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Post by Lonnie on Sept 3, 2014 10:37:36 GMT -5
It's interesting to note that the advent of the camera and the accessory of color photography roughly coincides with the outbreak of impressionism. So paintings no longer needed to be representational, there was a new medium to capture reality, giving the artist license to move in a different direction. Including license to drive into a ditch.
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Post by millring on Sept 3, 2014 10:45:06 GMT -5
My appreciation of the visual arts peaks with the Impressionists, I wholly disagree that they were the beginning of the end.. neither were the Abstractionists or the Surrealists. Those artists were grounded in representational methods (look at van Gogh's very early work, for instance). I think part of what separates real art from tomfoolery is knowing and embracing the traditions and rules before you break them or expand upon them. I did a little research, it's interesting to note that the advent of the camera and the accessibility of color photography roughly coincides with the outbreak of impressionism. So paintings no longer needed to be representational, there was a new medium to capture reality, giving the artist license to move in a different direction. Good post. Aikens was among the first to famously use the camera as a tool for painting. I think other science -- particularly the physics of light -- was informing new directions in painting as well. I also disagree with the video's assertions about impressionism. In fact, I would point to impressionism as a direction that was taking painting back into the realm of art and out of the mistaken notion that technique trumped content. I also like your assertion that "I think part of what separates real art from tomfoolery is knowing and embracing the traditions and rules before you break them or expand upon them.". I've always thought that it was in large part that principle that made the music of the 60s so strong. It wasn't exactly (or "just") the rebellion and self-expression that made the 60s music strong. It was those factors coupled with a technical skill in music that allowed that expression to be successfully rebellious, and made it so that, thought the music was increasingly self-expressive, we actually cared about it (even though it wasn't about ourselves).
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Post by Russell Letson on Sept 3, 2014 10:49:54 GMT -5
At some point, the tools and media available start to strongly affect the notion of what is possible or interesting, and there are always practitioners who will grab the new tools and use them in some surprising way. And there will always be traditionalists who view that with alarm, and viewers who will take to it just because it's new or startling. And other things being equal, it's the longitudinal audience that will decide what has staying power (for whatever reason) and add the object or novelty to the notion of the acceptable or important. It's a matter of statistics--of acceptance and understanding and resonance, distributed over generations. Whatever is "universal" in art is discovered after the fact--it's an observation rooted in multiple factors and responses, not a metaphysical quality, which is what the language of the likes of Florczak implies.
BTW, I think Elijah Wald pretty much settled the hash of the case of the rural-blues purists in Escaping the Delta.
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Post by dradtke on Sept 3, 2014 10:59:30 GMT -5
A lot of the original complaint is about what appears in galleries and museums. And education. Same point. Art majors are a fairly recent development.
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Post by millring on Sept 3, 2014 11:13:59 GMT -5
Same point. Art majors are a fairly recent development. Well, I guess what you're saying then is that you agree with the fellow's thesis -- that this new view of art is a modern construct intended to shape what art a society values? That it's prescriptive rather than descriptive (which is what he's driving at)?
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Post by Russell Letson on Sept 3, 2014 11:14:38 GMT -5
About the camera and painting: The camera obscura was a used at least as early as the Renaissance as a drafting aid. (And then there's David Hockney's speculation about mirrors and the Tim Jenison Vermeer-reproducing stunt.) I recall there was also a role for the pantograph.
What the photograph seems to have done is reduce the need and demand for purely representational or documentary portraiture and landscape--the photo seems to have been accepted very rapidly by people of (relatively) modest means as a way of capturing images of themselves and their families. And people of means to this day will commission a painted portrait, though if they hire, say, David Hockney, it's not going to look like something the local photo studio will turn out. And of course the photograph itself became an "artistic" medium as soon as photographers figured out interesting/expressive/startling ways of manipulating the processes.
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Post by dradtke on Sept 3, 2014 11:19:30 GMT -5
Same point. Art majors are a fairly recent development. Well, I guess what you're saying then is that you agree with the fellow's thesis -- that this new view of art is a modern construct intended to shape what art a society values? That it's prescriptive rather than descriptive (which is what he's driving at)? Is that what he said?
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Post by millring on Sept 3, 2014 11:26:45 GMT -5
Well, I guess what you're saying then is that you agree with the fellow's thesis -- that this new view of art is a modern construct intended to shape what art a society values? That it's prescriptive rather than descriptive (which is what he's driving at)? Is that what he said? Well, in part, yes.
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Post by Russell Letson on Sept 3, 2014 11:28:18 GMT -5
All views of art are "construct(s) intended to shape what art a society values." What I hear from guys like Florczak is that "constructed" aesthetic models are somehow false to some underlying set of universals that are independent of the understandings that humans construct--"constructed" is a devil-term to some kinds of cultural conservatives. (I'm adapting Kenneth-Burkean language here.) "Relativism" is another such--and it's generally used in a flattened, rhetorically charged way.
If there are absolute--or, to be precise, deeply-rooted and broadly distributed--inherent qualities to our responses to "art," they remain within the human realm. There is nothing "out there" that makes art. Only what is "in here." Though, of course, "in here" is in constant interaction with "out there." But because "in here" is complicated and wonderfully various, so is art.
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Post by millring on Sept 3, 2014 11:46:49 GMT -5
Except that the current academy is exactly a mirror of the restrictive academy against which it purported to rebel.
There certainly seems to be a modern sensibility where art is concerned. Complete freedom of expression as long as what is expressed concerns itself with ugliness, pain, suffering, and just a little bit (or a lot) of naughtiness.
And anything expressly intended to uplift or simply be generally beautiful is panned as naive, and is despised (and ridiculed) by the modern critic. There is little recognition of any possible gulf between Fredric Church and Thomas Kinkade. To the modern critic they are the same. Meanwhile, we are to believe that the road from Warhol to Curt Cobain (if I may mix my media) showed us what in life is real.
We've historically traveled from the humanism of the enlightenment that reveled and gloried in our humanity, to the modern day where we wallow in it.
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Post by Supertramp78 on Sept 3, 2014 11:49:42 GMT -5
The guy in the video does what a lot of people do when they are trying to make an ideological point. He games the samples. He won't show us all the thousands of paintings from history that were bad enough to not last until today. The stuff that got painted over or tossed out or never sold in the first place. he also doesn't show the art that is made today that people might actually think is good. Nope. Can't do that. we have to show the most controversial things and hold them up as the example for everything else - as if the entire art community is cranking out art splattered with feces. I guess I'm going to have to check that pumpkin pottery I have for fecal residue.
I also question his statement that bad art shouldn't be purchased. Bad art isn't being purchased. Art someone wants is being purchased. That huge rock was purchased with money from private donors and the rock is just part of the installation. The interesting thing about it is that you can walk around it and under it and thousands of people do.
But I wanted to comment on the education part where he says that people who want to paint or draw something nice are drummed out of art schools. The only experience I have with art schools is the one Cameron is in. The undergraduate degree is "Visualization" which is part art, part science, part technology. The Graduate degree is either Master of Science Visualization (think advanced programming and technical research) or a Masters of Fine Arts which is what Cameron is working through. All of those undergrad and grad degrees require classes in drawing and painting and mixed media as well as computer programming and computer graphics.
For fun I thought I would post some samples of the work coming out of this art school. Some are by the students but a few are also by the faculty.
This is what is actually going on in art education today. Not a spot of feces in the lot. No blank canvases. No single color works. This is a rough sample of the art produced over the last few semesters. Not a cherry picked sample of the most likely to outrage over the last decade or so.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 3, 2014 11:53:00 GMT -5
I looked at Mr Florczak's website, curious to see whether his Wikipedia entry had been copied from there. It seems it was. There are a few of his paintings there. Oh dear. I think I prefer the rock. www.robertflorczak.com/fine-art
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Post by millring on Sept 3, 2014 11:58:52 GMT -5
The guy in the video does what a lot of people do when they are trying to make an ideological point. He games the samples. He won't show us all the thousands of paintings from history that were bad enough to not last until today. The stuff that got painted over or tossed out or never sold in the first place. he also doesn't show the art that is made today that people might actually think is good. Nope. Can't do that. 1. One of the problems with the perception that "Modern Art" (<---in quotes because "Modern Art" doesn't mean the same thing as "contemporary") is bad is because, in contrast to the art produced throughout history, it has not yet been pared down to those few(er) pieces with "staying power". It's a common complaint about contemporary church music. It sucks. But the complaint is, at least on some level, an unfair one because what is happening is that we are comparing the current output of writers with the enduring work of history.
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Post by millring on Sept 3, 2014 12:00:08 GMT -5
I looked at Mr Florczak's website, curious to see whether his Wikipedia entry had been copied from there. It seems it was. There are a few of his paintings there. Oh dear. I think I prefer the rock. www.robertflorczak.com/fine-artCritics and teachers are rarely held to the standards of the disciplines they critique. Russell does not write science fiction. But we could continue to discuss the messenger if you think him more interesting than the subject.
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Post by millring on Sept 3, 2014 12:03:21 GMT -5
....and we usually WOULD relate better to student work. That's also part of what the video is saying -- that we naturally -- if left to our common senses -- would gravitate toward what we understand without needing to have it explained for us.
But that student work is not what is going to be curated into future museums. It will be passed down in families who cherish the artist as much as the art, or they will be in landfills.
The reality is that that student work is what would be shamed out of those students in a major University art program. That's not to say that a University with a commercial art program would take the same approach. If the whole idea behind the program is to train students to make work that's commercially viable, then of course the approach would be different. But that's not the art world that the video is talking about, any more than is the art fair world in which I reside.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 3, 2014 12:10:35 GMT -5
I looked at Mr Florczak's website, curious to see whether his Wikipedia entry had been copied from there. It seems it was. There are a few of his paintings there. Oh dear. I think I prefer the rock. www.robertflorczak.com/fine-artCritics and teachers are rarely held to the standards of the disciplines they critique. Russell does not write science fiction. But we could continue to discuss the messenger if you think him more interesting than the subject. Fair point. His aesthetic preferences seem to have informed his artistic output rather strangely though.
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Post by Russell Letson on Sept 3, 2014 12:49:52 GMT -5
My own self, I mention Florczak's name because 1) he's the guy preaching in the video and 2) his sermon* is anything but unfamiliar. In fact, like a lot of sermons, it comes from a tradition of sermonizing, which makes the messenger (and the tradition to which he belongs) of some interest. There are also evangelizers for The New and The Shocking and The Relevant, and it's usually not hard to spot the school from which they come and place them with their co-evangelizers.
(And, of course, such taxonomizing is precisely part of my own craft as an academically-trained commentator and anatomizer. If I were reviewing a book by Florczak I would start out by locating him in the field of art scholars/commentators. I might not put the results of my locating in the finished review, but it would be part of my understanding of his work. And if you want to locate me, start with Aristotle and work your way through A. C. Bradley to Northrop Frye, Kenneth Burke, Eddie Epstein, and the Gardners John and Brother Dave.)
* I use the word only slightly snottily, since I detect in his analysis a surplus of "oughts," which I associate with preaching, whether to the choir or strangers on the virtual streetcorner.
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Post by millring on Sept 3, 2014 13:03:50 GMT -5
My own self, I mention Florczak's name because 1) he's the guy preaching in the video and 2) his sermon* is anything but unfamiliar. In fact, like a lot of sermons, it comes from a tradition of sermonizing, which makes the messenger (and the tradition to which he belongs) of some interest. There are also evangelizers for The New and The Shocking and The Relevant, and it's usually not hard to spot the school from which they come and place them with their co-evangelizers. (And, of course, such taxonomizing is precisely part of my own craft as an academically-trained commentator and anatomizer. If I were reviewing a book by Florczak I would start out by locating him in the field of art scholars/commentators. I might not put the results of my locating in the finished review, but it would be part of my understanding of his work. And if you want to locate me, start with Aristotle and work your way through A. C. Bradley to Northrop Frye, Kenneth Burke, Eddie Epstein, and the Gardners John and Brother Dave.) * I use the word only slightly snottily, since I detect in his analysis a surplus of "oughts," which I associate with preaching, whether to the choir or strangers on the virtual streetcorner. I get that, and I sympathize. But I'm left more curious about an issue that people really do puzzle out (why can't they understand "modern" art? ....and why does that make them feel stupid, when it seems so obviously to be a fraud that nobody in a position to do anything about it is exposing?). I mean, heck, while we're going back and forth over whether or not the guy on the video has the authority to ask the questions, a doctor and a lawyer (in other words, NOT stupid people) from among us have admitted to feeling the same sense of being defrauded by modern art.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 3, 2014 13:11:59 GMT -5
I looked at Mr Florczak's website, curious to see whether his Wikipedia entry had been copied from there. It seems it was. There are a few of his paintings there. Oh dear. I think I prefer the rock. www.robertflorczak.com/fine-artTo me Mr. Florczak's work seems best suited for the cover of a Sci-Fi or Harlequin novel, but I must admit it is well executed and shows the work of a skilled artist with a solid background of training. This is a fascinating topic. I agree with some of the points our sound byte professor makes, and disagree with others. By the way, I watched a number of other Prager U videos, every one began with an opinion espoused as a fact, and their entire argument built from that. But I digress... My appreciation of the visual arts peaks with the Impressionists, I wholly disagree that they were the beginning of the end.. neither were the Abstractionists or the Surrealists. Those artists were grounded in representational methods (look at van Gogh's very early work, for instance). I think part of what separates real art from tomfoolery is knowing and embracing the traditions and rules before you break them or expand upon them.I did a little research, it's interesting to note that the advent of the camera and the accessibility of color photography roughly coincides with the outbreak of impressionism. So paintings no longer needed to be representational, there was a new medium to capture reality, giving the artist license to move in a different direction. Wish I could have stated it that well.
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Post by dradtke on Sept 3, 2014 13:13:23 GMT -5
Except for a few peripheral comments I'm not going to get deeply involved in this conversation for a few reasons. I don't feel qualified to decide if something is "art" or not. Here at work we have a number of painters and sculptors who produce very detailed and realistic paintings and sculptures for museums, but not art museums. Is that art or not? You got me. It takes a certain talent for something. These guys also individually create stuff on their own time and periodically have works shown at local galleries. Then again, the guy who did the statues above carved a zombie head that was reproduced and sold commercially. I don't really care much what curators think or say. I find it hard to buy into how wonderful things used to be before x and how shitty they are now because something. I've seen a lot of crappy modern art, and after walking miles through the Vatican museum I've seen a lot of pretty pedestrian ancient art, too. Carry on.
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