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Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

artsy.net

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Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#41

Post by acjohnson55 »

itronitron wrote: post #20
phnofive wrote: post #2

I feel like I’m looking at a magic eye ( I also haven’t yet been able to ‘’see’’ one of those ) when I see art like that linked here. Is there a trick to appreciating it beyond what I can see?

There is no trick to appreciating it, just that people that own work by a particular artist have a vested interest in talking that artist up and getting others to 'appreciate it.' The best advice I can give is to spend time with a particular work of art. Go to a museum or gallery, pick a specific painting or sculpture, and then come back to visit the same work of art multiple times, preferably on different days of th…

Respectfully, I think you're missing an important piece here. Much modern and contemporary art is not going to speak to most people on its own.

Art serves as a physical token of something bigger -- a shared experience of culture, time, place, narrative, or whatever. Sometimes, the technical craftsmanship of the piece is self-evident. Sometimes, it's not. Sometimes, the craftsmanship, or lack thereof, is completely beside the point.

One of the things that really changed my experience of art was doing guided tours at museums. Invariably, I come away with insights that would not have come to me, no matter how long or how many occasions I might have visited a piece.

Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#42

Post by zeruch »

tigertigertiger wrote: post #28

I know I will be down voted to hell for this but maybe somebody can tell me where I'm wrong in my thinking. First of all I know nothing about art so that already disqualifies everything I will rant now. For me artists are nothing more like the embodiment of the survivor ship bias. I can appreciate something that takes skill to create, be it a craft, a poetry, or even a photorealistic drawing. I can appreciate somethi…

"I could have made this"

That is a common trope but it misses the immediate counter...."but you didn't".

Many can code, not all come up with something that takes off, regardless of talent or skill. Any number of things can go into that. Art is very similar in that regard.

I say this as someone with a bias; I've worked in tech for the last 20 years and I've been a paid illustrator and painter since high school (Art and Commerce isn't alien to me).

Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#43

Post by zeruch »

TigeriusKirk wrote: post #12
keiferski wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basquiat in particular requires knowledge of 1970s-80s New York, the birth of hip-hop culture and graffiti, the art world, and a whole lot of other things. In short, Basquiat is appreciated because he was a visceral, anti-establishment, extremely young guy whose work was raw and real, in comparison to the somewhat corporatized minimal aesthetic [1] that was popular at the time. He was also a really good storyteller (…

I came of age in the 1980s. While I didn't live in NYC, there was a lot of crossover between the New York crowd and the artsy people in my city so I got a lot of exposure to it. The strange thing is that while I was aware of Basquiat and numerous other NYC artists of the era, I didn't think much of them. They didn't seem special to me because they were just what was going on at the time. I have a specific memory of w…

"Makes me wonder what I'm not appreciating enough today."

I wonder that frequently for myself. I still regularly catch stuff post defacto that I feel stumped to have somehow missed at the time.

Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#44

Post by tacheiordache »

tigertigertiger wrote: post #38
probably_wrong wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are probably missing the context. To a non-programmer, C and Python look the same. Take Citizen Kane. I'd call it a 7/10 film and kinda boring, but that's because I'm seeing it in a "post-Kane" world. At the time, however, it was so revolutionary that people still call it the best film ever made. Nowadays it's quite standard because everyone has been building on it ever since While I'm not going to disagree with…

Thanks for your opinion. I just tend to disagree with your examples. Programming languages are in their core something like a craft. There are about 700 languages and even if you know nothing about programming languages at all, if I explain to you the concept of how difficult it is to make one and that only about 700 of them ever got made, you will probably understand that this is not something a lot of people could…

>Programming languages are in their core something like a craft.

Art has that too and programming is art to some extent. Art has a technology component too! Think about the hardware - in art that is called the medium which has its chemistry (materials highly depend on that), it's got tools and while the art process is analogous to the methodology of writing software, in art you have techniques and so on. While it is not a one to one relationship, if you're willing to stretch things a bit (solely for this exercise) you can see plenty of analogies. Your parent commenter has a very good point about context and your unwillingness to look further into it will keep you from seeing a wider picture. Sometimes it takes years to understand some fundamentals but in the end you still get people who disagree and the same goes in programming. Think about the enlightenment one gets when understand LISPs while others see it as a bunch of useless parentheses and so on. Art may be more fluid but so is software if you look at the bigger picture.

Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#45

Post by tigertigertiger »

zeruch wrote: post #42
tigertigertiger wrote: post #28

I know I will be down voted to hell for this but maybe somebody can tell me where I'm wrong in my thinking. First of all I know nothing about art so that already disqualifies everything I will rant now. For me artists are nothing more like the embodiment of the survivor ship bias. I can appreciate something that takes skill to create, be it a craft, a poetry, or even a photorealistic drawing. I can appreciate somethi…

"I could have made this" That is a common trope but it misses the immediate counter...."but you didn't". Many can code, not all come up with something that takes off, regardless of talent or skill. Any number of things can go into that. Art is very similar in that regard. I say this as someone with a bias; I've worked in tech for the last 20 years and I've been a paid illustrator and painter since high school (Art an…

Well I did it. I made art myself, even special one. I made one of the biggest perler bead art in europe with about 70.000 beads (maybe even the world?). Would I appreciate my artwork? As some kind of skill - yes (having immense duration and boredom), as something that has a special intrinsic variable beside being bigger than other pieces - no.

I'm aware that every skill and talent takes some kind of luck to "make it". I just say that art lacks any objective qualities and is just based on choices of some elite circle that don't even match public opinion.

Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#46

Post by acjohnson55 »

tigertigertiger wrote: post #28

I know I will be down voted to hell for this but maybe somebody can tell me where I'm wrong in my thinking. First of all I know nothing about art so that already disqualifies everything I will rant now. For me artists are nothing more like the embodiment of the survivor ship bias. I can appreciate something that takes skill to create, be it a craft, a poetry, or even a photorealistic drawing. I can appreciate somethi…

I'm not going to try to convince you you're wrong. You can change you own mind about this, but it takes investment. Many, many people have found that journey toward "getting art" to be life enriching.

I'll say that for me, what blows my mind about modern and contemporary art is the willingness of individual artists to follow a conceptual idea waaay beyond what is reasonable. Whether the destination ends up being critically acclaimed is beside the point. You have to at some point be able to not care in order to play, because artists, more than anybody, know just how much of a crapshoot it is to get commercial attention.

Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#47

Post by powersnail »

zeruch wrote: post #42
tigertigertiger wrote: post #28

I know I will be down voted to hell for this but maybe somebody can tell me where I'm wrong in my thinking. First of all I know nothing about art so that already disqualifies everything I will rant now. For me artists are nothing more like the embodiment of the survivor ship bias. I can appreciate something that takes skill to create, be it a craft, a poetry, or even a photorealistic drawing. I can appreciate somethi…

"I could have made this" That is a common trope but it misses the immediate counter...."but you didn't". Many can code, not all come up with something that takes off, regardless of talent or skill. Any number of things can go into that. Art is very similar in that regard. I say this as someone with a bias; I've worked in tech for the last 20 years and I've been a paid illustrator and painter since high school (Art an…

I remember I talked to a writer friend, and said to her how I had a lot of great ideas of stories, and I'd perhaps one day quit my job and become a novelist. Back in high school, I wrote quite a bit of short stories and thought myself as pretty okay. I was encouraged to actually write something about it, a scene, an outline, a beginning, anything.

I tried for a weekend, scratched my head through it, and came up with an embarrassing draft for a chapter. As I tried to translate the ideas in my mind to actual words, all the flaws, holes, and awkward characters suddenly showed up. My ingenious ideas were not a blueprint of grand palaces, but a pile of ugly rocks scattered all over the place. I barely managed to connect them in a circle.

She told me, that the fact that I had a scene written was already better than most people who regarded themselves as "wanting to write".

There is a mismatch in people's expectations. Without going through the actual work, many people regarded their vague concepts in their imagination as genius. They are often not.

That's why I've stopped listening to people who say "I've never done XXX, but how hard can it be".

Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#48

Post by tigertigertiger »

tacheiordache wrote: post #44
tigertigertiger wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your opinion. I just tend to disagree with your examples. Programming languages are in their core something like a craft. There are about 700 languages and even if you know nothing about programming languages at all, if I explain to you the concept of how difficult it is to make one and that only about 700 of them ever got made, you will probably understand that this is not something a lot of people could…

>Programming languages are in their core something like a craft. Art has that too and programming is art to some extent. Art has a technology component too! Think about the hardware - in art that is called the medium which has its chemistry (materials highly depend on that), it's got tools and while the art process is analogous to the methodology of writing software, in art you have techniques and so on. While it is…

Thanks that's a very good point and definitely a new perspective

Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#49

Post by Hoasi »

tanjtanjtanj wrote: post #36
i_love_limes wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree far more with the top response to that quote than I do to the quote.

I think you and that commenter misunderstand that quote. Picasso's is not the only story that an artist must follow to become renowned, just one of them. The fame and fortune around an artist are nearly entirely the product of the mythology surrounding them and the connections they have with other influential people rather than their output.

> The fame and fortune around an artist are nearly entirely the product of the mythology surrounding them and the connections they have with other influential people rather than their output.

Sure, there is an element of storytelling, the ability of the artist to become a brand somehow, and another is the connections. For an artist to rise to fame, being in the right place at the right time, or rather, we should say, going to that place plays a role. But that is still an oversimplification.

To rise to super-fame, beyond the enticing or compelling story element and getting the connections to influential people, you've got to pull out the works. All those artists shipped; they were more creative and productive than the others, regardless of the quality/legacy of their oeuvre.

Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#50

Post by tacistbce »

tigertigertiger wrote: post #28

I know I will be down voted to hell for this but maybe somebody can tell me where I'm wrong in my thinking. First of all I know nothing about art so that already disqualifies everything I will rant now. For me artists are nothing more like the embodiment of the survivor ship bias. I can appreciate something that takes skill to create, be it a craft, a poetry, or even a photorealistic drawing. I can appreciate somethi…

All arts are a form of story telling, and all story tellings are a form of art.

What makes a story? Or better yet, what makes a good story? There're a lot of good answers for that, which means there isn't a one-liner fits all answer.

There is, though, a common ground for all the answers: stories are about all the different and complex ways we communicate, with ourself and each other. The ancient paintings were epic. They were big, full of gods and battles. It easy for us to look at those and think that this is what people liked at the time, but the truth is that this is the only thing the knew. When Van Gough presented a photo of a simple room or a pair of shoes, it is not is paintings techniques (though very good) that was exclaimed, it was the message and the novelty: a pair of shoes also exist, and therefore can be an object of a painting - they deserve a story.

There are infinite amount of ways to tell a good story, but there is only one way to distinguish one: a good story will always stick.

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