[General Battuta]

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.

[General Battuta]

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.

[MP-Ryan]

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.

[General Battuta]

That is a post I can get behind. Though I'd say the audience failed rather than the piece. 

[perihelion]

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?

[General Battuta]

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.

[Phantom Hoover]

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?

[Mongoose]

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.

[General Battuta]

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.

[General Battuta]

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?

[NGTM-1R]

Assumption: second-order benefits must necessarily exist and this is provable.

[Luis Dias]

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.

[General Battuta]

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.

[Phantom Hoover]

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

[swashmebuckle]

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

[NGTM-1R]

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.

[General Battuta]

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.

[Phantom Hoover]

why are you people all terrified and repulsed by this, it's puzzling at worst

[NGTM-1R]

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.)

[General Battuta]

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.