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Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: An4ximandros on October 29, 2012, 10:49:45 pm

Title: Art
Post by: An4ximandros on October 29, 2012, 10:49:45 pm
The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS1uDnIPTvo&feature=fvwrel) What the frak is this schite?
Title: Re: Art
Post by: el_magnifico on October 29, 2012, 11:02:27 pm
That's it, internet! I'm going to bed right now.

Spoiler:
And I'm really hoping I don't have any nightmares tonight. :shaking:
Title: Re: Art
Post by: mjn.mixael on October 29, 2012, 11:04:37 pm
I... :wtf:

Uh...  :wtf:

Hmmm...................
Title: Re: Art
Post by: esarai on October 30, 2012, 12:16:01 am
I have seen this before and each time I think I can interpret it, but then no, it just becomes demented as frak and I no longer know if it's actually trying to express something or is just epic trolling given free reign under the guise of artistic expression.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Mongoose on October 30, 2012, 12:33:06 am
Ah, good to see the emperor's-new-clothes aspect of modern art is still as vibrant as ever.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: deathfun on October 30, 2012, 01:36:35 am
Quote
No description available.

Sounds about right...
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Mikes on October 30, 2012, 03:40:47 am
This video contains music of SME and is not available.... grah.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Mars on October 30, 2012, 03:42:47 am
Here, I'll transcribe it for you:

Moaning, possibly male or female, definitely sensuous.

Crutches
Title: Re: Art
Post by: watsisname on October 30, 2012, 07:18:30 am
Sex pistons.
That's it, internet! I'm going to bed right now.

Spoiler:
And I'm really hoping I don't have any nightmares tonight. :shaking:

Quoted for mother****ing truth.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Rodo on October 30, 2012, 09:14:00 am
now that was fun.

NO
Title: Re: Art
Post by: General Battuta on October 30, 2012, 09:30:35 am
Ah, good to see the emperor's-new-clothes aspect of modern art is still as vibrant as ever.

How apropos for this particular act!

But this act is really easy to read, and I encourage everybody in this thread to do just that. All your confused emoticons and baffled posts are a little disappointing; the art here offers some pretty direct and transparent interpretations about how we interface with our own bodies.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Luis Dias on October 30, 2012, 09:54:46 am
Ninja'd. The act is so obvious. Of course, being so obvious is what precisely confuses people, who are expecting "deepity" out of it.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: General Battuta on October 30, 2012, 10:05:02 am
If you guys have ever seen any David Lynch (you should!) or horror films like Jacob's Ladder, there is all kinds of really cool stuff that can be done with dance-type choreography.

e: to cause unease and **** I mean
Title: Re: Art
Post by: mjn.mixael on October 30, 2012, 10:13:02 am
If you guys have ever seen any David Lynch (you should!) or horror films like Jacob's Ladder, there is all kinds of really cool stuff that can be done with dance-type choreography.

e: to cause unease and **** I mean

So you're one of those guys...

This video is an example of everything wrong with modern art. My opinion. It's stupid, ugly, and tries way too hard to be provocative. I prefer the good 'ol days where art was meant to be beautiful, not this BS where our society's "progressive" culture allows us to do any damned thing under the guise of art.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Luis Dias on October 30, 2012, 10:16:37 am
I'll have provocative before beautiful any ****ing day.

And for anyone who doesn't, then don't have it. Is anybody forcing you to have it? No. So why bother?

Why bother indeed with what other people find interesting and provocative?
Title: Re: Art
Post by: mjn.mixael on October 30, 2012, 10:19:31 am
I'll have provocative before beautiful any ****ing day.

And for anyone who doesn't, then don't have it. Is anybody forcing you to have it? No. So why bother?

Why bother indeed with what other people find interesting and provocative?

If you don't like my opinion, don't read it?

On the note of what you call "forcing"... There's art museum here. Full of beautiful works from many cultures and time periods. Littered among all the most incredible works of art in there are things like this little number... There's two light builds plugged into a wall made from hardware from Home Depot. That's it. There's a little blurb next to it explaining how the light bulbs represent the love of two gay men and how one will inevitably die (burn out) before the other. Wat. The museum paid money for that exhibit. That does not belong next the most elaborate paintings from the 16th century. It just doesn't. But some dude who wanted to be provocative to people like me made it happen.

The whole point of being provocative is to get under people's skin... I find it just dumb.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Luis Dias on October 30, 2012, 10:21:42 am
False equivalence. You railed against this freedom we have of doing art you don't like. Like the nerve of people. The nerve.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: General Battuta on October 30, 2012, 10:23:24 am
So you're one of those guys...

This video is an example of everything wrong with modern art. My opinion. It's stupid, ugly, and tries way too hard to be provocative. I prefer the good 'ol days where art was meant to be beautiful, not this BS where our society's "progressive" culture allows us to do any damned thing under the guise of art.

Uh, can we just agree to have different tastes?

There's always been a strain of challenging, 'ugly' art. Look at Boschian art, or Munch.

And if it's worth anything, I've only come to 'understand' modern art in the past year or two. I definitely would've agreed wholeheartedly with you three or four years ago.

e: Can you see the importance of the unsettling and the uncomfortable in art about the Holocaust, or a soldier's PTSD?
Title: Re: Art
Post by: mjn.mixael on October 30, 2012, 10:28:46 am
We can certainly agree to disagree.. though I don't care that you are implying I don't understand it as if the problem is in the the beholder. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder then art is destined to be subjective and I am allowed to consider this POS video to be a POS... and you have to deal with that fact as much as I have to deal with the fact that you find it interesting.

Of note, I'm not surprised that Luis is taking a single post where I stated it was my opinion and is trying to start an argument. The nerve of him to think my opinion is invalid.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: General Battuta on October 30, 2012, 10:31:28 am
I think there are rewards to be had in learning to process 'modern art'. It won't render all of it good, but it will allow you to extract value that can be applied to your own creativity. I know I've made things that you enjoyed that were influenced by things you probably wouldn't enjoy.

e: The recent film Prometheus is a great example. Prometheus is a total wreck at the surface level but is packed full of interesting subtext to dissect.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Luis Dias on October 30, 2012, 10:32:57 am

On the note of what you call "forcing"... There's art museum here. Full of beautiful works from many cultures and time periods. Littered among all the most incredible works of art in there are things like this little number... There's two light builds plugged into a wall made from hardware from Home Depot. That's it. There's a little blurb next to it explaining how the light bulbs represent the love of two gay men and how one will inevitably die (burn out) before the other. Wat. The museum paid money for that exhibit. That does not belong next the most elaborate paintings from the 16th century. It just doesn't. But some dude who wanted to be provocative to people like me made it happen.

The whole point of being provocative is to get under people's skin... I find it just dumb.

Time will wash the dumb things away like it has done since ever (yeah, we don't have the equivalent of two light bulbs from the 16th century for a reason). In the mean time try to be more open minded and appreciate things without such sarcasm. If it is simple, like to light bulbs, enjoy it and try to understand its poetic meaning. And then move on. As you said, the museum paid money for it, so you might as well try to enjoy it. If you can't, well there are other millions of stuff that maybe suit you better.

If you only feel comfortable with medieval art, well then there's lots of it too. I think you'd be missing quite a lot though.

Quote
Of note, I'm not surprised that Luis is taking a single post where I stated it was my opinion and is trying to start an argument

For the record, you said and I quote: not this BS where our society's "progressive" culture allows us to do any damned thing under the guise of art. Well I'm sorry if my freedom offends you so much.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: MP-Ryan on October 30, 2012, 10:36:45 am
I really enjoy a lot of art based on dance and choreography, particularly modern/contemporary, but there is a point where I think some choreographers take it from provocative, interesting, and relevant to the audience as a whole, to  unpleasantly provocative and inaccessible to most people purely because they are so immersed in form they lose sight of the message they want to convey.  Ultimately, art is about conveying meaning.  If it doesn't do that, it has failed by any measure of art.

This piece, IMHO, has crossed that line.  To a majority audience, it's just weird, not provocative and interesting - which is funny, considering the piece has an awful lot to say about accessibility in it's subtext.  Heh.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: mjn.mixael on October 30, 2012, 10:43:56 am
I do not care how you guys are implying that my distaste for modern art has left me at some lower level of creativity or understanding. I make a living on being an artist, as does Battuta. I'd hope I'm qualified have a valid opinion without being at some lower level. Through all of my schooling as a theater major, I had to view, study, and write about plenty of modern art. I thought all of it was terrible. I honestly can't remember a single piece that I enjoyed or found interesting. Art for the sake of messing with people is just something I find annoying. They're trying to mess with me, like how my nephews try to get under each other's skin. (I wrote a whole paper on this once.) We claim to be a progressive culture with our freedom to do anything for anything as if we are far and above any culture that has come before.

Honestly, Luis you are just trying to get under my skin so you are hitting the ignore list and I'll just continue this conversation with Battuta, who is much more capable at having a regular conversation.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: General Battuta on October 30, 2012, 10:47:53 am
It's still a topic I grapple with, especially in literature (obviously a field of particular interest to me). I've come to believe that critical appreciation is a skill that can be 'levelled up', but I don't know if that's inherently valuable, or just a game that people become talented at. A lot of my appreciation for much-spoken-of great works, like Blade Runner, has come out of learning to talk about subtext and dissecting the visual content of a frame. It's also helped me find interesting things to say at parties about middlebrow movies like the Nolan Batman.

But, I don't know, I don't think it's necessarily the only way to approach art. I just don't want people to write it off because it's so counterintuitive and annoying.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Luis Dias on October 30, 2012, 10:49:21 am
We are far and above any culture that has come before. At least I think so. About getting under your skin, well that wasn't my intention sorry.

Now you got me curious about your paper. Can you share it?
Title: Re: Art
Post by: perihelion on October 30, 2012, 12:58:09 pm
Yeahno.  After a second viewing, I am still of the opinion that this is, at heart, masturbating in public.  While it may be fun for the, ahem, "artist," it is pretty rude to inflict it on an unsuspecting audience.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: General Battuta on October 30, 2012, 01:17:11 pm
Yeahno.  After a second viewing, I am still of the opinion that this is, at heart, masturbating in public.  While it may be fun for the, ahem, "artist," it is pretty rude to inflict it on an unsuspecting audience.

You don't think the people who went to this show both knew what they were going to see and came prepared to interpret it?

I'm baffled that people don't think this is saying anything. You've got crutches, hair implants, Viagra...
Title: Re: Art
Post by: An4ximandros on October 30, 2012, 02:12:49 pm
Okay, after some p a r t i c u l a r l y   l o n g thinking, I believe I get this...

It's supposed to be about the Masochism and all the humiliation that revolves around it as seen by an outsider.

Basically the oversexualisation of ridiculous things.

At least I think that's what it's about.

There are way better ways to showcase this though, in my opinion at least.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: MP-Ryan on October 30, 2012, 02:22:06 pm
I'm baffled that people don't think this is saying anything. You've got crutches, hair implants, Viagra...

I'm not.  It quite nicely demonstrates my earlier point about failure in meaning conveyance as a failure of the art piece.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: General Battuta on October 30, 2012, 02:23:46 pm
You would all fail my course. :colbert:
Title: Re: Art
Post by: mjn.mixael on October 30, 2012, 02:24:54 pm
I'm baffled that people don't think this is saying anything. You've got crutches, hair implants, Viagra...

I'm not.  It quite nicely demonstrates my earlier point about failure in meaning conveyance as a failure of the art piece.

I think this pretty well sums up one of my main issues with this and most modern art. Like the light bulbs in a museum example I gave earlier. If it requires a whole transcript to explain to the masses, then I would consider it a failure at being good art.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: MP-Ryan on October 30, 2012, 02:32:41 pm
You would all fail my course. :colbert:

At this very moment I'm picturing you sitting on a flowery-patterned sofa in a run-down rental home near campus, joint in hand, muttering "Duuuuude.... it's soo deeeeeeeeeeeep.... man, y'know?  These Phillistines just don't understaaaaaand" like a liberal arts major :P

*This post brought to you by someone with both science and liberal arts degrees
Title: Re: Art
Post by: General Battuta on October 30, 2012, 02:39:32 pm
I honestly believe that critical interpretation is a skill that has to be worked at and developed, akin to but orthogonal to scientific reasoning. The difference seems to be that in science people are happy to kowtow to those with more training, but in art people shut down the moment something doesn't seem immediately intuitive and clear.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: MP-Ryan on October 30, 2012, 02:57:38 pm
The difference is audience, though.  In science, you write for the audience doing the review - your peers.  If your piece goes to a broader audience, you write instead to their level - this is why the summaries you see on Nature's website are invariably more accessible than the journal articles they reference.

In art, your audience is typically everyone - the idea being to invoke a response in as wide a group a possible, and to have them understand your piece in order to evoke said response.  If your message is so obscure or inaccessible that it's obscured by visceral reaction, you've failed by any objective measure.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Klaustrophobia on October 30, 2012, 03:00:10 pm
i'm with mjn.mixael here.  if thinking this is utter **** and having no desire to 'disect' it makes me close-minded, i've got no problem with being close-minded.  in much the same way i don't consider the stereotypical geeky kid close-minded because he doesn't like sports.  or a jock because he doesn't play chess.


just like all the damn literature classes i had to take through high school and college.  it's a work of fiction.  i. dont. fking.  CARE. about what  people living hundreds of years later say the 'meaning' of it is.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: General Battuta on October 30, 2012, 03:07:09 pm
In art, your audience is typically everyone - the idea being to invoke a response in as wide a group a possible, and to have them understand your piece in order to evoke said response.  If your message is so obscure or inaccessible that it's obscured by visceral reaction, you've failed by any objective measure.

I think that's going to be a really hard statement to defend, especially in the neighborhood of 'objective measure'.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Mongoose on October 30, 2012, 03:29:30 pm
To me personally, I think the raw skill required to create a particular piece goes a long way toward defining its artistic merit, even putting any questions of expression or meaning aside.  For example, I could spend a thousand years picking away at innumerable slabs of granite, but I couldn't come close to capturing even 1% of the emotion being displayed in Michaelangelo's Pieta.  On the other hand, if you gave me a couple of paint cans and a brush, I could produce something nearly identical to your average Jackson Pollock piece.  Any meaning therein becomes lost in the ridiculous nature of the medium.  Or even better, take a look at Piet Mondrian's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Mondrian) famous works.  If a first-grader with a pair of scissors and construction paper could produce something identical to what you're doing, maybe it's time to re-evaluate your choices in life.  The worst part of it is that the guy started out his life doing some really cool Impressionist work...and then he devolved into drawing straight black lines with red squares.

This all reminds me of a (most likely false) anecdote about an exhibit at a modern art museum that consisted of multiple bags full of garbage.  Supposedly, the staff came in one morning to find the exhibit had vanished...because a janitor had mistook it for the trash that it was. :D
Title: Re: Art
Post by: General Battuta on October 30, 2012, 03:31:13 pm
To me personally, I think the raw skill required to create a particular piece goes a long way toward defining its artistic merit, even putting any questions of expression or meaning aside.  For example, I could spend a thousand years picking away at innumerable slabs of granite, but I couldn't come close to capturing even 1% of the emotion being displayed in the Pieta.  On the other hand, if you gave me a couple of paint cans and a brush, I could produce something nearly identical to your average Jackson Pollock piece.  Any meaning therein becomes lost in the ridiculous nature of the medium.  Or even better, take a look at Piet Mondrian's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Mondrian) famous works.  If a first-grader with a pair of scissors and construction paper could produce something identical to what you're doing, maybe it's time to re-evaluate your choices in life.  The worst part of it is that the guy started out his life doing some really cool Impressionist work...and then he devolved into drawing straight black lines with red squares.

This all reminds me of a (most likely false) anecdote about an exhibit at a modern art museum that consisted of multiple bags full of garbage.  Supposedly, the staff came in one morning to find the exhibit had vanished...because a janitor had mistook it for the trash that it was. :D

This is the most frustrating attitude for me because it misses so much of what art is about. Haven't you ever considered that this is intentional? Do you think Piet Mondrian just hit his head one day and got stupid? He realized things that shaped his art.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: General Battuta on October 30, 2012, 03:31:40 pm
Ugh, I should just give up and write Dresden Files **** and swim in money.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: MP-Ryan on October 30, 2012, 03:45:41 pm
Not the point, batts.  Objectively, I can look at your writing and even if I didn't like it [which I do, at any rate], see that a wide audience is going to understand what you've written, if only on a superficial level.  No one is being blinded to the meaning in the piece because of a negative visceral reaction - you're communicating.

Contrast that to the dance piece in question.  The visceral reaction is preventing a number of people from "getting it" - it's not so much that they're incapable of getting it so much as there's no desire TO get it.

That's what I'm talking about when it comes to objective measures.  Art is supposed to convey meaning (really, this is the sole overriding purpose of art).  If all meaning is lost because of a reaction that was unintended, then the art piece has failed in its purpose.

I appreciate deep subtext - but I think there are a number of artists who get so caught up in the depth that they forget breadth.  In less eloquent terms, they get so caught up in wanking about how deep they're being that their piece becomes dull, bizarre, or just plain silly to the point where people switch off.  It's one thing to switch people off due to genre preference - that's perfectly normal - but it's quite another when the majority are switching off and your genre audience becomes half a dozen people.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: General Battuta on October 30, 2012, 03:50:40 pm
An unsophisticated reader (like a preteen) would be blind to a lot of the meaning in my work. I actually have friends who struggle to interpret what the heck I'm saying because they find the language difficult. So clearly people are being blinded the meaning - people less sophisticated than you, though. Are you, or I, or some guy over there, the metric for accessibility?

Then take Cormac McCarthy. I think he's a beautiful, incredibly direct writer. Mongoose can't stand him because he finds McCarthy's style obfuscatory. Should McCarthy 'open' his style? Or would that come at an unacceptable cost? Should I 'open' my style to the pre-teen and start writing like R. A. Salvatore? Would that make my art better?

Meaning is always lost to someone, so by your metric, all art fails. Where do we set the bar? You suggest half a dozen people is too few.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: General Battuta on October 30, 2012, 03:55:56 pm
I know this sounds patronizing as ****, so please believe I'm also applying it to myself:

When we were children we could not understand a great many things. We recoiled in fear or stared in confusion. That didn't make those things artistically invalid. We were kids. We couldn't understand; we didn't have the framework, didn't know all that we needed to know.

Becoming an adult does not grant us automatic access to all those things. We do not automatically understand all that we might understand. And the fact that someone does not understand a piece of art does not necessarily speak to a flaw in the art. It can mean that the viewer is not ready to engage with that art yet; not even ready to understand why they are not ready.

As a child I thought some things were grotesque. Now I think they're beautiful. That transition isn't a one-time thing. It can occur again.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: MP-Ryan on October 30, 2012, 04:03:15 pm
I suggest that when meaning fails because of visceral reaction, the art itself fails.  Perhaps the artist's intent for audience also needs to be accounted for, then.  If I create an art piece (say a photograph) solely for my wife, then it's success or failure is determined by her ability to understand the meaning in it.  For a novel or dance piece, the audience is implied to be much wider.

I suppose if the purpose of this piece was to convey meaning only for a very specific audience then it could be a success (if it did so for that audience; I'm going to assume that I was not part of the target were it indeed selective), but it has obviously been broadcast to a much wider audience for whom the meaning failed.

I guess what I'm driving at here is that certain artists, particularly in the modern genre, often have a tendency to branch from subconsciously clever to overtly strange, and I can therefore understand why some people find it ridiculous in the extreme.  Anecdotally, I once watched a play of 'A Midsummer Nights' Dream' in which the gender roles of Oberon, Titania, and Puck were all switched and the costuming and set design were all done in quasi-bondage gear.  The result was fantastic, but it could have been so easily overdone and become an exercise in 'artistic license wank' if the director hadn't been very careful.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: General Battuta on October 30, 2012, 04:08:08 pm
That is a post I can get behind. Though I'd say the audience failed rather than the piece.  :D
Title: Re: Art
Post by: perihelion on October 30, 2012, 04:26:01 pm
But there is nothing beautiful here!  This is being grotesque for the sake of being grotesque.  Or at least that is how it appears.  And given that's how it appears (to me), what incentive do I have to look deeper when the medium itself is so deliberately offensive?  Am I, the audience, to be blamed for that?  The artist chose the medium, not me.

Most "modern art" I'll just shrug my shoulders, admit that, "I don't get it," and go on with my life.  Some people enjoy it, I usually don't, and that's ok.  I don't go out of my way to mock.  I am not certainly not offended (and I've seen some pretty strange ****).  But this?  I'm so turned off that I wish I could go into my brain and delete having seen it in the first place.

Heh.  If the objective of art is to generate a reaction, I suppose it succeeded.  Was revulsion the intent? :doubt:

Title: Re: Art
Post by: General Battuta on October 30, 2012, 04:38:08 pm
Yeah, I think it definitely was part of the intent here. The way I read this, it's trying to point out the grotesque in the things we do to render ourselves attractive as we age. (Note the prosthetic erection (Viagra), the hair implants, the walker, trappings of age, and the steel gate.) But it does end with a bizarre kind of beauty, as the walker becomes a flute.

I'm not super repulsed by it though it does come across as pretty weird.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Phantom Hoover on October 30, 2012, 05:21:45 pm
But why does that actually make it *worthwhile*? OK, there's an obfuscated analogy, but... what does it do that a more overt satire wouldn't?
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Mongoose on October 30, 2012, 06:10:27 pm
This is the most frustrating attitude for me because it misses so much of what art is about. Haven't you ever considered that this is intentional? Do you think Piet Mondrian just hit his head one day and got stupid? He realized things that shaped his art.
Honestly, I think he must have.  When you take away essentially all of the skill inherent in creating art, the term "art" loses all of its meaning, and  you're just left with intellectual masturbation.  It'd be like trying to find some deep structure in the random snowy noise of an old rabbit-ear TV.  If art, at its core, is supposed to convey some message, and a certain piece has a message which is clear only to the artist, it's pretty much failed.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: General Battuta on October 30, 2012, 06:19:26 pm
If I read 1984 to a bunch of 3 year olds the message is only clear to the artist. Has 1984 pretty much failed?

You're making all these incredibly overconfident assumptions about deep philosophical questions that art still grapples with. You're trying to boil down lively discourse into dead little dicta based on what you're comfortable with.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: General Battuta on October 30, 2012, 06:20:51 pm
And again we come back to the wall you hit last time we talked about this: if the art you deride has influenced and is appreciated by people who create art that you appreciate, how can you deny there's any causal connection there? If it has even second-order benefits for you, how can you conclude it's worthless and meaningless?
Title: Re: Art
Post by: NGTM-1R on October 30, 2012, 06:24:12 pm
Assumption: second-order benefits must necessarily exist and this is provable.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Luis Dias on October 30, 2012, 06:43:51 pm
It has been proven because Battuta himself has already said he was influenced by **** you most probably despise. Really, he's being extremely reasonable here, and you are all ganging up on him based on your own personal problems of not "getting" some particular piece of art, "THEREFORE" that piece of art is moronic. The huge irony in this thread is that all of you then proclaim these artists to be pretensious and arrogant, when you are the ones who are judging them without sufficient context material and awareness.

As I said previously to MJN, I think the best attitude when one encounters these strange objects that other people call "art" is to try to "get it", and if not, then "move on". Probably (most probably) someone else will get it and find it bad, others will like it, others will be influenced by it. Move on to the next thing that may suit you better and leave the "strange stuff" to those that can have it.

There's a lot of referencing in modern art which is the single most obfuscating characteristic of it (it demands you know what the hell is the author referencing here and there for you to understand it fully), and that makes it hard for lay people to "get it". And sure enough there's something to be said about the "emperor new clothes", which is an epistemic problem that always arises within more obfuscating fields.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: General Battuta on October 30, 2012, 06:44:51 pm
Yeah, there's loads of art I don't get, or straight up don't understand why it's art. But while I'm often grumpy about it I try to remember it's possible that it's very meaningful if you come at it from the right place.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Phantom Hoover on October 30, 2012, 06:53:22 pm
ok uh can we not have this pointless discussion that's been had a thousand times before where neither side is going to give any ground
Title: Re: Art
Post by: swashmebuckle on October 30, 2012, 06:56:29 pm
But why does that actually make it *worthwhile*? OK, there's an obfuscated analogy, but... what does it do that a more overt satire wouldn't?
An important characteristic of postmodernism is its acknowledgement of the audience's reaction to the work as an integral part of the art. If this piece's themes were communicated in a way that the average viewer was totally comfortable with (such as satire), it would have missed the point completely. I think generating that reaction of revulsion and confusion at the prostheses (and the disabilities they are supposed to fix) is integral to its success. There are plenty of people (myself included) who like to think of themselves as good hearted types who don't have issues with seeing life in its less overtly beautiful forms, but when they are confronted with "ugliness", they feel the urge to look away. This piece reminded me of that fact and raised the broader issue of our cultural bias against the old and disabled.

In light of this, I find the angry reaction against the piece and similar works (It's not worthy to be in a museum if it's not beautiful!) to be super ironic. It's ok to be squicked out by stuff (pretty much unavoidable on the internet), but that doesn't mean it's cool to rail against it like it's somehow inherently inferior to other forms.

In conclusion, I give this piece a 7.4
The Good: Started a really interesting conversation, maybe changed some people's minds
The Bad: Not even a single explosion, won't get a full nights's sleep for weeks
Title: Re: Art
Post by: NGTM-1R on October 30, 2012, 07:19:10 pm
It has been proven because Battuta himself has already said he was influenced by **** you most probably despise.

See, this is dumb on several levels.

You're assuming I despise whatever the hell it was that influenced Batts (I probably don't). You're assuming that I have this particular threadstarter in mind (I certainly don't).

Why you'd make these assumptions I'm not entirely sure.

Actually, I'm challenging that secondary effects from any particular piece of art are necessarily going to happen and necessarily going to reach the viewer as recognizable secondary effects from another work and these secondary effects will necessarily reach the viewer any better than the work that was the influence and couldn't. These are all assumptions without obvious foundation that are required to make Battuta's counterargument to MP.Ryan and Mongoose work, and at least two of them can be easily dismissed.

First, the artist may not display any particular influence in any particular work, for any reason you care to come up with. Second, if the viewer can't track back to the source or assumes the thing in front of them is the original source, then to the viewer the effect is no longer secondary but primary and it is the viewer's perception that counts. Third, a similar effect occurs if the viewer can track back to the source but finds the source either incomprehensible or dislikes it but still finds that the reference adds something positive to the work in front of him; the effect is again made a primary one to the viewer. Fourth, if the original work was incomprehensible to or disliked by a viewer, references to it may also be incomprehensible to or disliked by the viewer, and thus any secondary transfer benefit is lost.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: General Battuta on October 30, 2012, 07:25:47 pm
I dunno, your position seems to require that for every viewer of every piece of art, in no case has the artist been influenced positively by another artist the viewer dislikes.

I can't really see that.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Phantom Hoover on October 30, 2012, 07:52:13 pm
why are you people all terrified and repulsed by this, it's puzzling at worst
Title: Re: Art
Post by: NGTM-1R on October 30, 2012, 09:50:12 pm
I dunno, your position seems to require that for every viewer of every piece of art, in no case has the artist been influenced positively by another artist the viewer dislikes.

I can't really see that.

Considering that's not what I said, and I in fact pointed out that if it happens the viewer either won't make the association or instead treat it as a primary rather than a secondary and the viewer's the one whose opinion counts...no? (There's nothing absolute necessary about it, the position works fine with only a single example since the position Luis/you took was an absolute, or looked like it.)

I should also add that this idea of "influence" is far too generic in itself. Nothing new under the sun etc.; a lot of what could be classified as "influenced by other work" is both multiple choice and influences of influences of influences, making for inherently weak chains logically. (Nevermind where it stops being influence and is instead convention.)
Title: Re: Art
Post by: General Battuta on October 30, 2012, 10:42:05 pm
It's totally irrelevant whether the viewer knows about this or not. They're still getting an indirect effect, in that the art they like gets a quality bump-up (which may be why they like it in the first place!) from art they don't.

I can point out something really specific in my own work but it's both a little facile and a little self-aggrandizing.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: sigtau on October 31, 2012, 02:15:21 am
Just popping in to comment on how this is the most intelligent debate I have seen on HLP in months.

Okay, carry on. :nod:
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Phantom Hoover on October 31, 2012, 06:20:56 am
that's funny, i was thinking it's a profoundly unintelligent debate
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Luis Dias on October 31, 2012, 06:45:18 am
It has been proven because Battuta himself has already said he was influenced by **** you most probably despise.

See, this is dumb on several levels.

You're assuming I despise whatever the hell it was that influenced Batts (I probably don't). You're assuming that I have this particular threadstarter in mind (I certainly don't).

Why you'd make these assumptions I'm not entirely sure.

Well I was talking to you, but I could be talking to anyone else, the effect and the "proof" is the same (if it can happen to someone else, then it can happen to anyone of us).

A particular example comes to mind that probably more people will understand better: classical music.

When everyone starts to hear it  (almost, there are some people who are used to hear it from toddler age), they can't stand it. Yeah, it's joyful here and there, but overall it's ****ing boring and meaningless. They can't understand these adults who constantly hear it all the time, what the hell are they doing?

And then you start to listen to one particular piece of classical music that you enjoy. You build up some taste for it and learn how to feel it. And then another. And then you have a whole list of classical pieces of music you actually enjoy. You still call the genre "boring", but probably when you listen to something classical you haven't heard before, you will now "understand it" a lot better. With time, you will have learned to enjoy it immensely. And thus you have become the adult you once did not understand.

Keep in mind that this is constantly happening with all of us. There's a lot of art that I just don't get. The difference is that I've gone through these processes long enough to understand that if something doesn't "get me", then that's perfectly okay and if someone else "gets it" then there's the only necessary reason for it to exist.

Quote
Actually, I'm challenging that secondary effects from any particular piece of art are necessarily going to happen and necessarily going to reach the viewer as recognizable secondary effects from another work and these secondary effects will necessarily reach the viewer any better than the work that was the influence and couldn't. These are all assumptions without obvious foundation that are required to make Battuta's counterargument to MP.Ryan and Mongoose work, and at least two of them can be easily dismissed.

"Easily" to you, not to me. It seems to me to be particularly ill-thought out and not at all what I see. Most things I enjoy in pop culture and other less pop stuff seem to have been influenced by very obfuscating pieces of work themselves, which then I go to try to enjoy and see myself unable to. But the creators insist that that was their influence. Why should I disbelieve them? Why should I believe you instead that this process is nonexistent?

It seems to me it pervades culture entirely, where really deep fringe obscure work "trickles down" to pop culture with a gap of years, sometimes decades. You offer just a denying of this phenomena, well.

Quote
Fourth, if the original work was incomprehensible to or disliked by a viewer, references to it may also be incomprehensible to or disliked by the viewer, and thus any secondary transfer benefit is lost.

The benefit is that the transfer to a more pop product made it possible to exist in the first place.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: AtomicClucker on October 31, 2012, 12:48:47 pm
As a visual artist, I was actually abhorred by the video and the nonsense it tried to push, but it still was a visceral piece of work and is art whether we quiver about or not. My opinion holds that it fell through on building vital bridges of context and communicating to the audience. I'll be blunt in establishing that there is no "good" or "bad" art when we play with rules and principles, but this one failed to convince me of its message.

I find "good" modern art builds bridges that allows us to see the context or and the reasoning, but keep in mind this is still opinion. The matter is that society has no "easy" method of approaching modern art. Hell, watch Art21 for case in point. We are often left adrift with the problem of communication.

Though for those trouncing on Piet Mondrien, you guys are idiots (please do read the history, this I stress). The man was a major figure in Graphic Design and one of my favorite modern artists. Call his lines "child's play" and I'll give you a spoonful of wrath and bottle of brandy to wash it down. But without going overboard, just read what happened to Picasso and why his work reverted back to a child like state as well.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Luis Dias on October 31, 2012, 12:59:49 pm
Oh my, I'm glad I skipped that comment by Mongoose or my blood would boil away before ... wait.... what the hell....

....gngngnng.....
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Solatar on October 31, 2012, 01:39:29 pm
Good, interesting debate (HLP is a great place to lurk :p ).  I consider myself a medievalist (really Late Antiquity, if there are any other Peter Brown fans around), which opens up a whole can of symbolism worms in my interpretation of everything.  Because I've spent so much time picking out meaning and themes in mosaics, cathedral architecture, and hagiography, my knowledge of modern criticism is lacking, except for a few literature classes some years ago where I argued with my professor against new criticism without really understanding what it was.

For those of you more well-versed in the modern art/literature world, how has the New Criticism affected your perceptions?  When I hear literature students complaining about seemingly random meaning disassociated with the artist's intent, I immediately think "this student hates New Criticism, not literature, but doesn't know it".

To a somewhat outside observer, the debate in this thread appears to be about whether or not the individual is qualified to make judgments about the validity of art.  What I perceive as "new criticism" - which could be wrong, hence the post - would perhaps say "the individual alone can pick out the meaning in art, can decide what is and isn't art, and his reasoned opinion is just as valid as any other reasoned opinion" while the more traditional view would say something like "if you don't understand the meaning, go educate yourself on the context, because the artist has a clear intent you have missed".  Can/is this view really be applied to art?  When I hear about people railing against modern art for being too simplistic, I get the sense that they're trying to interpret it completely in a vacuum.  If you see a Piet Mondrien work and think "this looks like kids work", and basically evaluate it as such, then it won't have meaning for you, but is that really fair to the artist?

I'm just curious, because my art friends and my literature friends (ones that are interested in 20th century stuff) seem to disagree quite a bit on the value of historical context, and it seems like a lot of people in this thread disagree on that issue as well. If these questions are confused, ill-founded, or excessively rambling, just ignore them and carry on.  :)
Title: Re: Art
Post by: FlamingCobra on October 31, 2012, 06:59:20 pm
I... :wtf:

Uh...  :wtf:

Hmmm...................

My thoughts exactly
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Scourge of Ages on November 01, 2012, 03:10:06 am
OK so... Finally got around to watching this when there were no family members around.

It's not as indecent or grotesque as I had imagined from the other comments. It is however one of the most annoying things I've seen in recent memory. Even knowing what it represents, I think it's needlessly obtuse and irritating for the message it's trying to get across. But whatever, as long as I don't have to deal with stuff like this I won't mind if others choose to.

And now a generalization: Performance art is the wankiest of modern arts, and this piece is perhaps the wankiest of those I've had the displeasure of seeing.

The preceding is a work of personal opinion, please do not take it as an attack on any other viewers' opinions. Just against the medium.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Luis Dias on November 01, 2012, 05:20:36 pm
Solatar,


Well, regarding your views on the matter, it seems to me that I'm relatively inclined to both perspectives you raised on the issue. The biggest problem in your extreme relativism (art is 100% in the eyes of the beholder) is that then the very word "art" loses meaning in a conversation, since the very idea of a "word" is to share between sentient people the same experience (of an object, of an event, of a pattern, etc.). If "Art" is entirely subjective then it isn't "shareable" at all. If, however, we can share anything we experience as "art" with other sentient beings and feel we are talking on "the same page", then the experience is shareable.

And it evidently is, historically speaking, since so many humans have expressed and shared so much of it and so much conversation about it. So even if people harshly disagree if X is art or not, the very word "art" clearly expresses a concept that both (at least vaguely) share. So in here, we have a falsification of your idea.

OTOH, art is definitely not as objective as any science. The very thought of it being so is ridiculously funny, and every attempt to constraint art into a "set" of stuff one makes with a "set" of tools, a "set" of process, with a "set" of purposes turns art into decoration, or worse, into a product. So of course that in this view, I am deeply inclined to your subjective stance that the art is "in the eyes of the beholder".

I also understand the notion that you can produce your own meaning while watching a piece of art, unrelated with the author's intent, althout I find that phenomena more secondary and serendipitious. The difference is however that a more comprehensive experience and knowledge one has of the historical context, the stories and the meanings that surrounded each piece of art when it was done is undeniably correlated with a much better enjoyment of each and every piece of art there is out there.
Title: Re: Art
Post by: IronBeer on November 02, 2012, 01:29:05 pm
I didn't get it, having watched it just now. Maybe I'm still trying to process the act, but I have no internal consensus presently.
I'm open-minded, not outright offended by that, but I'm confused as to what the point was.

Also, tounge-in-cheek relation: http://www.theonion.com/articles/performance-artist-shocks-us-out-of-apathetic-stup,251/
Title: Re: Art
Post by: An4ximandros on November 02, 2012, 01:43:46 pm
http://www.theonion.com/video/romney-suspends-political-beliefs-to-help-victims,30217/ oh god what.

Hahhaha

http://www.theonion.com/video/onion-weather-center-we-dumb-it-down-the-best-we-c,29507/
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Solatar on November 02, 2012, 09:08:21 pm

. . .


That was a really good analysis.  I don't personally hold the "art is to be analysed in a vacuum" viewpoint (should have made that a bit clearer), I actually abhor it, but I feel popular negative criticisms of the "genre" of modern art hinge on accusing it of having abstract and relativistic meaning, but those criticisms are largely based on a false idea of what the artist is trying to do.  Modern work can be so shocking that it makes the unprepared viewer feel that the only experience they can share with others is their mutual confusion, until the viewer takes a minute to consider symbolism (the deeper critical appreciation Batutta was talking about that has to be learned) and appreciates it (and shares it) on a deeper level. 
Title: Re: Art
Post by: Luis Dias on November 05, 2012, 06:31:34 am
Thanks Solatar. And yeah, the "mutual confusion" thing you refer to should probably worry the artists a little, since there's this uproar of the masses against art that's not even funny. Hopefully these hordes won't have their hands on it.