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 hackers sit down and study those works of art, they're not just posing.
A lot of modern art is like that. I look and scratch my head. If I go with a friend who understands the context, they can explain to me the history: movement Z is a reaction to Y, which in turn is a reaction to X. The artist is grappling with themes A and B, and exploring materials C, D, and E.
Many of us can do similar analysis with video games. Look at the Upgrade Complete series, which is a fun set of commentary on games at the same time it's a fun game. Look at the rise of the 8-bit look and sound that harks back to an earlier era. To an outsider, the 8-bit stuff could just seem like shitty graphics, but to many insiders it's awesome and nostalgic and charming. That's art.
Of course, Kongregate and GameStop are both full of shitty games. It'd be easy to write an article like this one, condemning all videos games as crap. But I and many other HN readers are willing to wade through the crap because when you find the gems, they're real works of art. Art requiring context to really understand.
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.
By "like big canvases of entirely purple", you're probably referring to Yves Klein, who I think is actually a bad example for what you're getting at. Klein was interested in a kind of total, pure experience of color. He worked with a paint chemist to create an especially vibrant blue color ("International Klein Blue") which, to a pre-television era, would have actually been quite mesmerizing. Klein was also a legitimately fascinating and eccentric character who I think would interest anybody that studied him.
I have a rule about art. It doesn't have to be everybody's rule; it's just mine.
If the artist creates something that he would want for himself, for his own living space, even if he knew that nobody else would ever get to see it, I'll accept that it's art, even if I can't stand it. If the artist is working on commission, the rule applies to whoever commissioned it. If it's something he would want for himself for his private island hermitage, okay, it's his art. Different people have different tastes, and this is his. And I'm fine with edge cases such as making things such as children's art under the sincere belief that he would have wanted it for himself if he were a child. I'm not trying for a legalistic definition, just a general principle that, to be real art, it has to satisfy the artist's personal esthetic desires in the complete absence of social payoffs such as statement making, money, being the center of attention in order to feel more significant, trying to build a reputation, etc.
If it would be something he would want for himself--a vibrant blue canvas in a color the artist finds mesmerizing, for example--then I consider it art even if he intends to sell it, get attention, build a reputation, etc.
I doubt most modern art could pass this test. I think most of it is just cynical manipulation of the pathetic and pretentious by the narcissistic and manipulative. If the artist wouldn't have any interest in it in the absence of an audience, it's just a product.
Of course, I can't know for sure what the artist's motivations were for a piece, but that doesn't matter. My definition of fraud doesn't require me to be able to spot it.
When M Duchamp put a urinal on display in an art museum it made a novel point that we perceive quotidian things differently just because they're in an art gallery.
When [help me here] "installed" a live donkey "to symbolise his inability to come up with a good idea" that's piss.
That said there is plenty of excellent modern art. If you live in/near a wealthy city, this is easily verified.
living on a street with 8 contemporary art galleries I can say that 90% of contemporary art sucks. It's just like startups, 90% of them fail. But people who love startups or art keep making more regardless.
I think a lot of the irritating attitude is the support of people who all do the same thing. Same way when your friend makes a new web app you're not going to say it sucks even if it does because (a) they're your friend and (b) you are going to want moral support for your next web app at some point.
Almost right. It goes both ways. I'm not talking about making things in general. I'm talking about things you make as art (or craft, I suppose, where part of the design is chosen based on your own esthetic preferences.) If you design it in a way that satisfies your own esthetic desires--it's art that you would enjoy for yourself--then it's your art, even if I don't like it, and even if it will end up going to someone else or bringing you fame and fortune.
But if it's not something you'd ever want yourself but, for example, you made it as a vehicle to gain notoriety or money, then it's not art, as far as I'm concerned. I don't owe your childish demand for attention or $20,000 "statement about capitalist oppression" any reverence just because you claim it's art.
I don't know man, I probably wouldn't even want forks (picking something of "obvious" utility) in my house if I were the ONLY one in the world who knew about them. What would guests think? That I'm some kind of weird food-impaler, maybe a closet Sadist. If people didn't use forks, choosing to have forks wouldn't be a foregone conclusion at all. Even all by myself.
You entirely undervalue the social context of objects, including objets d'art.
> You entirely undervalue the social context of objects, including objets d'art.
A lot of people might value something because it goes against the grain of social and cultural context. Those things might be more interesting or provoke different thoughts or perspectives.
That's the thing with totally out there, nutbar work. Usually there's a story that makes it all make sense, in relative terms.
A lot of artists strive very hard to produce something new which is, at its essence, nearly impossible. The distance you have to go to get somewhere uncharted is vast indeed.
If people think art is easy they should struggle to create some themselves. It will take years to be able to produce something that isn't immediately recognizable as either too unrefined for serious consideration, too obviously derivative, or so done to death it's a cliche.
It captures the essence of the struggling artist, and their perhaps seemingly mediocre output, better than anything else I've ever read before.
Also keep in mind that when people look at art, they're often placing the artist somewhere along this path into the uncharted; appreciating their struggle and being curious about where they will move next.
I think what you are describing is "art I don't really see the merit of". Modern art - as understood by most people - encompasses Van Gough through Matisse, Hockney through Warhol.
Is the work of Dali an "allergic reaction"? How about Roy Lichtenstein? How about Jackson Pollock? How about Tracey Emin? Where do you draw the line here?
If you draw the line at the point where you stop seeing the artistic merit, and if you start defining art from that purely subjective view point, you're surely missing out. What about artists who fall just past the line where you see the artistic merit? Is it possible you just don't understand that work? Will you start to define art as purely mechanical skill? If not, where will you define it?
That's an interesting and excellent question, strawman though it is. The thread you're replying to is an exploration of "Can you distinguish between art and non-art purely via the subjective merit and appreciation of the result?". But the question you're (really) asking is: "Given an attempt to define art, can that definition be widened to include everything, rendering it useless?"
I'm not trying to construct a straw man, I'm trying to talk about the lay of the land. If I have a beef it is with the irrational, undisciplined, non-illuminating, petty dullness of the whole argument.
Because in the many times I have seen this argument, it always seems to go the same way. There is a Philistine sneering at some boring or obscure objects, and there is an angry Defender of Art who treads a fine line between (on one hand) a bland modern schoolteacher's orthodoxy which says nothing can be excluded and (on the other hand) a haughty attitude that the boring object is really better than some other boring objects - you know, to those with REAL discernment - and that the Philistine probably loves airbrush art and Thomas Kinkade and the pre-Raphaelites (hee hee hee). There is a huge dogpile of smug people on the Philistine, whose populist persecution complex is encouraged. The Defender (who often enough is just an undergraduate with a little art history or a 35mm camera), is just fueling the Philistine, and the Philistine is fueling the Defender, and so on forever.
If I am bothered by any specific art, it is the pieces which use yet another random object to draw out this same discussion we have been having for over 50 years.
I don't really object to a totally stoned view of the world where everything is interesting period, and maybe it really is useless to talk about art. That seems to me at least consistent, and not a perpetuation of the same crummy drama used to endlessly propagate the modern orthodoxy. On the other hand, if someone wants to actually try excluding something from art then that also provides a starting point for an actual discussion of some kind.
A little off-topic, but why is your xkcd link using ssl? Really curious, since I didn't think xkcd ever exposed https links, can't see any reason for it, and not sure how you got it.
Did you add the "s" manually, for, I dunno, the sake of art ;) ?
And that's why I dislike "art" - because too often the only thing that makes something art is a label. Without it, it would be a skippable youtube video. His comment about the photo of a woman sitting in a chair is spot on. Nobody would give it five seconds if it was in somebody's summer collection, because it does look like a boring holiday photo. The article's author may have cherry picked, but it's true that art lacks fundamental safeguards against crap. If you have a reputation, you can post almost everything in the art thread.
I value aesthetics more than art. It's much better defined. Not everything that looks nice is an art, but in worst case you're left with something that looks nice ;-).
> value aesthetics more than art. (...) something that looks nice
"Aestethics" doesn't really require anything to look good.
Personally, I think LMFAO[1] and Robyn[2] looks absolutely terrible. But that tickles some part of my brain, and I enjoy the aestethics of it, in all it's uglyness.
The OP point was not about art being mere satisfaction for art nerds, but that there may be an effort to appreciate it. That's true of most art forms. It just happens that which effort depends partly on the person. It seems that for some reason, people are put off by what's around modern and contemporary art (the social aspects of people participating in it, etc…). Nothing prevents you from going beyond that, appreciate what you like, and expand your taste to new things.
The whole "my five year old can do that" argument is a bit tired. That's similar to the arguments that music using electronics is not art, etc… By itself, why should the amount of efforts necessary to produce something matter at all ? Besides, a lots of people engaging in "garbage looking art" were actually very skilled from a traditional POV, but went a way where they would not use it conventionally. Note also that similar issues arise for older art forms: it is fair to say that most people are put off by classic zen gardens (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryōan-ji). There is much less social proof at work there, and yet, couldn't you make the same argument about them ? Would you dismiss them as easily ?
Regarding Rothko or Klein, some people really like his art, without claiming to be particularly knowledgeable about art. Don't forget also that the famous stuff is generally a limited period of an artist production. Rothko did not just pain rectangles, Pollock dripping period was relatively short, etc...
Except Rothko was a lousy artist before he hit on the black on black rectangle thing. A study of his development as an artist shows somebody who is almost talent free.
I think the point is that much of modern art is so self referential that it has become almost devoid of any sort of external meaning. This is easy to observe. Sit for a few hours in the modern art wing of your local free public museum and observe as the man on the street barely holds back snickers and gafaws at the absurdity of some of the work.
I'm reminded of a tour through the Vatican art collection, perhaps one of the finest in the world. The crowds were bunched around some of the great statuary and paintings (even ones they didn't formerly know). Near the end of the tour, the viewer is thrust into the modern art collection. The crowds suddenly stop bunching and most people can't wait to get through it.
This seems on its face backwards. What should be more relevant to the modern viewer, statues of a dead religion in a language nobody natively speaks or religious art made by their peers and contemporaries?
"Except Rothko was a lousy artist before he hit on the black on black rectangle thing. A study of his development as an artist shows somebody who is almost talent free."
I accept that you think he was almost talentless, but he wasn't. I think he was a great talent long before he became well known for the typical rothko stuff, and it wasn't just talent in the modern sense but also in the craft sense, when he was a figurative painter especially of new york scenes (try googling his painting of the new york subway).
Your anecdote about the vatican collection is a good one. But it doesn't mean that modern art is worthless, or even suggest that it is.
There's a lot of subtlety in rothko's brushwork that most people don't pick up on. Really they're large, complex pictures but on a different level from most painting. I saw about 20 of his paintings in the turner/rothko exhibition in London about three years ago, and seeing them in a space that suits them brings out their impressive quality, and it became hard to see them as "just rectangles" or however you want to put it.
Sorry this is going to be long, but I'm going to try and explain my...perhaps provincial and unfair...way of thinking about Rothko...
First off, there is some truly great modern art being produced these days. I really think it has to do with the maturing of modern art as a field (see #2 below). Some of the recent Russian surrealists are producing astonishing stuff and there is some absolutely wonderful, delicate, sculpture art coming out of Japan in the last 20 years.
Something I've tried to do when helping my friends to try and appreciate modern art is to explain it in two ways:
1) It's important to understand a work of art as part of a continuum of the artist's individual work. I usually use Picasso as a frame of reference. He started off with a fairly traditional style, some really great stuff, and at a young age. He had a genuine interest and talent for the field. Ciencia y Caridad and even La Salchichona are quite good stuff. So when you look at Picasso through his career, and the transition into his later forms, you can generally see the progression and how he arrived where he did.
2) It's important to understand a work of art given the confluence of history and the actions/reactions of artists. Major shifts in art styles are quite often a reaction to a perceived dead-end to an older form. An older form may have evolved to the point that there simply is nothing more that can be said with this form...it's become an intolerable box of so many arbitrary rules that everybody's work ends up like everybody else's work. To jump out of the box might mean inventing a new form or new direction. Often works of art that are near the beginning of an immature style seem simple, silly or even childish. But those produced as the style matures can end up as quite wonderful. I find the music world provides several great examples of this happening, Classical music (e.g. Mozart) was as much a response to the cruft that had built up around Baroque (e.g. Bach) as anything. A more modern take might be minimalism. One of my favorite composers in the style is Steve Reich. His early stuff I can take or leave, endless experiments with phase and looped recordings blah blah. But some of his later stuff is sublime. Minimalism had matured sufficiently during his own lifetime that it went from screwing around with the interesting rhythms that appear when two pianos play the same phrase slightly out of phase...to intense, layered tapestries of sound that can fill a concert hall.
Try as I might, I can't seem to apply either of these very successfully to Rothko without ending up cynical. If I go with approach #1, I can't seem to come up with a narrative that shows a steady progression. Instead it seems like he simply bounced around from fad to fad, selecting whatever was fashionable at the time that seemed both impenetrable to the layman and required as little effort as possible on his part to paint. His responses to criticisms are usually layers of indecipherable Yoda-like nonsense. He didn't start as an artist very young, and after he did decide to take it up (in his 20s I think!) he didn't really seem to make a serious go at it. He did the equivalent of taking a couple of correspondence classes and hanging around with the currently fashionable crowd. When fashion changed (e.g. Salvador Dali's triumphant shows), Rothko simply switched to a hack tale on whatever was drawing the crowds. It doesn't seem to be a man driven by an insatiable passion to find his own voice. There just doesn't seem to be any sort of recognizable innovation in his work arguably until he starts painting big monotone rectangles. But that's like saying framing a paint sample the last time I painted my living room is "innovative".
Applying #2 is almost as bad. He seemed to be more of a hanger-on to the fashionable club of the day. In startup-ese, he seemed to pivot to the best selling, least effort fad of the year. "What's fashionable this year? Moderne or Abstract Expressionism? Which is easier? Abstract Expressionism it is! I can crank out like 20-30 of these puppies a day!" There's no real progression from his subway figure paintings to his surrealist period to his abstract expressionist period. He just bounces from one to the other. Art appreciation commentators and textbooks try and retrofit this into a narrative of him "stripping away the unnecessary" or "simplifying his work" but it seems like he just came full circle, from somebody who wasn't ever particularly interested in art, and didn't want to put much effort into it, into somebody who just couldn't be bothered in the end. He doesn't seem to fit in as part of the evolution of art since he bounces around between movements (but with the same hamfisted lack of polish or style) and doesn't evolve with them and he definitely doesn't appear to set a direction for the art world to follow in it's next evolving step.
Other than volume (why bother naming them, I'll do colors, then numbers for a while, but then I'll get bored and just not bother) there just doesn't seem to be any skill or point to his work. And there's nothing wrong with that, but we call those kinds of folks "house painters" not "artists". The East wall in my dining room doesn't need a title either.
(full disclosure, I've seen Rothko's work at the National Gallery in the specially constructed Tower exhibit, at the Leeum's small but really well curated modern art collection (though I don't think they displayed his works as well as they could have), the MoMA (of course), the Guggenheim in NYC and Venice, and I think the Musee D'art Moderne in Paris and have really tried to get with it w/r to his body of work including reading a biography about him at some point and watching a documentary about his life)
Sure, art is subject to personal taste, and I'm not saying that anybody is wrong in liking his stuff, it's just that I end up decidedly not enjoying his work and always leave with a cynical taste in my mouth no matter how open minded I go in. But as always with art, it's up to the individual to interpret and enjoy the art. Here's somebody who obviously does http://fuckyeahmarkrothko.tumblr.com/
That's the perspective from which I think it's totally legitimate to say: this is shitty art. Not the initial, "I don't get it so it must be crap" reaction. But trying to see so deeply into it that you can see the fraud or the idiocy.
That is why I really love Banksy in general, and especially Exit Through the Gift Shop. He has such a keen nose for fraud and pretense.
Right. When I see a Rothko in a gallery I know pretty much immediately it's one of his before I walk up to the info card. And my immediate gut reaction is usually one of incredulity. But like most modern art you have to try and learn about the context of the piece to appreciate it. And the more I dive into the context around his work the less I like it.
I generally like Banksy too. At first glance I like the aesthetic, and then when pondering a work, I enjoy the satire, symbolism, the cultural references and imagery.
And even if the final work is made in a few moments, I know that he spent time, perhaps hundreds of hours building out the stencil set, planning the piece, choosing a subject, etc. for the final image.
Contemporaries for sure, but probably not peers. The world that created that art is far removed from the world of the visitors. Art has its bubbles too.
I'm sure 99% of HN knows about J/K navigation and appreciates when websites implement it. But it's unknown outside the world of software development.
There's a bubble at ConceptArt.org, CGSociety, and every other place where people gather to talk about something. Art bubbles and tech bubbles have a similar problem: convincing people in other bubbles that what you value has value. The art in the article makes more sense when you see it as the product of a bubble. You would need to peer inside the bubble with a guidebook to know what you're looking at.
But I think there's another term for these bubbles, "echo chamber". They exist in every shared activity if no new input is brought in to keep the family from getting incestuous. The more I think about the concept of the "meme" as an analogue to genes, the more I see parallels.
The old statues are more relevant to many people because it is so amazing that they have been preserved and it gives them a window into old things, and because old things achieve a sort of special-object status especially in connection with religion (relics...) Moreover, the old things have already been through ruthless filtering, and the things which remain tend to have more inherent interest than the average recently-created thing.
That last bit makes perfect sense to me. Look at science or math. What's more comprehensible to the modern layman: something that we learned decades to centuries ago? Or work that's being published this month?
If you go to a general-interest science museum, they mainly cover science's greatest hist of yesteryear.
Not saying "some five year olds can do that" or even that the argument is ever meaningful. Just a cute video.
Too bad she'll either die of the chemicals or spend the rest of her life hiding from the fame of the past while trying to define herself, or worst, spend the rest of her life trying to retrieve the joy and vision of her former self.
If you don't know the story behind obfuscated C, but only look at the code listing as art, then many people would say "my five-year-old can do that", since it just looks like a bunch of random characters.
It is totally fine not to like art, and not wanting to invest time in understanding it. But there is a difference between not understanding something and proclaiming it "humbug" because you dont understand it.
Though I agree that modern art is mostly pointless, I actually have prints by Rothko and Pollock. I've dashed through countless modern art museums around the world, but there are a few artists and styles that consistently make me stop and stare. I can't explain why I like these works. I didn't know nor care about the artists' background or philosophy. I didn't buy it to impress anyone or make myself look artsy. Oddly, I don't like most other color field art. I don't even like Rothko's darker work. There's something about his big bright color fields that appeals to me. Is that art?
Actually, a lot of modern art IS intellectual games; not spirit or aesthetics. Look at the readymades of Marcel Duchamp (early 20th century). And these intellectual games apply to modern literature and music as well.
Many people broke down and cried when looking at Rothko works. Certainly it doesn't have that effect on me (mild boredom), but you dismiss their effects to easily.
I think you're nitpicking pointlessly here. Rather than seeking interpretations that you can be snide and cranky about, seek interpretations that make sense.
Literature is art, but literature isn't just a bucket of statements. Indeed, plenty of interesting literature makes use of things that aren't plain statements. If Upon a Winter's Night a Traveller, for example. Its title alone isn't a proper statement, and the book plays with that kind of incompleteness throughout.
The statement version of the book might be something like, "Incomplete statements can be interesting." But that's not art.
I don’t see an interpretation that makes sense. In fact, I don’t think there is one. I guess you define a “statement” to be a complete sentence, judging by “its title alone isn’t a proper statement”, but titles are rarely statements anyway and the actual contents of the novel, I am sure, are full sentences. We need to use more precise language, instead of hiding behind vague terms like “statements”, if we hope to evaluate the argument.
I am not nitpicking. I honestly don’t think any sense can be made from leot’s statement. If I am wrong, I invite you to refine it in a way that makes sense. Your earlier refinement (text is not the best medium for every message) makes sense, but the point is that art is not defined as “mediums other than text”, and therefore it isn’t relevant to the previous discussion about art.
Another (less lyrical) way of phrasing it might be:
"P1: There exists X in the set of (ideas, notions, feelings, etc.) s.t. X cannot be expressed as a combination of statements.
Humans get around P1 by using more than mere statements to express themselves. The consequences of their doing so might be called 'art'."
The word "statement", as opposed to "phrase" or "sentence", was used to draw a distinction between mere statements about facts-of-the-matter and literature. The implication was that "statements" are things like "the sky is blue" or "war is bad", from which semantics can be derived through syntax and the grounding of referents. In other words, I'm implying, here, that "literature" is not a simple collection of statements.
But regardless of the status of literature, i.e., even if literature were a mere collection of statements, are you claiming that every feeling, notion, idea (etc.) that can be expressed† can, in fact, be expressed via text/words/phrases? In other words, are you claiming that (a) language can express everything felt, thought, experienced? Or, alternatively, are you claiming (b) that no non-linguistic medium of expression can express that which is inexpressible by language?
†I'd use "communicated", but I fear someone might take the position that "communicate" only has a technical information-theoretic definition.
I thought he was was drawing a distinction between literal communication and evocation of experience and feeling. E.g., "war is bad" vs Guernica. I take it as linked in that I saw it as an argument for a broad understanding of art. E.g., if a big purple square of Rothko's is evocative, it's still worthwhile art even though any reasonable translation of it to unpoetic statements of it is either null or dull to the point of idiocy.
They do so using metaphor, simile, plot and character, but very rarely direct argument. Remembrance of Things Past is not the same as "nostalgia is powerful."
But what's really going to bake your noodle later: Is it more sophisticated to have broad acceptance of contemporary art or to call out bad attempts at art that are relying on your need to feel sophisticated for acceptance?
What separates Rothko and Pollock from the artists in the link is that other people have tried to capture what they captured, and failed. I never got it until I finally saw other rectangle blobs and other paint drippings. There is at least something there to be felt.
Are you saying that true art needs to be immediately understandable without requiring some background knowledge? This is not true for e.g renaissance art either. It usually uses a host of obscure (to modern people) symbols to communicate.
Obscurity, as a general rule, is not a virtue in itself.
Consider books of Stanisław Lem and Gene Wolfe. You could say both are difficult to read science-fiction. Both use sophisticated language and long, intricate sentences. After reading several books by each author, I came to this conclusion:
- Lem's books are difficult, but you're getting something out of them. They are thought-provoking, make you see the world or things they refer to in a different light, or contain things no one thought(or described in a book) before.
- Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun"((I read all of it and it wasn't my first Wolfe's book) is difficult for the sake of being difficult. They are references you are not going to get if you are not an euridite. The book is designed for erudites. It's still enjoyable to a point and the vision of the world is interesting. Yet I can't help but notice that almost all references in that book are hollow. They don't serve any purpose. Many characters in the book are named after saints. So what ? Nothing. Some stories characters tell to each other resemble other stories, from Greek myths and whatnot. So what ? Nothing. It's just a reference. The world is thousands years old, and it may be a distorted story from the past. Or maybe not. A quote from wikipedia: "for example, a backyard full of morning glories is an intentional foreshadowing of events in Free Live Free, but is only apparent to a reader with a horticultural background".
Having a feeling that I didn't catch everything I went to several message boards dedicated to Gene Wolfe's books. Surely they can explain what's so great about these books. But they fail to convince me. They keep blabbering about how Severian is an unreliable narrator (there are a few instances of this, but they're not easy to spot). So what ? Nothing. It doesn't change anything in the book, at best it adds another "what if". Severian is a slimy character willing to lie if it benefits him. Move on.
Gene Wolfe's books are huge collections of references which make reader feel warm and fuzzy inside for getting them. If you meet someone who likes his books, it's because they make him feel special and superior. Not because of a great story, action, thought provoking ideas or very memorable characters. Additionally, the books are a big wildcard. They are deliberately kept very vague and appeal to conspiracy theorists. They could be interpreted in any way you wish.
So there you have it - background knowledge. It can be very easily used - and often is - to woo the public because it makes them feel special and superior. When you explain it away, does it make the work more interesting (like Obfuscated C) or you don't care (like Gene Wolfe's morning glories) ?
I think what you're describing here is more a problem with Gene Wolfe message boards than with Gene Wolfe's writing. They (or at least the ones I've run into) seem to delight in exploring the super-obscure details that show how clever they are, while ignoring the broad strokes which are the meat of the stories. Wolfe's books are these great symphonies working on multiple levels, and these boards focus on finding the Easter eggs.
I'm not going to tell you you're wrong not to like Wolfe. His is a very particular style, and I know people whose literary judgement is at least as good as mine who do not like it.
For my taste, though, taking an intriguing setting, telling a vivid story in it, and not spelling out all the answers is about as thought-provoking as literature comes. I won't pretend I can tell you exactly what happens at the end of the Wizard Knight or the Soldier series, but I can tell you that I've deeply enjoyed rereading them, and plan to continue doing so every few years for the rest of my life, and the mysteries make it more appealing to me, not less.
I wouldn't say I don't like it - but I think it's overblown. The Book of the New Sun has very interesting atmosphere and bits with a lot of flavor (alzabo, the introduction of Dorcas). Plus he actually managed to paint a convincing image of a very, very, very old world where you can't even dig in the ground without finding some bits of history. And my interpretation is that "Urth" is actually an evolved name of "Earth". I also read a couple of stories in similar way. It was quite amusing that in a play featuring the creation of Earth, an autarch appeared on day 1. It's almost as if the society can't imagine a world without one.
But the writing is really dry, some parts longer than they need to be, and majority of characters not memorable. I liked Jonas and the encounter with the mad autarch.
Overall, I would rate it 3.5-4 out of 5. It would be a great read if it was a bit more condensed.
As for the boards, they reminded me of the hunt for the fifth replicant among Blade Runner fans. The script was changed and the scene with one replicant was removed, but dialogue still mentioned 5 replicants. The speculations were batshit insane, until Ridley Scott simply said it was an error in the script.
Wolfe does have interesting ideas sometimes. The first book about Latro was fun in a perverse way. A character who completely forgets what he saw yesterday - yet he always found something new to say about his companions. They are shown in different light as they travel. It sure beats Terry Pratchett introducing the Librarian in exactly the same way for the 20th time. At one point the necromancer (in the classical sense) casts a spell and permanently changes to a woman. Aside from a journal entry for one day, Latro never notices. And how could he ?
Well, by saying you don't like Wolfe you are just stating a personal preference. The fact that you have found a very specific reason for your dislike doesn't any in way invalidate Wolfe's authorship or his readers as much as it further illuminates your own way of thinking.
In fact, in one sense your explanation is painfully ironic, as you seem to consider yourself morally superior to those readers who -- you claim -- read Wolfe for entirely superficial reasons. Are we really stooping so low now as to criticize people for their reading tastes or to second-guess their reasons for reading what they do?
Personally I derive as much pleasure from reading Wolfe as I do from Lem, although I would never compare them. And the key word is "pleasure": I, like I suppose most people, read books to enjoy them. I enjoy Wolfe for many reasons, but "moreal superiority" is not one of them. And I am wary of terms such as "literary significance" to guide my tastes; that's a term for scholars and academics to worry about, as a reader I am concerned with books and stories that affect me emotionally and stimulate me intellectually.
I see your point about Wolfe's complexity being more of a device and less about genuine depth. Despite this, I do enjoy the richness it imparts on the narrative. Wolfe's template is Borges, who uses similar devices and whose stories often have a sort of insular quality where the narrative only exists to create a clever gadget whose cleverness can be admired, but cannot be applied to anything outside itself. For example, Borges has a neat story, The House of Asterion, about a lonely person who roams a large house with many corridors; at the end of the story is killed, and we realize that he's the minotaur in the myth about Theseus.
As for The New Sun, I think that Severian's unreliability is more a ruse (or at best evidence of a flawed character) than an important plot point -- compare this to his Latro trilogy, set in ancient Greece, where the main character, having suffered brain damage, is unable to form new memories, and is therefore genuinely unreliable. The Short Sun also has a character who loses his sense of identity when his mind is merged with another's, and his lack of reliability comes from an inability or refusal to recognize who he actually is.
(Incidentally, while I admire The New Sun greatly, I found its two loose sequels, The Long Sun and The Short Sun, to be much more emotionally stimulating. It helps that the main characters are not borderline sociopaths. They are also less prone to the kind of cryptic connections that are evident in the first book.)
That makes very good sense. The problem is, a lot of us have been to modern art museums, where you'd think that next to every piece there would be an explanation as to the X, Y, Z, A & B that you mentioned. But there never is. So why is that?
You must admit, it's not a crazy idea that they are being intentionally opaque because the decision of what art is "great" and what is "crap" is not being chosen out of merit, but by the whims of an insider few. Is it really so hard to believe that the artists who are considered "hot" right now are just better at working over these insiders who pick the winners and losers?
Some museums will have didactic plaques, or large wall didactics, especially for thematic shows. But for well known artists, or major works, these panels don't make sense. They mean so many things to so different people, that it would be presumptuous to try to pin down a meaning in a few sentences. The panel would leave out more than it could include.
Remember I'm responding to the person above who was saying there was a very straight-forward explanation and way to understand art based on X, Y, Z, A & B. If that explanation is so straight-forward, they can probably fit it in a couple of paragraphs.
Regardless, I think saying "well its reeeeally complicated, so we're just not going to explain ourselves at all" is pretty indefensible.
The plaques also get in the way of a viewer's own response to the work. Pretty soon people are reading their way through the museum.
Also, for most contemporary art, there is not even a critical consensus about the work. Most artists hate to describe what their work is about. They might say what experience inspired them to make the piece, or the feeling they had when they were making it, if you're lucky and caught an unguarded moment. And there would be as many reactions to the piece as critics who wrote about it. It's a losing game.
It's OK to want it, I'm just mentioning some of the barriers to it ever happening.
> Pretty soon people are reading their way through the museum.
Yes. Yes that's exactly what I want to do. I want to spend a day at the museum, and read, i.e. learn, why some things are important and great art, and others aren't.
> for most contemporary art, there is not even a critical consensus about the work.
What? Then how is any decision made as to what art is featured in these exhibits, and what isn't? Remember, for every piece in one of these exhibits, there are 10 artists getting behind on rent who didn't make it in. Someone decides. Who? How?
If you're trying to counter my current argument, which is that this is all arbitrary and picked by some insiders at their whim, you should be aware that you're actually kind of helping my case here...
About my motivation: My wife shows her work and curates shows in the LA area. Consequently for the last 20 years I've spent a lot of time in galleries and museums. I was just trying to get across some of the thinking of the curators who decide what to put on the plaques. Not trying to get into an argument, particularly.
About "no critical consensus": Saying there's not consensus about meaning, doesn't mean curators don't know if there's value in the work.
Lots of times people know work is good, they just don't agree on why. It takes time to figure out whether it's a dead end or not, or to see where the artist goes with a line of work.
Here's another one: there's lots of work that is loved by even sophisticated collectors, but unliked by artists. (E.g.: large-scale paintings that "look like art" but are not new.) There's lots of work that is liked by curators, but not by many artists or collectors (e.g., work grounded in complex theories).
"arbitrary and picked by some insiders at their whim":
The artistic community operates outside your judgement and scorn. Go in expecting to learn something, and maybe you will.
I travelled across the US and visited a lot of modern art galleries on the way (historical art galleries all look the same...). I have no background in art, and I have never been able to figure out those plaques. In the end, I learned to utterly ignore the plaques until I was done observing the piece, and then I'd maybe read the plaque to maybe shed more light. Often the plaque could be misleading.
Two examples here. The first was a plaque describing half a painting as being painted black for whatever reason. Sure, given the painting, if you stood back about 20 meters, it looked black. But from only a few meters, it was clearly a mottled purple and black. How can I trust the interpretation of the curator if they can't even get the colour correct?
The other example was another artist who took a number of photos of beachgoers, in such a way that most of them had a single person and a vast expanse of sand or water. The blurbs said 'exploring the loneliness blah blah'. Only problem was, the people in the photos were clearly enjoying themselves (one photo of a group of people 'looking off behind as if in fear' had the four folks looking back laughing). Add in to this that in my country, having a beach to yourself is bliss. In this case, the curator wasn't wrong - the plaques were describing what the photographer meant to capture. The context was that the photos were taken just after the 9/11 attacks and it was what he was feeling - isolation and loneliness. But I couldn't make those photos match that context.
So, lesson learned: experience art for yourself, then see if the artist or curator has anything which might add to the experience.
If the artist intended to express loneliness, but instead gave most people a feeling of "hey look at those happy people on a beach", then that wasn't good art that was ruined by a plaque. It was just bad art.
I went to the MOMA recently, and one piece was literally a piece of cardboard with some silver spray paint and a few holes in it. My response was, "I could have done that. There's no art to it." That and many other pieces could have benefitted from an explanation. I see no problem with people "reading their way" through a museum. I did that at the Met, because I was curious about the background to many of the paintings I saw. (Which, by the way, I was in awe of.)
There is a large branch of modern art, "conceptual art", which is precisely dedicated to making art of anything, just a concept. Typical examples are ordinary objects, sometimes not even transformed (for instance, a water bottle on a column). It can be traced back to the 1917 "ready-mades". There, the art is in the intention of the artist and nothing else.
Sometimes you may feel cheated. Sometimes, it's brilliant. That's art. Like for everything else, 90% of it is simply mediocre.
I expect that whatever shows up in the MOMA to be the 10%. Further, the "intention of the artist" is completely lost if there is no explanation, and the work is shown in a gallery without context. Something has to give.
The stuff that shows up in the MOMA is surely the top 10% for some audience; otherwise a curator wouldn't have bothered with it.
If you're expecting that it should also be in your top 10%, well, then you have created yourself an expectation. If eventually that stops being fun, there are other things you can do.
> I expect that whatever shows up in the MOMA to be the 10%.
Fair enough.
> Further, the "intention of the artist" is completely lost if there is no explanation, and the work is shown in a gallery without context.
However, some of the strongest form of art today (prehistoric cave painting) have lost all of their context and hope of being understood. I think we can manage without any explanation most of the time.
Prehistoric cave paintings have an anthropological interest outside of just their artistic interest. I'm much more interested in those as a scientist than as I am about someone trying to appreciate art.
This is exactly the point where the art starts disappearing up its own butthole, absolved of any and all responsibility to speak for itself ("if you don't appreciate it then you're lacking context") while at the same time completely independent of context by definition.
I don't believe there's a straightforward way to understand art. Sorry if I misled you. That XYZABC bit is generally the summary of a lot of discussion, with explanations custom-crafted for me.
If you want to understand it, go take an art history class. Then you'll have the attention of somebody whose job it is to explain basic art concepts to you. That's not the job of anybody at a typical gallery or art opening.
So to go back to your original post: you get a quick summary from your friend, and that's sufficient to "get" art, but I have to spend three months going to an art history class?
Also, I can't believe the top post for this article is by someone who, a little further down one of the threads, basically said "eh, actually I take it all back".
I said no such thing. The point of my post is that understanding a lot of art requires context. I gave two examples of the kind of art people here appreciate perfectly well. I also said that contemporary art is often mysterious to me, and described what happens when I go with friends who do have the context. I did not say I fully get the artwork then. What I do have is have some notion of why people appreciate it.
I at no point said, "Gosh, you can understand all art easily after 3 sentences of explanation". Which you should have gotten by analogy; a layman can't get one of the IOCCC entries after a short explanation, and a non-gamer won't really appreciate Upgrade Complete if it's the first game they've ever played. They can get that there's something to get, but they can't possibly fully understand a work in context until they understand the context.
This isn't that complicated. From your original post:
> If I go with a friend who understands the context, they can explain to me the history
Either your friend's explanation improved your experience at that museum/gallery, in which case I say "Put it on a plaque", or it didn't because our understanding of art can't be improved by any kind of brief explanation and really you need to "take an art history class" as you directed us to do. So which is it?
My conclusion is this: if including any kind of explanation --short, long, anything-- can improve the average person's experience at a museum or gallery, then they should do so. The fact that they don't makes a lot of people skeptical about the entire thing, which is a shame.
A few minutes of dialog doesn't fit on any sort of plaque. It's interactive, personal, situational.
Also, I didn't say that a plaque-sized bite of text can't improve things. What I'm saying is that you won't necessarily get a work after reading one. Try it yourself. Take one of the IOCCC works and try writing a short paragraph that will explain it to the general-audience viewer.
And I didn't tell everybody to take an art history class. I told you to take one. Because then your arrogant, entitled-to-be-spoon-fed attitude might possibly be appropriate when you're actually paying somebody to educate you.
Modern art museums are not somehow legally obligated to make you happy. (Neither, for that matter, am I.) If you don't like the way museums are run, you have a problem. If you want to understand the art, you can go put in the time like everybody else did.
* This entry is an entire flight simulator/3d demo/fractal generator/graphical chess program in like a quarter of a page! Wow!
There, I've already covered most of the entries in a very easy explanation. Oh, and a lot of them put the source code into a cutesy shape or substitute out normal "C" words to confuse the reader. It's easy to point out features like that too.
* The C language lets you list word replacements to apply to your program before turning it into machine code. For example you can turn every "NEXT" into "start_printer(); feed_page(); shutdown_printer();". It's a great timesaver. You can also use it to say 'dump this entire file here' and centralize code that's used a lot. This entry has hundreds of replacements and does that entire-file-inclusion over and over. It uses tricky methods with all this replacement to pre-calculate the answer to a math problem before it's even turned into machine code. So the actual machine code ends up doing zero computation before outputting the answer.
* This program was being cute. Normally it's tricky to write a program that prints its own source code, because it's like making a sentence that contains itself. But turns out that some compilers will turn a blank file into machine code that does nothing. And doing nothing means you get a blank file for output. They changed the rules after that.
The last example is like a good example about modern art. It makes a point and pokes fun at the rules but you can only make so many clever observations about any particular thing. Almost every winning IOCCC entry has a legitimate purpose. And you can explain the purpose. Even though explaining the joke will never be as funny as natively understanding it. In art, explaining the purpose (even if it's something simplistic like capturing a scene) can expose those pieces of 'art' that have nothing to them (like the ones made by people with too much superglue and a desire to be 'shocking').
Also upgrade complete lays bare its jokey demeanor in the first couple seconds of menu, before you even reach any references or old-school graphics. You may not fully 'appreciate' the game but you can certainly understand and enjoy it without being a gamer.
Right. I agree that one can put text next to art explaining something about it, and you have demonstrated it well.
However, starship was upset that the plaques weren't sufficient to make him get the artwork as a novice. I think you'd agree that explaining each work fully is impractical; there's just too much context that's relevant.
Art is undeniably faddish, and there is definitely a political element; I wouldn't want to deny that.
However, that's sort of like going to a natural history museum and expecting to see the whole ursine evolutionary history and ecology explained next to every bear. There will be a little plaque with the basics, but the typical viewer knows a lot of the basics and is a repeat visitor, so they are expected to learn these things over time.
These days I'm perfectly happy to bring up Wikipedia when at a museum.
In the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, they have a tree ring from what might be the oldest tree ever found. Next to that gigantic slice of wood on the wall is...a giant plaque. The plaque describes in detail how measuring the life of a tree from tree rings works, as well as the history behind that particular tree and when it was cut down.
In fact, as I recall, there was such a plaque next to almost every exhibit in the entire museum.
Imagine this. You read a novel and really enjoy it, interpreting some facet of the work as X. Later in an interview, the author suggests (or says outright) that the facet was actually Y ≠ X. That facet=Y would worsen the novel for you.
You go back to the novel and reread all relevant passages. You decide that not only is facet=X an internally consistent interpretation within the canonical text, but that facet=Y would lead to a contradiction. (Hey, authors are fallible and don't necessarily imagine non-contradictory worlds.)
So what is the "ontological" status of the interpretation where facet=X and the interpretation where facet=Y? Throw in that possibly either the author's intention isn't easily described in extant words, or that the author had no specific intention regarding `facet`, or otherwise multiple conflicting interpretations can still claim validity. Maybe the authors, artists, musicians are smartest to let audience members enjoy the work for their own personal reasons, without ruining a perfectly fine interpretation some individual takes.
Dude, honestly I think you are the one who is probably trolling. I can explain what's nice about ioccc codes to non-programmers easily enough to catch their attention - there's something real going on there. Upgrade Complete is an enjoyable game on its own right, even if you did not know the satire. You seriously think (that other people think) that Kongregate games are shitty and require historical references to begin to appreciate? Think again.
Artists grow up seeing art. They learn the techniques of the previous generation. But then they strike out on their own, doing something new. They spend decades exploring, growing, and changing.
I do seriously think that there are a lot of video games that are totally unapproachable unless you've played a lot of other video games. Try it sometime: take somebody who doesn't play games and sit them down with some top games. The amount you have to explain is incredible. To somebody here I can say "tower defense with shooter elements and a complicated skill tree". For a non-gamer, that's a ton to figure out; without coaching they'll just poke at it for a bit and walk away. But that's ok, because the audience isn't the non-gamer.
And then there are the games that are full of cultural references or in jokes. Upgrade Complete may be mildly enjoyable on its own, but the reason it gets such a high rating is the brilliant play with the many tropes and ideas of modern video games.
That's art. And contemporary art is generally like that but more so. Video games have to function as games, but art can be what it wants.
I'll bite...I know very little about art, but I'm willing to be educated. So tell me, by what criteria does one distinguish modern art from garbage?
Taking your Obfuscated C contests as an example, even if the source files look like gibberish to your average citizen (or average programmer), you could at least explain why it's special. And it wouldn't be that hard to see, for anyone, why creating a winning entry takes a lot of technical skill and creativity and that not just anyone could do it.
Whether you like a work is a purely subjective experience. There's no Art Guy In The Sky handing out ribbons. It's up to each of us to decide what we like and don't like.
Having said that, the best way to learn to appreciate visual art is to learn to sketch. You don't have to become Leonardo, but simple observational drawing is a great way to train your eye and brain to see better and as a side benefit you will understand a lot of the language of art better.
Not the only way by any means. Reading art history, looking at paintings from different periods, reading articles on art theory can get you going too. Talk to other people about the stuff they like; especially the stuff that puzzles you. Don't automatically assume that they are "faking it" or "being pretentious", though they may; people are people. But if a lot of people are interested in something, there's often something worthwhile there.
If none of that appeals to you, and you just want a simple, visual experience, look at art, admire the stuff you like and ignore the stuff that leaves you cold. Looking at art is a lot like listening to music. It can be a deep, technical experience, or a simple, enjoyable way to pass time.
>It's up to each of us to decide what we like and don't like.
Is that really true? Because there seems to be an implicit hierarchy of art. It isn't all subjective, otherwise art critics would be out of work.
>Having said that, the best way to learn to appreciate visual art is to learn to sketch.
I'm not knocking visual art, in general. I'm a terrible painter, so I can certainly appreciate the tremendous skill and talent it requires to create a masterpieces. What I'm referring to is art that seems to be art, only because other say it's art. In the article, there's a photograph of a woman sitting in a lawn chair. Why is that art and a random photo of me doing the same thing, not?
There are hierarchies in any kind of communal human activity. Art's not special in this sense. You can choose to participate or not. And it's certainly not a single hierarchy. Take your pick, if you feel so inclined.
My reaction upon seeing something like the lawn chair piece would not be to automatically reject, but instead it would be an increase in curiosity. Why is that woman sitting in the chair? Why is it happening in this venue? Why should I care? An artist is usually trying to evoke a response of some kind. WTF is a perfectly good response to get someone's attention. From most artists point of view, the worst possible reaction is indifference.
If I have any criticism about modern art is that the ideas often really aren't that new anymore; the vein has been mined pretty extensively. Doesn't mean the art isn't any good, or that it has nothing to say, just that the term "modern" has simply become another label for particularly type of movement that doesn't connect with its original meaning.
Languages change too ...
Labels, like "art" are human conventions. They are useful in the sense that they can communicate or convince. If you feel good about not calling a work "art", rejoice. But don't be surprised when other people who dig deeper might occasionally find something of note.
Sculpture professor whose class I modelled for: "Most people are going to completely ignore your work [that you spent weeks on, had your ego destroyed by peer criticism, fixed, put your soul into, etc] -- or look at it for about three seconds before moving on. If you can hold their attention longer -- if you can make them pause for an extra five seconds, and notice, or feel something, then you've succeeded." (He said this to students, not pre-acclaimed people whose work you're supposed to like because it has their name attached.)
Relatedly: If you can enrol in an art class (eg basic figurative drawing) it's a great growth experience. You'll also see what I saw: many levels of skill, an array of typical growth-paths, how artists are trained to conceive of their compositions (or of the human body), how very skilled kids can create something accurate-in-detail but totally uninteresting, and so on.
What's the difference between hearing a bunch of squealing and noise and ugly chords (=jazz) as a kid versus knowing how to play horn and wondering how jazz greats composed the atoms they did? (eg "abrupt, dramatic use of silence" by Thelonious Monk -- "how can you abruptly PAUSE?" you say) -- how a human might develop to the point (other than pure trolling) that they conceive of that composition. Not to mention a lot of technical details like what's easy/hard to do with a brush/chalk/charcoal/yarn/limestone/camera.
Certainly some people play games with an open-minded (=gullible), trusting audience (of potential buyers). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0NIs1fOkQg There's still plenty of great, subtle modern art that a 10-year-old would not appreciate but a 40-year-old could.
Related: the jazz educator David Baker has described the progression of learning jazz to first, joining together big, pre-made pieces; then, joining together small pieces; finally (as a master) joining together atoms.
I think something equivalent could be said for programming (journey from modifying a script that already works to understanding the atoms of the language) and there's some close-enough statement that could be made for painting / visual art. The journey from imitation to atom-by-atom originality.
If I tell someone those things about the Obfuscated C entries, they still won't be able to tell a good one from a bad one. Different judges will rank different entries differently. Even if judges agree, it's possible that other people will think the judges wrong.
Other kinds of art are no different. Heck, most interesting things are no different. Try listing criteria to distinguish a good programming language from a bad one and see how many people you can get to agree with you.
Coincidentally I watched two docs recently that touch on the topic of what "modern art". "Exit through the Gift Shop" and "Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?", both were pretty good.
I think that there's a difference between art today and art a hundred and fifty years ago and I think that it's deeper than you suspect. In the Middle Ages, scholars believed that beauty was representational. They believed that something was beautiful exactly to the degree it represented (religious) truth. The more one depicted virtue in art, the more beautiful that art was, and effective representation was just one aspect of that virtue. The purpose of art was to make this virtue more accessible to the common people.
Fast forward to the beginnings of modern art and what we have is people like Monet and Van Gogh who demonstrate that aesthetics are necessarily tied to photo-realism. This leads to an eventual explosion is aesthetic experimentation, much of who's purpose was not any expression of the 'truth' but rather experimentation for experimentation's sake. As time goes on, the art community develops a tight feedback loop which ultimately leaves behind the idea of clarity in favor of novelty and ultimately forgets about accessibility which used to be one of arts most important attributes.
Art as experimentation isn't a bad thing, but it's an attitude that is radically different from that only a century and a half ago. People of a conservative bent often miss the old attitude and you'll notice that when the Right-Wing governments of the 30's took over, the first thing they did was resurrect it. (Ironically, the Soviet Union also did this.)
"movement Z is a reaction to Y, which in turn is a reaction to X. The artist is grappling with themes A and B, and exploring materials C, D, and E."
I don't want to see reactions. I don't want to see an artist grappling with themes. I don't want to see an artist exploring new materials.
I want to see a master displaying his work that exemplifies concrete themes and ideas. In other words, I would like to see defined, finished works as opposed to ambiguous, ill refined quasi-ideas.
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.
I'm not sure this is true. It seems to me that people who don't have insider knowledge end up with stuff they like -- they aren't lining up to pay $350k for something they don't like or understand. Ironically, they're probably ending up happier than some collectors trying to speculate who end up with the B.S.
On the other hand, collectors who are rich, dedicated, and informed are a huge component of the total money spent on modern art, and are big players (iconic example: the Guggenheims). They can end up having a tremendous influence on the art world.
Bottom line: don't feel sorry for art collectors. And if you collect art, buy what you like! Not what people tell you you ought to like!
Another good example: Peter Norton, of Norton Utilities, has been a very influential collector. He's probably one of the hundred or so most prominent private collectors of contemporary art.
If you're saying that people sometimes buy stuff for reasons other than truly appreciating it, sure, I'm not going to disagree. But that's not just true about art; it's an endemic problem with humans buying things.
Indeed, I worry less about it with art than most other things. Most art I've seen is produced by people who are sincere about it. Their art may be bad, or at least not my thing, but they're not going to spend a month making something without meaning to them.
I think most of the real scams in the art world are at the very high end. E.g., I think Damien Hirst is a marketing genius and a weak artist. Chihuly too. But if you're going to drop $10k-$10m on a piece of art, I'm just going to have to trust that you know what you're doing.
Perhaps you could explain the context? In most magazines articles are meant to be taken at face value, so if Vice is up to something else it would be pretty easy for people not to know that.
The obfuscated C contest is very explicitly by and for C programmers - the layman isn't expected to know about it, much less have a positive opinion of it.
Who's expecting the layman to have an understanding and a positive opinion of everything that turns up in museums and galleries? Not the artists or the curators, surely.
If anything, the only problem I see here is the reverse: Laymen are expecting that all those things should be instantly accessible to them with no work.
The obfuscated C contest is what it is. The contest isn't describing itself as about art and I imagine that almost none of the participants are even thinking about art. That's not even what it's about. What is the point in calling it art?
If we could prove that da Vinci wasn't thinking about art when he painted the Mona Lisa, but instead just about creating something great in a medium he loved, then would we have to remove the painting from the art museum in which it resides?
My point in calling it art is that I think it's art. And that it's a kind of art that readers here are equipped to appreciate because they are steeped in the history and practice of the medium. My hope being that people will then draw the analogy between that and kinds of art they don't have the context for. E.g., cutting-edge contemporary art.
There's a lot of truth in what you said but there is also the other side of that, which is disturbingly real, which is a bunch of yuppies looking at weird shit and playing along with the game because they were told it was classy and artistic. A prime example of this can be seen in the film 'Exit Through the Gift Shop'. It's a documentary about Banksy, the street artist, or at least it started out that way. Basically, this French immigrant to LA, Thierry Guetta was obsessed with street art, banksy, and filming his every waking moment. He went on a journey to find Banksy, did it, and then was kind of mentored by some in the street art scene.
At the end of the film Guetta himself is having this enormous underground art exhibit and famous people like Brad Pitt come! But Guetta is not an artist. It is obvious that he's posing. To say he's emulating his heroes is putting it very nicely. The guy is literally going around an abandoned warehouse throwing strange shit together for the sake of it being strange, calling it art, and then people eat it up going so far as to say he's a genius.
The point is, there was no context. It was strange for strange's sake but it got labelled as art. Everyone is an artist. We all have the ability to be creative and make our own art. That cannot be debated. But what can is how much of it really deserves recognition and what criteria does a work of art have to possess before we can hang it in a gallery and say "that's real art"? For me, real art has a message, it has skill, it is intentional, and the artist puts a genuine piece of themselves into it that you can just really sense. But I digress...
I highly recommend the film, it used to be on Netflix. I think it's a perfect compliment to this article.
This is a good example. That's why only time can tell apart the real art from posing art. A piece of art is like a finding in science, the value of it is defined by its influence in the history going forward.
> For me, real art has a message, it has skill, it is intentional, and the artist puts a genuine piece of themselves into it that you can just really sense.
This is exactly right, in my opinion.
There is obviously a continuum from 'bad' to 'good' art. If this is no obvious display of skill, then it is going to be towards the 'bad' end, no matter how much justification you try to slap on to it. A painting of a bowl of fruit, even when done with considerable skill, can also be bad if there is no message.
>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.
Can we not accept people having different views than us (and quite reasonable ones at that) without bringing up the BS notion of "trolling"?
Trolling is what 15 year olds do at 4chan, not what a normal, adult, blogger does in an extended post with various examples and arguments.
>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 hackers sit down and study those works of art, they're not just posing. A lot of modern art is like that.
No. The obfuscated C contest is more akin to traditionalist art. It's not conceptual and it needs serious chops. It's just that the presentation of it is twisted (so, more like Dali, or Archiboldo, etc...).
Is an article in Vice magazine. Their raison d'être is cultural trolling. I tend to like a lot of their articles, but you have to remember that they are a free magazine with a shit ton of very expensive advertising that feeds on controversy in an attempt to appear relevant to the rich bright young things that they try to court.
This is the same magazine that ran a review of the drug adderall by mailing some to a Canadian farmer and asking him how much work he managed to get done while high. - http://www.vice.com/read/farmer-v12n4 - They are not the most serious of people.
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 hackers sit down and study those works of art, they're not just posing.
A lot of modern art is like that. I look and scratch my head. If I go with a friend who understands the context, they can explain to me the history: movement Z is a reaction to Y, which in turn is a reaction to X. The artist is grappling with themes A and B, and exploring materials C, D, and E.
Many of us can do similar analysis with video games. Look at the Upgrade Complete series, which is a fun set of commentary on games at the same time it's a fun game. Look at the rise of the 8-bit look and sound that harks back to an earlier era. To an outsider, the 8-bit stuff could just seem like shitty graphics, but to many insiders it's awesome and nostalgic and charming. That's art.
Of course, Kongregate and GameStop are both full of shitty games. It'd be easy to write an article like this one, condemning all videos games as crap. But I and many other HN readers are willing to wade through the crap because when you find the gems, they're real works of art. Art requiring context to really understand.