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I don't "get" art

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Re: I don't "get" art

#51

Post by prawn »

anaheim wrote: post #11

PROTIP: Tracey Emin is a Professor at the Royal Academy. It's art that a lot of the art world considers "good art". This Emin person has gained tons of attention by displays so ridiculous that people thought they must be brilliant since no one had thought of doing something so utterly devoid of talent before. From the Wikipedia article: "In 1999 she was a Turner Prize nominee and exhibited My Bed — an installation, c…

The scene represented a point of serious depression (contemplating suicide) and realisation/rebirth for the artist. Some might see it and think of dirty engineers or needing to clean up. Others might see that a bed can be a site for pleasure, pain, love, resentment, physical activity, rest, birth and death.

Each to their own. Some may see weeds growing in cracks on the side of the road and think it looks messy and needs poison. I always see the evolution of life, incredible ways that dog-eat-dog life in a godless world can see some measure of success against the odds and think about how a weed may be different to different people. (Then I poison it.)

Re: I don't "get" art

#52

Post by nextstep »

wpietri wrote: post #48

I'm not going to deny that there's a lot of crappy art out there. However, this article is such bullshit that I suspect the writer is just trolling. For those who are nodding along with this article, consider the Obfuscated C contest: http://www.ioccc.org/ That's art. But it's art that most people in the world can't begin to appreciate. You need years of coding experience to really get it. You need context. When hack…

Of course he's trolling! It's Vice magazine. How does nobody seem to get this?

Re: I don't "get" art

#54

Post by bfrs »

wpietri wrote: post #48

I'm not going to deny that there's a lot of crappy art out there. However, this article is such bullshit that I suspect the writer is just trolling. For those who are nodding along with this article, consider the Obfuscated C contest: http://www.ioccc.org/ That's art. But it's art that most people in the world can't begin to appreciate. You need years of coding experience to really get it. You need context. When hack…

Obligatory references:

If it needs a long sermon to proclaim it's art, it's probably bullshit [1]

Modern Art - A Skeptical View [2]

[1] http://www3.sympatico.ca/manideli/Artsp.htm

[2] http://www3.sympatico.ca/manideli/

Re: I don't "get" art

#56

Post by halostatue »

Retric wrote: post #15
mynegation wrote: post #10

Art, especially modern art is very contextual. Warhol's grocery carton sculptures were created during the golden era of advertising and globalization of trade, for example. Art is also very subjective. Some like simplicity, some like complexity. Some like clarity, some like stories and implicit context. Some like subdued colors, some like saturated hues. This makes art very complicated. That is why art history exist.

bad art is very contextual Much like how a bad joke need to be explained and people ignore and get annoyed by bad elevator music. But, feel free to listen to that used car salesman selling that just like new 1971 pinto.

No…all art is very contextual.

Picasso's most famous work, Guernica, has many contexts to which it can be interpreted—not least of which the Spanish Civil War, upon which it is a meditation. Yet, for me, the only context that matters is that I think that Picasso's Cubist period (of which Guernica is a part) is a horrible waste of his talent, which is much better demonstrated in his blue period.

Basically, I don't care for Cubist work. Inconsistent, I know, because I happen to love the Surrealism in Dalí's work.

Re: I don't "get" art

#57

Post by joseph »

wpietri wrote: post #48

I'm not going to deny that there's a lot of crappy art out there. However, this article is such bullshit that I suspect the writer is just trolling. For those who are nodding along with this article, consider the Obfuscated C contest: http://www.ioccc.org/ That's art. But it's art that most people in the world can't begin to appreciate. You need years of coding experience to really get it. You need context. When hack…

Imagine if someone took programs written for the Obfuscated C contest and boxed them up for sale to the general public. Art that is "movement Z is a reaction to Y, which in turn is a reaction to X" might be fine for artists to circulate amongst themselves, but the problem is that it is sold to people who have no such insider knowledge, yet like to pretend it is somehow relevant to them.

Re: I don't "get" art

#58

Post by cynicalkane »

wpietri wrote: post #48

I'm not going to deny that there's a lot of crappy art out there. However, this article is such bullshit that I suspect the writer is just trolling. For those who are nodding along with this article, consider the Obfuscated C contest: http://www.ioccc.org/ That's art. But it's art that most people in the world can't begin to appreciate. You need years of coding experience to really get it. You need context. When hack…

I think modern art is what happens when your "understanding art" circuits get into a feedback loop of some kind, there's something going haywire in there. Modern art is the mental equivalent of an allergic reaction. So we get these famous artists who made things like big canvases of entirely purple, and we say it's art because art critics sneezed out a bunch of reasons why it's art.

Laypeople look at Rothko and wonder why a guy who made rectangle blobs on canvas is better than all the other guys who thought of making rectangle blobs on canvas. And then you wonder what's the point? The point of art is, depending on your philosophy, variously to improve the mind or the spirit or to provide aesthetic pleasure; it's not to satisfy the intellectual pretentions of art nerds. The obfuscated C contest is a difficult intellectual pursuit and this wouldn't be hard to understand to someone who doesn't know C, but it is hard to explain how Rothko's rectangle blobs or Pollock's scribbles improve the human condition more than anyone else's blobs or scribbles except that these artists happened to fall in the right confluent streams of intellectual nonsense at the right time. The obfuscated C contest is not a thing where you say, "my five-year-old can do that", or that any other Joe could do that should he rub the intellectual establishment the right way. But we live in a world where we take stuff anyone can do and put it in a museum because it has some neat context behind it or something. And so the layperson is completely nonplussed.

Re: I don't "get" art

#59

Post by carsongross »

wpietri wrote: post #48

I'm not going to deny that there's a lot of crappy art out there. However, this article is such bullshit that I suspect the writer is just trolling. For those who are nodding along with this article, consider the Obfuscated C contest: http://www.ioccc.org/ That's art. But it's art that most people in the world can't begin to appreciate. You need years of coding experience to really get it. You need context. When hack…

I dunno, man. The bullshit ratio has gone up dramatically since the modern notion of "artist" has emerged.

"It is not that the public has failed art; it is art which has failed the public."

Re: I don't "get" art

#60

Post by carsongross »

potatolicious wrote: post #13

I never got art until I started doing it myself. The internalization of the creative and technical processes of it are, IMO, crucial to "getting" it. And like one might expect, I still only really "get" art that has a close enough analog to the work I do. So... sculpture? Right out. And like others have brought up, art is contextual. One fundamental fallacy I see people make is that all pieces of work need to be conc…

"run far, far away from ones that do."

Like Picasso, Dali, Caravaggio and Michelangelo?

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