101–110 of 112 posts
I don't think we're being radical enough. I think this kind of art is fantastic, but it copies human-designed art. Let's do things that aren't possible with paint or crayons - let's do multi-dimensional time-shifting video art. I guess we need to do stuff that looks like 'normal' art first, to get people used to it.
In my town we call that stuff "video games."
If you want to understand art since Cezanne, and especially after 1945, you need to understand the modernist idea of the meta-narrative. It works like this -- prior to the loosening up of gesture in painting, the narrative was whatever was depicted. Maybe it was Washington Crossing the Delaware, or Napoleon Crossing the Alps. Pictures told stories directly. Beginning with impressionist painting, and following through…
I’m not an art history major, but why does a work of art require a backstory? Or a meta-story? Why is a screensaver not “real” art? It seems so limiting. That’s a beautiful painting and the painter is very talented, but there is no existential dread evident in the brush strokes, no social commentary on the intersection between class warfare and feminism, so it’s not “real art”. Who makes these rules? It’s like when y…
I think art expresses something inside a person. Sometimes, people find it meaningful on its own. Sometimes they don't and understanding can be enhanced by "story" or whatever.
Kind of a case of sometimes words get in the way and sometimes words help bridge the gap between two minds.
/random internet stranger who didn't actually read the article, just your comment
One has to remember that "generative art" only characterizes techniques for generating pictures. Art itself is about what the picture makes people feel, or what they have to say. Just making pictures for the only purpose of being "beautiful" is fine, just not very artful...
> Just making pictures for the only purpose of being "beautiful" is fine, just not very artful... Beauty is the goal of art. If his works don't resonate as well as a Nikolay Dubovskoy or a Cy Twombly, or any other human artist, it's in beauty that he fails. I find that generally this confusion around "beauty" comes from using a popular but non-standard definition of beauty. Beauty has meant, since the ancient Greeks…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Aesthetics" isn't a branch of philosophy, unless you consider Formal Logic, Physics and Psychology branches of philosophy as well, it's separate a field of study. Aesthetics is the sum total of all branches that relate to the thing we're all discussing here. To flippantly suggest that your misguided lay definition of beauty is preferable in aesthetics than the one hashed out for the last 3000 years by those in the f…
What are you even talking about? Aesthetics is literally considered a branch of western philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Branches_of_philosoph... I'm not suggesting my definition of beauty is better, but it's definitely more appropriate given the context. Language is meant to communicate, which is why it's context sensitive. If someone tells me they have a theory about why the sink is blocked, I don…
That self-same wikipedia page you listed also denotes Logic and Cosmology as branches of Philosophy, and the Wikipedia page for Philosophy also lists Physics, Mathematics, Economics, Linguistics. Calling aesthetics a "branch" of philosophy in the pejorative sense that you have here is absurd, given that just about any serious humanity is technically an area of Philosophy.
Yes, I agree that language is contextual. And when you discovered that you were using a very informal definition of beauty on a board full of extremely well educated pedants, while having yourself only a middling appreciation for the study of aesthetics, you'd think your language would modify to reflect that realization. :D
As to your field -- working in a field related to Aesthetics does not mean you have education in Aesthetics.
I make a living in Art and design as well, but that isn't the foundation for my arguments in Aesthetics. Quite the contrary. People working in Art are usually some of the least educated in aesthetics, since our art education has been destroyed by baby boomer hippies.
Don't confuse your craft of Art, with the science of aesthetics.
That would be as absurd as an engineer arguing that his having built a building which stands up to gravity means he has a strong education in the study of gravity. The one hardly relates to the other.
The ability to create works which stand up to the gravity of Aesthetics does not mean that one has a strong education in Aesthetics itself.
Now, I'm not going to say that every engineer who hasn't studied theoretical physics is in a poor position to be an engineer, but it certainly tells you something about their seriousness if they haven't read any books in the field.
Further, if an engineer went to some length to pejoratively tell me that Physics is just a branch of western philosophy when debating the theoretical foundation of the force of gravity, I'd similarly call them out as seemingly not serious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This feels too prescriptive. Can you really create such a sweeping narrative (of the meta-narrative) encompassing the entire world of "art" over the past 75 years? The meta-narrative is great but it's not everything. Personally I'm not very inspired by the Newman piece, and the bit about the masking tape makes it only marginally more interesting to me - it doesn't necessarily tell a story, it just reveals the techniq…
I actually prefer your art to the art shown in the article. But, I would not call your artwork generative. However, it is programatic and animated. And could be easily created by the ideas of op art. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Op_art Op art, like your art, is created out of a fascination for illusory space and patterns. It's a footnote to modernist and geometric abstract painting. The background you provide on the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Just making pictures for the only purpose of being "beautiful" is fine, just not very artful... Beauty is the goal of art. If his works don't resonate as well as a Nikolay Dubovskoy or a Cy Twombly, or any other human artist, it's in beauty that he fails. I find that generally this confusion around "beauty" comes from using a popular but non-standard definition of beauty. Beauty has meant, since the ancient Greeks…
I'm curious how your theory of art deals with minimalism and conceptual art. I suspect you'd have to admit that mid-century we collectively expanded the definition of beauty to include modern ideas – structure, process – and expressions of irony.
But here, I’ll answer for myself:
As far as minimalist art, there has been something called “design” which has been considered beautiful since long before modern artists began their war against representationalism.
Beautiful abstract design was the standard throughout all of the areas conquered by Islam, with the arabesques, as well as extremely popular across both Italic Europe and Northern Europe (with the mixture of Celtic Art and Roman giving rise to 10-Century Romanesque).
Abstraction has been highly prized in Europe for thousands of years, just search google images for "Romanesque capital". The Romanesque Capitals are just as abstract and surreal as anything created in the 20th Century, and this lineage of minimalism had at no point died.
Further, the cubists and so on, for their part, were mostly just copying African tribal art. The central thesis that minimalism was New was not historically accurate.
Conceptual art, for its part, used to just be called “Action”, and some actions were considered meaningful and others not so meaningful. Particularly meaningful Actions have always been considered beautiful, profound, transcendental, etc. The figure Jesus is immortalized in the story that he, who said himself God, washed the feet of a prostitute with his hair. You don’t get more conceptual art than that.
The war in the early 20th century was NOT whether design and action had meaning or value or beauty, that has been well established since the beginning of human civilization. In fact, most of civilization would have said that Action has always been more intrinsically valued than Art since it effects something tangible, and certainly Design was through most of civilization more prized.
The war in the early 20th century was over whether CALLING your designs or actions by the designation Big-A Art transmuted them into another stuff and imbued them with intrinsic value that they didn’t already have. I’m not at all convinced that the modernists have won that argument. That line of thinking has always been profoundly refused by the general public, and as time goes on, their central thesis appears to be in decline in popularity with critics, art historians, and theorists.
The irony is that the 20th century modernist’s claims at novelty and intrinsic value all required that one totally ignore the history and value of folk art and design, artful action, and so on, throughout human history and across human cultures. If one takes a more open-minded view of art and art history, the modernist’s claims at originality are laughable at best.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Just making pictures for the only purpose of being "beautiful" is fine, just not very artful... Beauty is the goal of art. If his works don't resonate as well as a Nikolay Dubovskoy or a Cy Twombly, or any other human artist, it's in beauty that he fails. I find that generally this confusion around "beauty" comes from using a popular but non-standard definition of beauty. Beauty has meant, since the ancient Greeks…
I'm curious how your theory of art deals with minimalism and conceptual art. I suspect you'd have to admit that mid-century we collectively expanded the definition of beauty to include modern ideas – structure, process – and expressions of irony.
The problem with "irony", where this common myth about its novelty comes from, is that Irony is invisible to generations separated by time and place.
To see irony in a work of antiquity requires a significant amount of education in the circumstances of that work. Irony never lies of the surface of a work. If enough time passes, our appreciation of that irony will often be lost.
How much irony is hidden there in the vase paintings of ancient Greece which we will never recognize, having not the context to see it? Irony, a Greek term, coined by Aristotle, passed on by the Romans, and more recently popularized in the 1500's by the French -- yet could we recognize Irony in any of their works without help?
If the average art critic finds no instances of irony in the art of the past they could be excused for that, their job isn't art history. Those are separate professions.
Where art critics do deserve blame however is when they've been shown countless examples of irony in the works of antiquity, and they act as if those instances are all unique anomalies. If they continue to bandy about the story of irony's novelty to defend the valuations of the works of their contemporaries, that's not fair play.
That's Art Criticism made Marketing, and it's an ugly but extremely common thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually prefer your art to the art shown in the article. But, I would not call your artwork generative. However, it is programatic and animated. And could be easily created by the ideas of op art. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Op_art Op art, like your art, is created out of a fascination for illusory space and patterns. It's a footnote to modernist and geometric abstract painting. The background you provide on the…
Thanks for the comments. My understanding was that generative was synonymous with algorithmic/programmatic. Was not aware of op art but I certainly see the connection.