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Post by frazer on Sept 3, 2014 22:46:06 GMT -5
That gut feeling is paramount in my opinion, James. We know the real thing when we see it - or at least what the real thing is for each of us. There is nothing wrong in 'I know what I like', whether it be figurative, abstract, conceptual, whatever. Where it gets to me is when genuine artistic endeavour is dismissed out of hand, with no attempt at understanding. And I can say that 'cos I've got a degree in it ;-)
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Post by Deleted on Sept 3, 2014 23:07:49 GMT -5
I think that Robert may have ticked me off a little with such an airy dismissal of Chris Ofili. I Like some of his work.
Robert has a music and art channel on Youtube that gave me a few giggles, so I'll let him off.
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Post by frazer on Sept 4, 2014 0:44:59 GMT -5
His 'my way or the highway', absolutist approach is a real turn-off for me, and I think calling the presentation "Why is modern art so bad?" is an ignorant starting point to choose, to the extent that I was tempted not to watch it at all. I'm certainly glad I didn't have him as a lecturer!
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Post by millring on Sept 4, 2014 6:12:04 GMT -5
His 'my way or the highway', absolutist approach is a real turn-off for me, and I think calling the presentation "Why is modern art so bad?" is an ignorant starting point to choose, to the extent that I was tempted not to watch it at all. I'm certainly glad I didn't have him as a lecturer! I get that. And experience tells me that I agree with it. And at the same time I still puzzle -- in spite of an education that should have removed that puzzlement -- at the absolutism of modern art education that supposes to have it both ways: To both declare art's subjectivity, and then purport to be capable of describing it objectively. I can remember asking my art professor what there was about an artist's work that actually communicated the things that the art history book claimed it communicated. I'm still waiting for an answer.
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Post by Russell Letson on Sept 4, 2014 11:37:33 GMT -5
I can't say much about conventional art-history/appreciation training, nor have I spent much time with the textbooks, but I do know that describing how/what a work "means" makes demands on one's grasp of the facts of the work (what exactly the object consists of, how it is produced, what historical conditions and traditions governed its production, a history of its reception, and so on) as well as on a careful observation of one's own reactions and a sense of what might be idiosyncratic or purely-personal in them. And decent writing chops. This is what I've needed to do both academic criticism and journalistic reviewing.
So whatever I identify as being "communicated" by a given work is rooted in elements that are accessible to any reasonably well-informed or observant viewer and (on the other hand) subjective responses to the work. If I were writing a textbook, the latter would be minimized or maybe eliminated, though I would report how others have responded to the work. A textbook that makes large claims about meaning and value ought, in my view, be very clear about the where meaning and value are located. But then, that's my particular aesthetic model at work--I don't believe in a Platonic realm of Beauty, just millions of individual (however similar) nervous systems responding to a set of stimuli.
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Post by Lonnie on Sept 4, 2014 12:49:58 GMT -5
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Post by Marshall on Sept 4, 2014 16:21:39 GMT -5
. . . , And at the same time I still puzzle -- in spite of an education that should have removed that puzzlement -- at the absolutism of modern art education that supposes to have it both ways: To both declare art's subjectivity, and then purport to be capable of describing it objectively. I can remember asking my art professor what there was about an artist's work that actually communicated the things that the art history book claimed it communicated. I'm still waiting for an answer. I have a Tee-shirt (all threads come back to the same place, don't they?) that I got from the Chicago Art Institute. It has on it a print of a painting and a quote by Edgar Degas "Art is not what you see, but what you make others see." Great quote. . . . , but for the life of me I have no idea what the painting is about (? ? ? ? ) I don't even think it's by Degas. It's some abstract organic green and yellow thing. Looks cool, sort of. But I have no idea what it is. But I love the quote so I bought the tee shirt.
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Post by frazer on Sept 4, 2014 20:33:12 GMT -5
His 'my way or the highway', absolutist approach is a real turn-off for me, and I think calling the presentation "Why is modern art so bad?" is an ignorant starting point to choose, to the extent that I was tempted not to watch it at all. I'm certainly glad I didn't have him as a lecturer! I get that. And experience tells me that I agree with it. And at the same time I still puzzle -- in spite of an education that should have removed that puzzlement -- at the absolutism of modern art education that supposes to have it both ways: To both declare art's subjectivity, and then purport to be capable of describing it objectively. I can remember asking my art professor what there was about an artist's work that actually communicated the things that the art history book claimed it communicated. I'm still waiting for an answer. Yes - why should we take the art history book's interpretation as gospel? I think one of the great things about great art is that it can mean different things to different people. I think the main thing is the gut reaction. I don't try to analyse why I love a beautiful musical solo, and I try to just enjoy a beautiful piece of art in the same way. If we have to be persuaded to appreciate something, maybe it isn't working well enough in explaining itself, or at least giving clues to its interpretation. That said, it can be fun to come to a 'difficult' piece of art and take the time to see if it does speak to you on any level. It may not. I try to keep an open mind.
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Post by Russell Letson on Sept 4, 2014 23:46:08 GMT -5
You can't really teach primal enjoyment of a work--but you can show ways of looking at it, explain how it's put together, explore where the parts come from and what other works might be related to it, point out how other people have reacted to it. And sometimes in the course of doing that, the student (since that's the situation I'm familiar with) does get it, or enough of it to turn the experience into something they might want to return to or try with another work. But that initial attraction or resonance or interest--that's entirely up to the viewer/reader/listener.
Nor is interpretation necessarily what I would aim for (though in literature we're dealing with meaning from the start, so that's a bit different from the arts that lack lexical content). Instead, I would go for a kind of awareness or mindfulness, with or without a grasp of technical matters. (Though my entire education was precisely aimed at understanding technique and the technical. But then, it was a specialist education.)
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Post by frazer on Sept 4, 2014 23:58:40 GMT -5
Absolutely, Russell. It's a shame this Florczak fellow doesn't seem to share that approach.
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Post by Marshall on Sept 5, 2014 7:12:04 GMT -5
. . . , Nor is interpretation necessarily what I would aim for (though in literature we're dealing with meaning from the start, so that's a bit different from the arts that lack lexical content). Instead, I would go for a kind of awareness or mindfulness, with or without a grasp of technical matters. (Though my entire education was precisely aimed at understanding technique and the technical. But then, it was a specialist education.) "Lexicon From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This article is about the linguistic concept. For other uses, see Lexicon (disambiguation). Formally, in linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes." Why didn't you say that in the first place. (I actually figured it out. And I like it)
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Post by millring on Sept 5, 2014 7:31:33 GMT -5
There will always be the misunderstanding that art requires skill.
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Post by millring on Sept 5, 2014 7:38:39 GMT -5
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Post by Lonnie on Sept 5, 2014 9:16:32 GMT -5
I got 4 out of 11. Patti got 7, but she has granddaughters and understands the art of children.
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Post by Doug on Sept 5, 2014 9:30:54 GMT -5
5 out of 11
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Post by Russell Letson on Sept 5, 2014 10:36:29 GMT -5
I didn't bother with the quiz part because I couldn't come up with a criterion for choosing that wasn't either random guessing or "this one is pretty." And I have a sneaking suspicion that the whole enterprise is a way of avoiding the possibility that some "art" is simply a chunk of sensory/perception data that someone decides is pleasing to experience.
For example, for decades I have kept two "objects" on a shelf: the workings of a cheap windup alarm clock, and an assemblage of two brass mouthpieces holding up an alabaster egg, rather like a trophy cup. I don't know what, if anything, these two objects "mean," but I enjoy looking at them. They were not made by some artisan, did not require any skill to be put in their current forms. For reasons I don't recall, I disassembled the clock and was struck by the look of the gear train of the works and set them on a shelf. The egg I bought in a flea market in Florence around 1964, and the brass mouthpieces (tuba and cornet, I believe) I found in an antique store. When I stuck the mouthpieces together, shank to shank, it looked like a plinth, so I set the egg on it and put it next to the clockwork. The devising of these objects did not require any special skill--I simply removed them from their original contexts and put them on a shelf where I could look at them. And my enjoyment of them is hard to distinguish from my enjoyment of a non-representational painting done by a very accomplished friend who took the trouble to master airbrush technique and produced images that he thought of as representing various kinds of energies. Despite my friend's own subjective sense of what his painting "means," my primal response is "ooh, pretty!"
The degree of technical skill required to produce the object is not a necessary part of that primal response, though it might be a component of my total response to my friend's work. In fact, one reason I value his work is its rarity--not just anybody can produce a painting like his, and even those who achieve that level of skill are not likely to produce images just like his. So his "vision" as well as his skill-set are responsible for my total response. But that primal "ooh, pretty!" precedes everything else. And that comes entirely from me. And, to be fair, "ooh, pretty!" is part of what drives the artist to make the painting in the first place--he is putting the pretty thing out in the world where he and others can ooh at it. That's what I did with the clockwork.*
Another angle on that quiz: So some of those daubs were made by toddlers. Why can't toddlers' daubs be art? How much (and what kind of) intention is required for the product to be considered "art" rather than, say, "play"? Consider the elements required for the toddler to produce a "canvas": materials (paint, brushes, surface); sufficient visual acuity to distinguish colors and shapes; sufficient muscular control to get paint onto surface in a desired pattern or manner; feedback loops that determine how and where to apply paint and when to stop. Not all of the toddler-side qualities are as developed as their equivalents in an older painter, but unless the kid is just trashing around with a paintbrush, there is some degree of intention and control and (presumably) satisfaction with the resulting colors and patterns. Which is to say, I'm guessing that those toddlers are saying to themselves in toddlerese, "ooh, pretty!"
* There's an art-appreciation-class cliche that lays out a three-sided diagram mapping the elements of "art": artist-object-audience. When a maker makes something that no one else will see, is it still art? Yes, because then two vertices of the triangle have been collapsed into each other. And I would argue that in all art, the artist is also the audience. If somebody else wanders into the studio, so much the better, since we monkey-folk are all about social interaction and batting ideas back and forth and picking fleas off each other.
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Post by Supertramp78 on Sept 5, 2014 11:09:31 GMT -5
I got 10 out of 11. What do I win? I actually liked them all.
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Post by theevan on Sept 5, 2014 16:28:41 GMT -5
Any comments about Tom Wolfe's clever dissection of modern art The Painted Word?
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Post by millring on Sept 5, 2014 16:55:30 GMT -5
Any comments about Tom Wolfe's clever dissection of modern art The Painted Word? I'm not sure when you'd find the time, but if you do, this interview is fascinating in its echoes of some of Wolfe's themes. talesofaredclayrambler.libsyn.com/episode-70-garth-clark-on-the-tales-of-a-red-clay-rambler-podcastClark had recently done a series of debates taking the theme that pottery is dead. He was countered by Matt Jones, a North Carolina potter making a living in pottery and living the resurgence of the apprentice movement in the US.
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Post by billhammond on Sept 5, 2014 17:09:01 GMT -5
Wow, there sure are some strong anti-contemporary-art views out there!
Listen, I love the visual arts, all media, all periods. I enjoy the hell out of browsing museums, galleries, etc., and I long ago made peace with abstract artworks. The more I open myself up to them, I have found, the more I get out of them, kind of like the first time I heard "Switched-On Bach" and was startled but eventually came to really enjoy and appreciate that music by giving it a chance.
I guess I don't understand the anger, the implications of fraud, because this or that person, in an artistic endeavor, elects to do things his or her way and yet has to encounter some viewers who go beyond expressing ambivalence or even dislike of the work but seek to impugn the creator and his or her character.
There is no licensing system for creativity. There is no litmus test that can be performed on any given work to establish that it is A. art, B. good art, or C. bad art.
Next time you walk into a gallery and see something that you think your 3-year-old niece could have painted, try thinking about how awesome your 3-year-old niece is. And then sit down and look at it again with an open heart, soul and mind.
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