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[Mar]

since your thinking that, your not an artist, and thus that is not art. 

 

dick move guy. dick move

[team_q]

Pablo Picasso

What I had said was sarcastic, it was a jab at people who get huffy about modern art. The idea that art only has worth what you explain it's worth to your audience, I think its silly. Which is why I laughed to myself when you gave that Pablo Picasso example.

[gimymblert]

Following where this thread goes after quiting it, i can say some post enlighten me a bit more about what ART is, or could be define: It's not "something", it's a frame, doing art is framing things!

Of course everything can be art, as everything can be frame as art.

Framing was always important in art, in a painting, in photography, or even in sculpture. Framing define the langage of a particular genre of art.

The revolution brought by Duchamps' urinal was it made the framing conceptual Suddenly the physical limitation of the framing became less relevant than the contextual framing, The urinal becamed art because the museum was the framing, and his meaning was about ART, in a toilet the framing would have been just another functional object (unless the reference frame it for you differently, as duchamps demonstrate with LHOOQ "series").

Art is the framing that make object meaningful, it says "pay attention", only the observer decide whether or not there is value and a need to pay attention, but value is whole new story.

In "rules of play" eric zimmerman and katie salen define the magic circle, the way GAME, in a general sense, are framed by imposing meaning to thing from the game realm, a plank of wood became a sword or a pistol according to what's at play. Art does the same thing, it define a perspective on things, their expressive power. No wonder duchamps in is older days QUIT ART FOR GAME! 

[JaJitsu]

since your thinking that, your not an artist, and thus that is not art. 

 

dick move guy. dick move

 

[jpgray]

Since it's fun to let dedicated followers of fashion explain their pursuits, who wants to take a crack at explaining to me the genius of the following (Oak on Easel #1, Tim Knowles):

[gimymblert]

 

[Jrsquee]

hahaha i really like that
I like it waaaaay more than the thing that first started this discussion
I think it's clever and an interesting visualization of the movement of the tree

think of it from a visualization/statistical graphics point of view!
I think it's pretty funny too

[Mipe]

The sad thing is that this tree has more artistic talent than half those so-called "artists".

[nikki]

You don't have to like it.

You could if you did, but since you don't... why bother?
I personally don't care about ballet, but you wouldn't find me posting these rants about it on a forum dedicated to something else.

[aeiowu]

trees painting trees! 

i love it.

[jpgray]

It has its charms, right?  That those charms are lost on me is immaterial.  To my mind the most creative aspect of "fine art" at the moment is that of marketing: finding a place for your idea and justifying it, and coercing some segment of the gatekeepers to do the same.  The language for doing so is often made the subject of fun:



To take the problem away from the more controversial "modern art," where objective technical skill is not at all necessary, consider opera--it does almost nothing for me.  Yet I've tried very hard to like it, and in certain discrete parts, I do.  I imagine, though, if I spent many months listening to recordings, attending performances (I've seen more than a few) and in general investing a lot of myself in appreciation, I would come to enjoy it almost by default.  I would feel good about myself for knowing the most obscure and minute differences between interpretations, performers, styles, etc., and my enjoyment would derive as much if not more from my personal investment as it would from the actual art.

I think whiskey aficianadi come from a similar place: so far as I know, no one enjoys his first taste of whiskey.  Whiskey snobs may, however, be heavily influenced by their social environment to -cultivate- a taste for it nonetheless, and with wide experience may derive pleasure from the ability to make fine distinctions the "lay person" cannot, even though the basic flavor hasn't much changed.  I think a similar thing occurs with those who are insufferable fanboys for obscure bands--it's not so much the music anymore that brings pleasure as it is one's appreciation for one's own delicate taste.

Does that make any sense to anyone?  

[Sam]

That does make sense to me.  However!

"Oak on Easel #1" appeals to me, and I've little to no knowledge of 'modern' art movements.  I've certainly not spent time cultivating knowledge and taste in it.  But I guess my appreciation of the piece is on a less deep level than an art critic's would be.

To me it's mostly humorous, but with beauty in there too.  The title plays off the way traditional pieces are described as "charcoal on card" or "oils on canvas", but here it actually is an oak tree on an easel.  The photo of the tree doing the painting is fun, as the easel looks so carefully set up to be level and in a comfortable position, but it's all just for a tree to rub against it.  The finished thing is quite nice to look at: interesting variation in density of the lines, and amusingly it does look kind of like a sketch of the trees on the far river bank.

I found the artist's site which shows a collection of similar images from other trees (and a variety of other projects along similar lines of capturing motion in an image.)  In the context of those other pieces one can see the varying patterns between trees, and it makes me think of how individual trees move differently in the wind.  In turn that makes me think of how the movements of the tips of branches is determined by the complex forms of the whole tree, how that was produced by forces acting on the tree over decades, and how all of that is now being pulled together to make some marks on a canvas.  Having these thoughts stirred up was a positive experience for me, and so I like the piece.

So I guess I ended up taking up your challenge from when you first posted the image.  But I'm not a dedicated follower of fashion, just some guy, y'know.

[Corpus]

I just discovered a post which I don't remember writing

touché. I can't remember what I said now so I can't answer this, but we should have dinner some time or something

think it might be art

[nikki]

Why couldn't you use a tree to make a drawing ?
Alot of people here use computer-algorithms to draw for them..

@corpus: it might be yes, depends a bit on your other work

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

People don't wanna be shitty by association. By tearing something down, they are showing, for sure, that they aren't affiliated with it. Maybe you like some art, but MAYBE you are an 'Art Fag', you need to make absolutely sure people know you aren't affiliated, so you take every opportunity to malign it.

i think this is the best post in this thread (just read through this thread for the first time). a lot of people in this thread treat art and artists the way nerds get treated in school, and for similar reasons; with nerds they don't want to be associated with people who care about detailed knowledge of some specialized subjects, with art they don't want to be associated with people who care about beauty and subtle sensations and such.

it's basically a subculture clash. nerds have their own subculture with their own lingo, so do artists, so do many other subcultures, and people are generally hostile to people not in their own subculture. this is why most game devs hate tale of tales for instance; they're from the artist subculture, not the nerd subculture that most game devs are from. they're like 'what, they prefer oscar wilde and proust to tolkein and asimov? grrrrrrr'

[nikki]

it's basically a subculture clash. nerds have their own subculture with their own lingo, so do artists, so do many other subcultures, and people are generally hostile to people not in their own subculture

unless they meet in real-life (in a gallery for example) , I think the hostility is for a pretty big part an internet-forum problem.

Anyway i had a exhibition last weekend, wich sort of is a mixture between art and computer nerd, because i am. And as such could have a place in this post.



http://pietmondriaan.com/2010/04/04/opening-nikki-koole-galerie-gallery/#more-3706

^{pictures of nerds and artists coexisting in the blog}

[jpgray]

People don't wanna be shitty by association. By tearing something down, they are showing, for sure, that they aren't affiliated with it. Maybe you like some art, but MAYBE you are an 'Art Fag', you need to make absolutely sure people know you aren't affiliated, so you take every opportunity to malign it.

i think this is the best post in this thread (just read through this thread for the first time). a lot of people in this thread treat art and artists the way nerds get treated in school, and for similar reasons; with nerds they don't want to be associated with people who care about detailed knowledge of some specialized subjects, with art they don't want to be associated with people who care about beauty and subtle sensations and such.

it's basically a subculture clash. nerds have their own subculture with their own lingo, so do artists, so do many other subcultures, and people are generally hostile to people not in their own subculture. this is why most game devs hate tale of tales for instance; they're from the artist subculture, not the nerd subculture that most game devs are from. they're like 'what, they prefer oscar wilde and proust to tolkein and asimov? grrrrrrr'

I think your analogy actually cuts in the opposite direction--anyone who believes a preference for a particular art gives him entrance to some imagined elite of hypersensitive aesthetes is simply a garden variety idealist, driven by the familiar combination of vanity and insecurity to exclude and belittle those who have found little value in those things which he values. 

That seems the primary function of obscurantism in aesthetics--nothing expressed in any of the manifestos I've read (post-structuralist, post-modern, minimalist, supremacist, any school you can name) requires any rigorous technical language to express.  Despite this, plain language is utterly avoided.  I imagine it's partly out of the need to separate and justify one's own idle interests as superior to other idle interests, and partly out of a need to make commonplace sentiments sound more impressive.  When the pleasures of exclusivity are preferred to the pleasures of communicability, such people preempt exclusion--they exclude themselves.

As a proof, consider Hume.  Guy took empiricism further than anyone imagined, and produced results that shocked the world, and he did it all in plain-spoken, unadorned language, excluding no one.  Modern schools of art criticism run aesthetics through the same paces it has gone over for centuries, and are so proud/ashamed of themselves that they set up every possible claim to exclusivity, when absolutely none are justified.

The idea that it takes a special, superior soul to appreciate the marks of a tree on an easel is just... inescapably laughable to me.  All that is needed to appreciate it is to have an appreciation for it.  A dumb jock may have this just as easily as a Proust lover who is too feverishly anxious to distinguish himself from the plebes.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i think that paints a picture that doesn't really exist, and is also quite hostile to artists (exactly what i was just talking about). are there a couple of people like that? of course. do they dominate the art scene, are most artists an elitist group of people who hate outsiders, try to purposefully say stuff that doesn't make sense, "driven by vanity and insecurity", etc.? not at all. maybe it's just that i've more first-hand experience with artists (i grew up in an artist collective building) but your description doesn't sound anything like the people i know, it sounds like an outside caricaturization -- so again, yeah, i really do think it's a subculture clash, "garden variety" tribalism

[nikki]

That seems the primary function of obscurantism in aesthetics--nothing expressed in any of the manifestos I've read (post-structuralist, post-modern, minimalist, supremacist, any school you can name)

Not one of those 'schools' have a manifest , so i doubt you'd read them  
oh and  supremacist isn't an art-movement it's another word for discrimination  

the text Malevich wrote on Suprematism (i assume you meant that one) is actually a reasonably easy to follow text , he's just explaining why the world is ready for abstract shapes (as opposed to the 'realistic' stuff that was there before them.. ), and trying to get himself and friends noted abroad offcourse !

On the bright side. i completely agree with you on this:

The idea that it takes a special, superior soul to appreciate ...  All that is needed to appreciate it is to have an appreciation for it.  A dumb jock may have this just as easily as a Proust lover who is too feverishly anxious to distinguish himself from the plebes.

when you start to appreciate anyone could become special too !

[jpgray]

(series of valid points)

You're right to point out that there are no explicit manifestos with regard to many of those movements (even their existence as "movements" in many cases remains in perennial dispute, so any generalization is difficult).  Malevich's writing is fine and not at all jargon-choked as you say.  What I mean by "schools" (so much for speaking clearly!) includes the critical theory that grows up around the movements, and the general trend of some to make a stitched-together movie monster out of the humanities and social sciences.  

when you start to appreciate anyone could become special too !

:D  Whenever I start to feel smug about my taste or erudition in some field, I try to think of all the millions of people, in many cases cleverer and happier than me, who were (or are) no worse off for paying that field no attention whatsoever.