[Genryu]

Plus, I know teenagers that could give lessons in maturity to some older people on this board.
"This is art!!"
"It is not!!"
"Is so!"
"Is not !"
etc...

[vyper]

[q]Vyper, can the flamebaiting.[/q]

Okay, Maeg, I've been here for two years plus and I've never been accused of flame baiting. I'm just not taking him on in his arguments that I don't see a point to, and conveying backups to my own.

[Blaise Russel]

I don't know, I was trying to be viciously mordant and sarcastic back there.

[vyper]

Both ways work.

[Martinus]

[color=66ff00]You're conveying that you have a better grasp of the subject just by proxy of being older.

That seems more of a sweeping generalisation than a coherent argument to me.
[/color]

[vyper]

[q]That seems more of a sweeping generalisation than a coherent argument to me.[/q]

1 - I'm saying his perspective is different, and that I won't like the "angry" picture for the same reason.
2 - That still doesn't qualify as flame baiting.

[Goober5000]

To return to the original point of the thread...

Originally posted by Holy Imperial Gloriano
why they didn't just leave note This is not garbage but meh.

That made me think of the Magritte painting:

Translation: "This is not a pipe."

Actually, art aficionados might find the two exhibits similar in more ways than one.

[Flipside]

I suppose that from my own point of view, Art should be recognisable as such, you need to be able to look at it and say 'someone was getting creative there', even if you don't like it, you can still recognise that someone has tried to create 'Art'.

That's why I consider Pollack and artist, even though it looks a bit odd, it is an expression of emotion, a feeling that someone had a passion for what they were doing, that is what I consider Art.

If a bag of rubbish can be mistaken for...well.... a bag of rubbish, then it, at least in my opinion, could not have been projecting any kind of creativity or emotion.

[Galemp]

On a slightly different tangent...

Re: Mondrian, Red, Yellow, and Blue. You may (or may not) be familiar with the basic principles of color, form, and composition that all art students learn in their first studies. But they are of supreme importance, moreso than simply the subject matter. The paintings of Vermeer and his contemporaries, for example, are on the surface simple portraits of everyday life, but as art they are fascinating for their composition and use of light and form to draw the eye in certain directions.

What Mondrian did was to keep the composition and do away with the subject matter, retaining the ultimate meaning of the art while minimizing it to its basic components and moving it into the abstract. Where you may see just some squares is where you would also see just a woman in a rocking chair; what art critics see is a composition.

Furthermore, Mondrian is considered genius because he was revolutionary. It may be no big deal for you to put down some lines and colors, but for someone to do this in 1960 and call it 'art' was totally new and highly controversial.

You could say the same thing about Mies van der Rohe's landmark Seagram Building in New York; you can say, 'Any moron can build a glass box' but looking at the architectural precidents he was building on, you can understand that the idea, the concept, the totally new and different theories behind the art made it genius. It was something the world had never seen before, which is why your crude imitations can never have the same impact that the original art did when it appeared.

Goober: Excellent point made with le pipe. Magritte is an outstanding example of how art can be stimulating.

[Ford Prefect]

Only the artist knows whether or not it is art. If a work stems from a genuine feeling or thought that the artist has, then it is art. Now, you can make a strong argument for the case that art fails if it cannot make an emotional or intellectual connection with many people, but to disregard anything as worthless simply shows a lack of desire to put thought into something. You don't have to like it, (I sure don't like a lot of it), but art demands a lot of its audience-- it requires you to make a conscious effort to think about what it is you're seeing, and not to disregard or embrace it based on first impressions or preconceived ideas.

Thomas Kinkade, however, spits out his paintings in formulaic motifs and hires a workforce to do touch-ups on them. They are tacky pictures with not an ounce of thought put into them and if we were to flush them all down the toilet, we would, in my opinion, have rid ourselves of the most obscenely awful things ever to plague our civilization.

[Styxx]

That documentary where they took one of the most famous modern art critics and presented him with a bunch of pieces, half of them by famous modern artists, and half of them by children, mental patients and the show's own staff (I think it was that, at least) then asked him to identify which where the actual modern art pieces, and he was completely unable to do so says it all, in my opinion.

Art should require not only insight and emotion, but also skill. Throwing paint randomly at a canvas doesn't require skill. Filling a bag with rubbish doesn't require skill. Of course, it may make you think, but a car crash can make you think, and most sane people wouldn't consider that art.

[Zeronet]

Thats Art. *Runs off screaming*

[Goober5000]

Originally posted by Styxx
That documentary where they took one of the most famous modern art critics and presented him with a bunch of pieces, half of them by famous modern artists, and half of them by children, mental patients and the show's own staff (I think it was that, at least) then asked him to identify which where the actual modern art pieces, and he was completely unable to do so says it all, in my opinion.

Art should require not only insight and emotion, but also skill. Throwing paint randomly at a canvas doesn't require skill. Filling a bag with rubbish doesn't require skill. Of course, it may make you think, but a car crash can make you think, and most sane people wouldn't consider that art.

I'd agree with that.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Styxx
That documentary where they took one of the most famous modern art critics and presented him with a bunch of pieces, half of them by famous modern artists, and half of them by children, mental patients and the show's own staff (I think it was that, at least) then asked him to identify which where the actual modern art pieces, and he was completely unable to do so says it all, in my opinion.

Art should require not only insight and emotion, but also skill. Throwing paint randomly at a canvas doesn't require skill. Filling a bag with rubbish doesn't require skill. Of course, it may make you think, but a car crash can make you think, and most sane people wouldn't consider that art.

Anyone remember the Turner Prize winner who sold a crushed up ball of A4 for about 10 grand?

Now that's art (not the, er, 'piece', but the scam of getting 10 grand for it....)

[Petrarch of the VBB]

Awesome.

So if I were to grow a goatee and wear a beret, I could sell a smashed VHS cassette on a plinth for a tidy sum?

[Mongoose]

Call me unsophisticated, but to me, art has to look good.  Things like DaVinci's The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, or Michaelangelo's Pieta or Sistine Chapel, are beautiful and have always been seen as such.  Obviously, no one debates that these pieces qualify as art.  Also, as someone said above, they required great skill to be made.  I consider Kincade's pieces art because they are good-looking and because, like them or not, they did require some skill.  On the other hand, we have modern "art" like that trash bag or that "painting" with the big colored blocks that a 5-year-old could have made with a set of finger paints.  These should not be considered art; they have no aesthetic value, and they required little to no skill.

I disagree with Ford Prefect saying that art can only be considered as such in the artist's eyes.  If that were true, every young child's crayon scribbles would be framed and in museums; to the child, it's art, right?  To me, art has to be declared as such by the general public, not by some "elite" art critic.  I remember my high school history teacher telling about his visit to an art museum.  The one hallway he was in had a ceiling that was painted blue.  He thought nothing of it, until he saw a descriptive sign stating that the ceiling was a piece by some "artist."  Give me a break; painting a ceiling blue does not make you skilled in art.  I could do the same with a can of house paint and a roller.  Personally, I think the ultimate test of skill of an artist should be the ability to paint things, such as portraits and landscapes, so realistically that you can't tell whether or not it's a painting.  I'm not a big fan of abstract or impressionistic art, but I will say that it is art.  Modern art, however, is trash, much like that bag .  I like to think of it as an "Emperor's new clothes" scenario:  no one wants to seem "uncultured," so they keep calling this crap art.

P.S.  Of course a smashed VHS tape would be art!  Just put an unwoven cassette tape and a scratched CD next to it, and you're set.  We can call it "A/V Nightmare" .

[Flipside]

I think you are bang on there Mongoose. Most of the artists that are truly considered 'great' were extremely critical of their own work, since they were perfectionists, so nothing was ever good enough. I think it was Van Goch who destroyed some of his own works in a fit of rage that he was such a 'poor' artist in his own opinion.

Art is defined by people, not artists.

[Ford Prefect]

My point is that there is a difference between recognizing that something is art and liking it. I actually agree with you that art ought to be somehow aesthetically acceptable, but just because an artist chooses not to abide by that criterion does not make him a phony. Do I want to view an exhibit that consists of arranged trash? Not particularly. Hell, my favorite artists are Monet and Renoir. But that doesn't mean that every ugly piece was created by some pseudo-intellectual who wants people to call him an artist. If it was created to express a genuine feeling or thought, it is by definition art.

[Flipside]

It's not so much 'ugly', I'm seen some quite horrible looking pieces in my time, Dali, alongside some absolute works of genius produced some absolutely atrocious stuff, at least in my opinion.

I think the word 'pointless' would be more apt. it's like taking something that is mundane and, for the purpose of art, keeping it mundane and trying to add a pretty tag onto it to give it purpose. Mundanity has a place in Art, I'll agree, but this, to me, is a pointless piece.

Even if he's arranged matters so that there was, say screwed up bits of red paper in the bag that spelt 'Art' from a certain angle, at least he would have made an effort, and wouldn't need a written explanation of what this piece means.

[Ford Prefect]

Well yes. If you need to write an explanation of what the point of your art is, then I would say it has failed because you haven't succeeded in conveying your idea through the chosen medium.