâm missing what you see - maybe artistic freedom means something else to me than it does to youâŠ
Some points here:
-Weâre specifically talking about work involving people pissing. So Piss Christ is an irrelevant digression.
-Saying that you shouldnât presumptively categorically throw out any art that involves pissing isnât the same as saying you should âview all art as somehow worthy of praise.â Youâre, again, bringing in an irrelevant argument, and creating a straw man that you can batter about as âidioticâ. (Analogy: Saying âYou really shouldnât categorically hate black peopleâ is not the same as saying âYou should be friends with every person in the world.â)
-I DID in fact present an example of artworks that involve people pissing, but which have wide popular appeal. The âManneken Pisâ figure found in many fountains, and which has been adopted as a kind of symbol of Brussels. You did not respond to itâs mention. (I notice in this most recent comment you specify âa modern work involving piss.â This is changing the goal posts and introducing another irrelevant aspect to the discussion, which, again, is just about âartwork about people pissingâ and why you think itâs inherently without value).
Just curious â how did you find that video relevant to this post and/or thread?
I didnât watch the video, but I do think a lot of modern art is fantastic, and a lot⊠isnât. Of course, by modern art, I usually mean sculpture and rarely paintings, but thatâs just it- isnât it? The medium has become the message. Often what we call modern art is produced by modern methods, modern scale, and modern budgets. Rothko and Pollock are quickly fading as âmodernâ as the art scene gives way to the so-called âpost-modernâ (a misnomer born out of necessity and a surprising lack of originality.) @Othermichael posted something about Chuck Close, but thereâs nothing about his style that evokes a real sense of âmodernismâ as we tend to talk about it. We talk about Piss-Christ and chocolate vaginas, and a lot of what has made it into Saatchiâs good graces. But the everyday? Computer algorithms and dye technologies that make available to us billions of colors? Your kid running MS-Paint has access to a better, broader palette than most artists across human history, which throws a whole new spin on the phrase, âMy kid can do that.â
We enjoy modern art and illustration daily, but most of our exposure to it is in ads, and in the disposable. People spend years gaining experience in graphic design to create that abstract, simple, but eye-catching logo you use to promote your very abstract software service. I think what @LapsedPacifist is trying to articulate (quite successfully, I think) is the real sense that much modern art which receives plaudits hasnât attained an aesthetic that speaks to her/him. Thatâs absolutely fair. I think a great deal of what makes art so inaccessible to people is that it doesnât speak to their experiences. We wouldnât look at a book like House of Leaves and expect it to appeal to everyone.
But we have this sense that art is somehow a province of the wealthy and well-to-do. I think that attitudeâand the related and equally destructive idea that the problem is âaccessâ to art that doesnât speak to most peopleâis far more destructive to art than people realize. This is why I find it intolerable when people criticize commercial art. Commercial art, whether itâs a poster, or a t-shirt, or a goddamn tchochke is the only meaningful access a lot of people have to art. Itâs subsidized by the masses. Most Americans donât think very highly of Piss-Christ (to continue taking a common example), and why the fuck would they?
Some art is created at a level so far removed from most peopleâs experience that I honestly do not believe it should be featured in museums. I want to be clear: Iâm not saying popular art is the only kind that deserves to be in a museum, Iâm saying that there is art which is simply not comprehensible by almost any reasonable aesthetic standard. I went to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta a few times, and I was quite taken with a number of the works there. But, there was one exhibit that was just monochromatic circle sectors. Thatâs it. The description made clear that the âartistâ did not feel he was creating âart.â I agree with him. Itâs not that I couldnât get into the aesthetic, or that I donât understand things like Dadaism, or that Iâm a Stuckist. I just agree with him.
Part of why fiction, in the literary sense, works is the skepticism with which the reader engages the fiction. Thatâs part of how we communicate. âDude! I ate, like, three hundred Peeps last Easter.â No. No you didnât. You ate a lot of Peeps, Iâm sure, which is what youâre trying to convey. Itâs this basic level of aesthetic skepticism that a lot of modern art wants us to shed in order to âwork.â Iâm going to put forward the controversial position that skepticism matters, and is an important part of how we engage art.
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Yes, itâs an oddity, and a destructive one. What we in the west have learned to think of as âartâ communicates in a realm of understanding far removed from the experiences and understanding of most ordinary people, so to put it in museums that invite attendance by ordinary people is a paradox of sorts. But, I think this constructed, received conception of art serves another purpose â it helps to separate and maintain a social hierarchy. As the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu pointed out fairly long ago, this conception of âartâ serves to distinguish some of us from the mass of others; understanding that which has been declare âart,â buying it, acting as a patron of it, claiming an ability to understand and appreciate it in ways that most people donât â these all function as markers of âdistinctionâ:
The definition of art, and through it the art of living, is an object of struggle among the classes. A work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded. To the socially recognized hierarchy of the arts, and within each of them, of genres, schools or periods, corresponds a social hierarchy of the consumers. This predisposes tastes to function as markers of âclassâ. Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.
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Itâs a play on Hindemithâs opera Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen, the book of which was written by the rather famous Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka? (Just guessingâŠ)
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Methinks your distinction is showing. 
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Iâm a painter and composer. This particular distinction had better damned well show, I think, or Iâm likely committing crimes on my poor audience.
âNo. Maâam, I donât know who these people are. My work comes from straight inspiration, not the example of outdated artists.â
âYeah, rightâŠâ
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Iâd argue it would count as art if it WAS airbrushed on a dodgy van, but not hung on the wall in a galleryâŠ
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A dodgy van in a demolition derby, one would hope. It needs that kind of high concept: the Impermanence of Life and Art, and all thatâŠ
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OMG! I just watched the video. Prager University? Really? I would have restructured my entire comment based around that fact, if the BBS embedded videos properly. From the makers of âFeminism vs. Truthâ and âWhy you should love fossil fuel?â
And really âUniversal standards?â Horsehockey. This isnât figure-skating, itâs a much more diverse field. I get that some modern art is outsize in its cost, and underwhelming in its aesthetic, but no way am I replacing that with his ridiculous notion that âexpertsâ are the only people fit to evaluate art. Hell, if anything, Iâd say thatâs part of the problem right nowâart as a subculture.
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You do realize he was an invention of Banksy, right? That was not a sincere documentary.
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No, but lowbrow and conservative values-laden dismissals reflect poorly on the person who attempts to conflate their opinions with âobjectivityâ.
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I have heard that theory, and it certainly feels right, but is it actually true? (Fantastic flick, btw, prank or no)
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Iâll just leave this here
Agf, keeping in character is impossible, but isnât everyone and everything an invention of sorts? Illegitimacy in art?
Really? Itâs come to that? Bboing founders are posting videos from prageruniversity.com now? Is it Doomsday? [relevant video clip above]
So, WHEN you W A T C H E D Florczakâs video were there enough graphics to
KEEP YOUR ATTENTION? Were You⊠I N F O R M E D?
Scathing criticism follows:
Florczak is inveighing against the Impressionists. From 1910. An image of the Imperial Japanese holdouts, lurking in the Phillipines jungle until the 1970s comes to mind. This Florczak, too, needs to be coaxed out from his forest of error.
Florczak fetishizes 1890s art the way Glenn Beck fetishize the 1950s (itâs a perfect crystalline canon which cannot, must not, be deviated from-- or Iâll start crying). He boxes all modern abstract art into the false construct of âaesthetic relativism.â His condescending, troglodyte worldview is to be pitied and laughed at.
I wish Florczak would keep with what heâs best at: ever alert on the porch rocking chair, ready to yell out: âYou kids, stay off my lawn!â
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