[sigtau]

Just popping in to comment on how this is the most intelligent debate I have seen on HLP in months.

Okay, carry on.

[Phantom Hoover]

that's funny, i was thinking it's a profoundly unintelligent debate

[Luis Dias]

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.

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.

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.

[AtomicClucker]

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.

[Luis Dias]

Oh my, I'm glad I skipped that comment by Mongoose or my blood would boil away before ... wait.... what the hell....

....gngngnng.....

[Solatar]

Good, interesting debate (HLP is a great place to lurk ).  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. 

[FlamingCobra]

I...

Uh... 

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

My thoughts exactly

[Scourge of Ages]

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.

[Luis Dias]

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.

[IronBeer]

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/

[An4ximandros]

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/

[Solatar]

. . .

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. 

[Luis Dias]

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.