# Why Is Modern Art So Bad?



## bostjan

I didn't know where to post this: Art, PC&E, General...

A friend of mine on facebook, pretty cool guy, usually pretty liberal politically, posted this video:

https://www.prageru.com/courses/history/why-modern-art-so-bad

I was pretty surprised that he agreed with the video.

I will offer a disclaimer that "Prager U" is basically a political organisation whose goal is to bring folks to the radical right.

But context of the host site aside, let's discuss the content of the video.

My summary of it is:

Robert Florczak is pissed off that "modern art" is getting too much attention and too much funding. He praises the composition, style, and attention to detail of the classic, romantic, and baroque masters. He says that the impressionists were pretty great, but created a monster by accepting the ideal of aesthetic relativism, and then subsequent generations glammed on to aesthetic relativism and abandoned realism and objectivism. Then, next thing you know, Jackson Pollack is flinging globs of random coloured paint onto a canvas and fetching hundred of thousands of dollars per piece.

I've seen some of Florczak's work, and, I have to say, that it's pretty good.

There are some notes of what he's saying that make me think "yeah, that's not right!" But, overall, I think he's severely missing the point.

Just my opinion.

Art is not photorealism, it's not the act of creating something that is difficult to create - it's an object appreciated for it's imaginative aesthetic. We can define it in a number of ways, but I think that the imaginative aesthetic part of it is pretty firm.

1. Note that artists shifted, not gradually, but pretty suddenly, from valuing realism to valuing imagination, exactly during the period when photography became an accessible technology. It's no stretch of the imagination to think that people desiring highly detailed realism would direct their attention toward photography, leaving a vacuum in the art community for something a little different.

2. Whilst I don't particularly care for Pollack's work, personally, I don't see the point in trying to talk the people who do out of enjoying those works. I also don't see how arguing with such people would be productive for me, in any case. Furthermore, his anecdote about the smudge paint on his apron smelled funny to me right away. Even though I'm not a fanatic of Pollacks, I'm familiar enough with his techniques to have guessed that what he had shown was not a Pollack piece.

3. I agree that someone vomiting on canvas and calling it a masterpiece is pretty silly. I understand that this happens. I don't pretend to know enough about art to understand why some people get blown away by something like that. But man, I don't see much modern art like that. I see stuff like Dali's surrealism and think "Hey, that's pretty cool! It looks cool and it says something." I've been to a few museums that had two or three pieces that I thought "I don't get it...", pondered for a few moments, then moved on. I'm not going to boycott the Dali museum just because I don't "get" a blank canvas with a piece of woolen yarn glued to it.

4. The whole things seems a little like complaining to me. I get that, and I understand why. If I spent 1000 man hours making a nuanced painting of a turtle, with lots of little fish far off in the background, and made certain every last pigment was mixed just so, and sold my turtle painting for $400, then saw a guy take a canvas, and draw a large monochrome x on it and sell it for $200000, I'd feel pretty marginalized. And...I can see why, in a world where that hypothetical situation is not terribly unlikely, not many artists would bother learning intricate composition methods. But isn't that just life? And wouldn't the best way to prove to everyone that your paintings are worth more than $400 to be to keep painting, and make something nuanced to your style, with also some deeper meaning to grab a wider audience.


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## KnightBrolaire

bostjan said:


> I didn't know where to post this: Art, PC&E, General...
> 
> A friend of mine on facebook, pretty cool guy, usually pretty liberal politically, posted this video:
> 
> https://www.prageru.com/courses/history/why-modern-art-so-bad
> 
> I was pretty surprised that he agreed with the video.
> 
> I will offer a disclaimer that "Prager U" is basically a political organisation whose goal is to bring folks to the radical right.
> 
> But context of the host site aside, let's discuss the content of the video.
> 
> My summary of it is:
> 
> Robert Florczak is pissed off that "modern art" is getting too much attention and too much funding. He praises the composition, style, and attention to detail of the classic, romantic, and baroque masters. He says that the impressionists were pretty great, but created a monster by accepting the ideal of aesthetic relativism, and then subsequent generations glammed on to aesthetic relativism and abandoned realism and objectivism. Then, next thing you know, Jackson Pollack is flinging globs of random coloured paint onto a canvas and fetching hundred of thousands of dollars per piece.
> 
> I've seen some of Florczak's work, and, I have to say, that it's pretty good.
> 
> There are some notes of what he's saying that make me think "yeah, that's not right!" But, overall, I think he's severely missing the point.
> 
> Just my opinion.
> 
> Art is not photorealism, it's not the act of creating something that is difficult to create - it's an object appreciated for it's imaginative aesthetic. We can define it in a number of ways, but I think that the imaginative aesthetic part of it is pretty firm.
> 
> 1. Note that artists shifted, not gradually, but pretty suddenly, from valuing realism to valuing imagination, exactly during the period when photography became an accessible technology. It's no stretch of the imagination to think that people desiring highly detailed realism would direct their attention toward photography, leaving a vacuum in the art community for something a little different.
> 
> 2. Whilst I don't particularly care for Pollack's work, personally, I don't see the point in trying to talk the people who do out of enjoying those works. I also don't see how arguing with such people would be productive for me, in any case. Furthermore, his anecdote about the smudge paint on his apron smelled funny to me right away. Even though I'm not a fanatic of Pollacks, I'm familiar enough with his techniques to have guessed that what he had shown was not a Pollack piece.
> 
> 3. I agree that someone vomiting on canvas and calling it a masterpiece is pretty silly. I understand that this happens. I don't pretend to know enough about art to understand why some people get blown away by something like that. But man, I don't see much modern art like that. I see stuff like Dali's surrealism and think "Hey, that's pretty cool! It looks cool and it says something." I've been to a few museums that had two or three pieces that I thought "I don't get it...", pondered for a few moments, then moved on. I'm not going to boycott the Dali museum just because I don't "get" a blank canvas with a piece of woolen yarn glued to it.
> 
> 4. The whole things seems a little like complaining to me. I get that, and I understand why. If I spent 1000 man hours making a nuanced painting of a turtle, with lots of little fish far off in the background, and made certain every last pigment was mixed just so, and sold my turtle painting for $400, then saw a guy take a canvas, and draw a large monochrome x on it and sell it for $200000, I'd feel pretty marginalized. And...I can see why, in a world where that hypothetical situation is not terribly unlikely, not many artists would bother learning intricate composition methods. But isn't that just life? And wouldn't the best way to prove to everyone that your paintings are worth more than $400 to be to keep painting, and make something nuanced to your style, with also some deeper meaning to grab a wider audience.



Modern art is .... because it's less about the intinsic technicality or actual creativity and more about theatrics/"the process". There's a book talking about how the valuation of modern art is tied specifically to the story the artist comes up about it, where the author essentially creates his own modern art under a pseudonym, and sells art critics on his process/story,they go crazy and love his art, and proceed to run up the price of his "art". The same thing happened with banksy. Modern art (excluding certain sculptors) is all about $$$. This is how hacks like damien hirsch can get millions of dollars for a trisected preserved shark or a skull that he glued diamonds to.


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## Dekay82

Well, let's get the whole "art is subjective" thing out of the way up front. I would argue that modern art is not up to par with past movement because it seems like the artists aren't doing their duebdilligence and jumping right in. 

Look at the foundations of modern art. Dali, Picasso, Matisse and hisbstupid cutouts, those guys were MASTERS of art , and started to break out after they had nowhere else to go. I think in most instances, you have to master the rules and basics before breaking them and going all out. There are exceptions, of course. Even Dada was created by established artists. It was just abreaction to the times. 

We can aplly this to music too. Ornette Coleman was a goddamn beast on his horn, he took years to master it, then eventually went buckwild with his free form. Hell, even Tosin Abasi spent years learning from shred tapes and look at him now. Indont even like AAL, but that guy took his time, learned the rules, and the best way to break them to innovate. 

Also, rich folks with no taste often pay big $$$ for stuff that is trendy. Watch Wall St. plenty of rich folk have good taste, so don't dogpile on me for that last comment.


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## bostjan

Dekay82 said:


> Well, let's get the whole "art is subjective" thing out of the way up front. I would argue that modern art is not up to par with past movement because it seems like the artists aren't doing their duebdilligence and jumping right in.
> 
> Look at the foundations of modern art. Dali, Picasso, Matisse and hisbstupid cutouts, those guys were MASTERS of art , and started to break out after they had nowhere else to go. I think in most instances, you have to master the rules and basics before breaking them and going all out. There are exceptions, of course. Even Dada was created by established artists. It was just abreaction to the times.
> 
> We can aplly this to music too. Ornette Coleman was a goddamn beast on his horn, he took years to master it, then eventually went buckwild with his free form. Hell, even Tosin Abasi spent years learning from shred tapes and look at him now. Indont even like AAL, but that guy took his time, learned the rules, and the best way to break them to innovate.
> 
> Also, rich folks with no taste often pay big $$$ for stuff that is trendy. Watch Wall St. plenty of rich folk have good taste, so don't dogpile on me for that last comment.



Okay. "Modern Art" is a really wide subject, encompassing surrealism, cubism, fauvism, minimalism, expressionism, et-cerea-ism, et-cetera-ism, et-cetera-ism...

You want to talk about a more recent surrealist who had excellent composition technique, what about HR Giger? Not everyone loved his works, but I don't think too many argue that his technique was under-developed.

I've seen stuff in museums that was interesting, and still showed a high degree of skill. Surprisingly, for me, at least, pretty much every piece of modern art that I would describe as such was by lesser-known artists.


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## vilk

I sometimes listen to music that is just guitar and bass amplifier feedback, and I enjoy it more than Top 40 music, or classical.

No one _mistakenly created_ aesthetic relativism; aesthetics are inherently relative. It's only just that humans have a long history of forcing conformity of value upon each other. 

However, in modern times humankind has advanced in many ways. We have indoor plumbing, education, internet, and important for this discussion-- understanding of sociology and history, which allows us to think and logically conclude that there is no true metric by which to measure "art".


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## bostjan

vilk said:


> I sometimes listen to music that is just guitar and bass amplifier feedback, and I enjoy it more than Top 40 music, or classical.
> 
> No one _mistakenly created_ aesthetic relativism; aesthetics are inherently relative. It's only just that humans have a long history of forcing conformity of value upon each other.
> 
> However, in modern times humankind has advanced in many ways. We have indoor plumbing, education, internet, and important for this discussion-- understanding of sociology and history, which allows us to think and logically conclude that there is no true metric by which to measure "art".



I agree.

There is, however, a value assessed to a piece of art when it is sold, and a certain virality to art when it is reproduced or influences other artists.

When an artist splatters paint on a canvas, the result is random and unscripted. Some feel that detracts from the value of the art, but those who pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for those pieces have a much more final say in the art's value.

Honestly, If I wanted a monocrome painting of a blue canvas to hang on my wall, I would mix up some blue paint and paint my own canvas blue.

If I want some simple geometric designs, a la Frank Stella, then I think I could use masking tape and a ruler and make my own.

On the other hand, if I wanted to reproduce _Starry Night_ I could print it off of the internet or go buy a poster from the local bookstore. Otherwise, I would not be able to reproduce the techniques without years and years of training and practice.

Same with music...if I wanted to just hear feedback and a lo-fi drumbeat, I could go into my basement, throw an old shoe in the dryer, and plug in my hollowbody and leave the volume set so as to produce low level feedback. And I would be fibbing if I were to tell you that I hadn't played around with such ideas before.

I'm not saying it's not art or doesn't have value (I personally feel contrary to that), just trying to probe into the discussion.


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## DredFul

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## TedEH

I feel like I have a lot of this kind of discussion in my head any time I see a Glen Fricker video where he complains about drum samples or something, or when someone says that electronic music isn't made by "real musicians" or something like that. I see art basically as an expression. People who create want to justify and validate their expressions, and to avoid being invalidated. That's all I think it boils down to. Everything else is talking about valuation systems and market forces and personal taste and all kinds of things that, while tangentially related, have zero bearing in my mind as to what counts as "art" or what counts as a "valid" expression.

I'll defend anyone's right to dislike something, be it a painting or song or whatever else, but at the same time argue that it doesn't stop the thing they don't like from being art in the first place.


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## DredFul

TedEH said:


> I feel like I have a lot of this kind of discussion in my head any time I see a Glen Fricker video where he complains about drum samples or something, or when someone says that electronic music isn't made by "real musicians" or something like that. I see art basically as an expression. People who create want to justify and validate their expressions, and to avoid being invalidated. That's all I think it boils down to. Everything else is talking about valuation systems and market forces and personal taste and all kinds of things that, while tangentially related, have zero bearing in my mind as to what counts as "art" or what counts as a "valid" expression.
> 
> I'll defend anyone's right to dislike something, be it a painting or song or whatever else, but at the same time argue that it doesn't stop the thing they don't like from being art in the first place.



Well said.

I love the electronic musician argument  "they just press buttons" what do we guitarists do? We press notes hoping that something cool comes out, where's the difference? I actually think electronic music can be one of the most creative fields because you are not bound to one sound, but rather can make anything your instrument.

That as well as the "it's just shredding it doesn't have any feel" I think is just an attempt to disregard and invalidate something that doesn't appeal to you. 

I'm getting to Nietzsche-territory here


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## KnightBrolaire

If we're just going to talk about art in general, then for me, art is whatever speaks to me. Generally for me it's all about the flow of the work and the composition. That's a large part of why I find most modern art boring/distasteful, is the lack of composition. Even Surrealists like Dali, Giger or Beksinski all had excellent compostional skills and know how to draw your eye towards important part of the painting in a natural way. Compare that to paintings by Basquiat and they are far more disjointed compositionally/lacks that natural flow. Personally I find sculptures from Rodin or Giambologna or other great sculptors extremely moving, same with photographers like Peter Hegre.


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## TedEH

I honestly get pretty annoyed with Glen Fricker constant ranting about how drum samples are the worst thing ever- and then he immediately goes on to praise amp and cab sims, plugins that process the bajeezus out of your drums so that they sound like samples anyway, etc.


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## bostjan

Agreed.

Also, I guess there is a certain thing about the video that rubs me wrong, which is the whole premise of the the thing is "this is category of things is bull...., you should dislike it indiscriminately." I think Florczak could have made a better approach of "this is what I like, and here's why you might like it too."



KnightBrolaire said:


> Even Surrealists like Dali, Giger or Beksinski all had excellent compostional skills and know how to draw your eye towards important part of the painting in a natural way. Compare that to paintings by Basquiat and they are far more disjointed compositionally/lacks that natural flow.



I thought those examples (who were modern artists, by the way) had some of the best composition skills. I guess the video is partially so bad because it isn't even really making the distinction between various types of modern art, so some of the arguments come off sounding ignorant. If he wanted to go after minimalism or dadaism, then maybe it would have been a more coherent video.


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## inaudio

I apologise in advance if any of the points I make seem juvenile. I don't claim to be well versed in philosophy but I like to dabble into it every now and then. 

First off, I think this conversation is a difficult one to have but interesting regardless. I think that one a cause of confusion in this "debate" is that a lot of the words used aren't explicitly defined, but rather serve as containers for different meanings to different people. When it comes to relativism I think that you have to be careful not to drift off too far into postmodernist territory. I know that postmodernism is a bit of a boogeyman buzzword these days but I don't think that I'm misusing the term for dramatic effect. Just for the sake of clarity I'll dig up the Wikipedia definition of postmodernism. 



> ...postmodernism is typically defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony or distrust toward grand narratives, ideologies and various tenets of Enlightenment rationality, including notions of human nature, social progress, objective reality and morality, absolute truth, and reason.[4] Instead, it asserts that claims to knowledge and truth are products of unique social, historical or political discourses and interpretations, and are therefore contextual and constructed to varying degrees.



I think that a simpler way of defining postmodernism would be through the catch phrase "there is no universal truth." When I was younger I bought into that statement wholeheartedly until I realised that the statement itself is a paradox - the statement implicitly states that it actually is the new universal truth, while holding that there is no universal truth. In the same Wikipedia article there's a valid criticism towards postmodernism made by Chomsky.



> Noam Chomsky has argued that postmodernism is meaningless because it adds nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge. He asks why postmodernist intellectuals do not respond like people in other fields when asked, "what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc.?...If [these requests] can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: 'to the flames'."[44]



I think that the whole "art is subjective" statement is valid, but only when you consider art from the perspective of individual experience. I don't think that there is a single universal metric that could be used to define "good" art, but that does not mean that we can't investigate art on various levels of analysis to see if we can find something of value. 

I think that an interesting thing to consider is the evolution of art. A lot of the music that we are able to listen to today from the classical composers exists only because it was conserved; in some sense art actually goes through a quasi-evolutionary process of elimination. An interesting thing to ponder is what art of our time will actually be preserved by the future generations when we're no longer around. Whether or not that is a valid measure of how "good" art is, is up for debate, but at least it offers a concrete aspect of music that we can observe and discuss. I think that some of the points made in the video criticises (some) modern art for abandoning the old traditions. I think that the criticism is valid, bearing in mind that the traditions themselves may have a meaningful reason behind their existence. 

The reason I felt compelled to respond to this thread was because relativism and postmodern philosophy actually ended up being a major cause of depression for me. I'd like to end this with a little classical quote from George E.P. Box that helped lift me up and out of my existential funk. 



> All models are wrong; some models are useful.



Like I said, I'm not well-versed in philosophy and if anyone wants to point me towards new direction I'd be more than appreciative of it. This is definitely an interesting topic and an interesting thread!


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## bostjan

inaudio, that was very well said.

I know nothing about art. I really don't think my life would be much enriched by knowing anything about art, though. I like observing art, generally.

I guess we can bring high-level philosophy into this, but I'm vaguely nihilistic about philosophy. The philosophy of art is probably another topic wasted on my ears. Post-modernist philosophy has been a major frustration for me as an educator, since I'd often have a student disrupting class by trying to strike up an argument about whether our measurement of time is really measuring time or just flat-out failing to measure anything, because he read a sentence or two about Einstein's theory and interpreted general relativity to mean that we don't know anything about anything and somehow that means that he needs to argue with me about that during class time, instead of learning how to solve a quadratic by factoring, or whatever was on the syllabus.

So, I guess my experience with popular post-modernism is that it equates to simple contrarianism.

Aesthetic relativism, though, isn't a post-modernist model, it's a plain old modernist model. The idea in fine art was that all of the mechanical techniques are just tools to create something subjectively valued, anyway. Your modern movement in fine arts really spans from the late 19th century to the mid/mid-to-late 20th century.

I really think, as I said in the OP, that the accessibility of photography during this period had a profound effect on the fine arts. If John Q. Public wanted a portrait in 1867, he would have to hire a portrait painter, unless he was fairly wealthy or had academic connections. John Q. Public Jr., in 1907, would have hired a photographer for the same purpose. This leads me to believe that there would have been less grunt work for budding artists during the modern period. Sure, an artist could always paint all day long, but there's suddenly less financial incentive. Art goes from being a job that can put food on the table to a pass-time for the wealthy and those passionate enough to live a monastic lifestyle. By 1970, as the movement had been past it's usefulness, artists, having taken artful expression to the nth degree, had slowly pushed the envelope to the point where this was normal:


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## Given To Fly

DredFul said:


> Well said.
> 
> I love the electronic musician argument  "they just press buttons" what do we guitarists do? We press notes hoping that something cool comes out, where's the difference? I actually think electronic music can be one of the most creative fields because you are not bound to one sound, but rather can make anything your instrument.
> 
> That as well as the "it's just shredding it doesn't have any feel" I think is just an attempt to disregard and invalidate something that doesn't appeal to you.
> 
> I'm getting to Nietzsche-territory here



I want to hone in on this: _"they just press buttons" what do we guitarists do? We press notes hoping that something cool comes out, where's the difference?_ "Frets are not buttons." Here is why: if frets were the same as buttons, using the guitar as a reliable MIDI input device would work just as well as using a keyboard. The guitar is not a reliable MIDI input device but every year there are lectures/demonstrations on the topic that always end with the same sentiment: "That would be really cool if it worked." You asked, "Where's the difference?" The difference is in the amount of control an electric guitarist has over a fretted note after it has been plucked. A "true" electronic instrument requires the musician to have almost no control after the initial attack. That is the difference. I think the confusion lies in the fact the electric guitarist can manipulate the electric guitar so thoroughly in both the acoustic and electronic realms that the idea "frets ARE buttons" becomes deceptively logical. 

Otherwise, I agree with most of what you said.


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## bostjan

Ha ha, well, I think what he was saying was that they are all ways of translating the noises in one's own head into the noises in someone else's head. 

In that sense, a song is like a story, the instrumentation is like the language of that story, and the players are like the voices telling the story. The main idea there is the story itself, which is conveyed either by pressing buttons or bowing a violin or strumming a guitar or humming into a kazoo. There are so many other layers in that, though. I mean, would you rather hear Morgan Freeman read you a story in English, or listen to Bobcat Goldthwait read you the story in Arabic?

Parallel to that is fine art, except the story to tell has to be contained in a piece, usually in 2-D form on a canvas or 3-D form sculpted into bronze or marble, so, for me, it's less emphasis on the story itself and more emphasis on the instrumentation.

I think of something like the ultra-minimalist painting I posted above roughly analogous to the guitar feedback with shoe-in-dryer noise rock piece I mentioned earlier.

Then a Jackson Pollock piece is analogous to a Wing song with full 8-bit MIDI instrumentation, complete with guitar solo.

And observing a Helmut Ditsch piece is like listening to Michael Angelo Batio performing speed lick exercises.


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## TedEH

Given To Fly said:


> A "true" electronic instrument



My original point of bringing up electronic music was pretty much exactly to illustrate this kind of tendency to try to invalidate things for which we don't hold much personal value. We (as guitarists) value the expressiveness that comes with instruments operated via fine motor skills and muscle memory more than relatively static expression resulting from a MIDI note, but that doesn't make a MIDI controller a less valid way to produce music.


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## bostjan

Validity depends on context and congruent expectations.

If you want to perform some sort of brutal death metal and expect to gain a cult following locally, your most valid instrumentation will be guitars, bass, drums, and deathmetal vocals. If you go instead with a drum machine, MIDI guitars, a theramin, and falsetto off-key vocals, you might not achieve validation. On the other hand, if you only expect to make some really weird music, and be unique, then you are probably on the right track...


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## TedEH

Maybe 'valid' is the wrong word. I'm talking about generalizations and dismissals, stuff like saying "a singer is not a musician, because REAL musicians play instruments" or "rap isn't real music, it's just people saying things over some noise", or "guitarists are better musicians than bassists" or "country music is objectively garbage".

In the context of personal opinion, or with a particular objective in mind, sure, you can decide what's 'valid' or appropriate. When I say valid, I just mean it in the sense of 'this is a valid example of'.

I want to try to connect this to the whole "no true Scotsman" thing, cause in my mind the principle is very similar, but that's maybe not a great way to describe it.

So saying something like "a guitar is more of an instrument than a MIDI controller is".... I think is just a projection of personal values rather than anything resembling an objective observation.


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## vilk

Consider this: To an old man, it's potentially more difficult, requiring more practice, time, and effort, to operate a computer, set up MIDI connections, install and run interface software, programming notes, etc., than it is to play a guitar. We say "pressing a button" like it's nothing because we grew up using computers (or at least I did, and I was born in 1990). 

I'll tell you what right now: I myself could personally record a demo on a 4 track way, way more easily than I could ever program EDM.


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## TedEH

^ It's strange to me that people so often associate the level of difficulty in producing or doing something to the quality of the results.


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## vilk

well, as I was kinda hinting at, "level of difficulty" itself is often relative.

Also, some things might be easy to do in a superficial way, but very difficult to execute artistically. For example, flinging paint imprecisely at a canvas, or letting your guitar amp feed back. I can make my little speaker do some feedback. But it doesn't sound like when Wata from Boris does it. That chick has some magic power over electromagnetism.


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## bostjan

TedEH said:


> ^ It's strange to me that people so often associate the level of difficulty in producing or doing something to the quality of the results.



...and that's full circle back to the gist of Florczak's argument in the video.

EDM is valid as music, as art, etc.

In the guitar-player community, there is a huge aspect of musicianship and technique in which we take interest. But to look at guitar playing as music, or art in general, we have to take a big step back, because you can not make music equivalent to guitar playing. Maybe Freddie Mercury was not very notable as a guitar player, but he was certainly notable as a musician.

And I think that is another way in which Florczak stumbled in his video. He's making an equivalence between being a painter and being an artist. Can you make art without painting? Can you be a notable artist without being a notable painter? What if a piece is notable art, and is a painting - does that mean it must be notable for it's mastery of conventional painting techniques? This is all rhetorical.

The issue is further complicated by the lack of any real clear set of metrics by which to grade painting technique.

But yeah, say I vomit on a canvas and call it art. No one would give a ...., really. If I knew the right people who got me into an art gallery, though, then maybe. If Florczak is not impressed by modern art, well, okay. Most people aren't, I think. But if he wants to rant on youtube about how modern art is just bull...., so no one should go to museums that feature modern art, then I think he's lost his mind, because the video doesn't make any difference in the grand scheme of things.


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## IGC

From a picasso standpoint, I can get abstract art. But some abstract art, newer/older is just a little over my head.


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## Given To Fly

TedEH said:


> My original point of bringing up electronic music was pretty much exactly to illustrate this kind of tendency to try to invalidate things for which we don't hold much personal value. We (as guitarists) value the expressiveness that comes with instruments operated via fine motor skills and muscle memory more than relatively static expression resulting from a MIDI note, but that doesn't make a MIDI controller a less valid way to produce music.



I probably should have phrased that differently. To be honest, the instrument I had in mind when I wrote "true" electronic instrument was Milton Babbitt's synthesizer at Princeton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_Mark_II_Sound_Synthesizer
I like Babbitt and Stockhausen, but I am not sure if that is what people mean when they say electronic music. I value High-Modernism in classical music more than you probably want or care to know. Also, "Frets are not Buttons" invalidates the guitar as a MIDI controller more than anything else. I wrote a long paragraph about the harpsichord explaining how the mechanism that plucks the strings also creates a unique disconnect between the player and the resulting sound of.................................. It is best if I stop.


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## bostjan

I think the general idea of poking at electronic music in this thread was focused on music that uses programming and prerecorded samples. That's what I hear gripped about most by guitarists, at least.


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## TedEH

bostjan said:


> I think the general idea of poking at electronic music in this thread was focused on music that uses programming and prerecorded samples. That's what I hear gripped about most by guitarists, at least.



That's what I was thinking, but seeing as I know little about electronic music as a whole, I'll admit I might be misusing the word.


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## iamaom

I find one of the huge problems with the video in the OP is that it seems to only look at a narrow scope of academics. Note I'm going to use mainly musical examples because I'm not familiar with art and this is a music forum. 


 The laughable graph showing a &quot;decline&quot; in standards. There's plenty of fine art, from video game artwork to devianart, there are plenty who are still painting in the traditional sense. We live in an age where pretty much anyone who puts enough time into it can paint like Monet or Leonardo, so naturally people will want to explore their own style and stick out from the norm. Claiming that art has somehow &quot;declined&quot; in an objective manner is like saying music has &quot;declined&quot; because Lady Gaga is a worse composer than Mozart. There's plenty of traditional music, there's plenty of jazz, there's plenty of music of all kinds available for free on the internet. Just because popular taste has changed does not mean any form of art has suddenly disappeared forever or no one is working on it.
 Good or bad is mainly subjective. People have paid tens of thousands of dollars for crude paintings by elephants, because they're impressive for an animal. We look back at finger paintings by cavemen in admiration, even if the local elementary school art show exhibits more advance techniques. We marvel at blind or deaf musicians, even if the piece is fairly basic or derivative.
Improvement is really subjective. Did Miles Davis' &quot;So What&quot; improve on harmonic progression or the way we think about modes? Or was it nothing more than a lazy sheet of bare bones music that he expected his band to fill out? What is &quot;improvement&quot;, as if there's some sort of end goal of art that is being raced towards. The Classical era of europe was seen as improvement from the garish and overly tacky displays of wealth of the Baroque, but the music and art in many ways is simpler. Did we &quot;regress&quot; somehow? Why is further reductionism found in much postmodern art somehow seen as a regression then? Terms like &quot;progress&quot; or &quot;improvement&quot; are never defined in the video and are words in a vaccuum.
Academic artists are going to view art in a much different way than everyone else. Referring to the last point, there might be techniques that are difficult that do not produce seemingly impressive results to the casual viewer, that someone experience in the field might be very impressed by (and vice versa). For example the Mona Lisa. To me it's not that great. It's just a picture of a woman, yet I've been told my entire life that this is the GREATEST work of art ever. Everyone just accepts it, it's famous because it's famous. The same of Shakespeare or of Bach. Anyone not familiar with these mediums probably truly don't understand why they are famous and heralded, their standard is simply imitated by laymen. Someone not familiar with jazz (even a well trained classical musician) might look at Giant Steps and say it's nothing but a bunch of noise, but someone familiar with it will see it for the amazing leap in harmonic progression that it is. And on the other foot, some techniques or forms are impressive to the uninitiated even if the experience don't really view them as impressive. Look at tapping on guitar. I can impress just about anyone who doesn't play into thinking I'm some sort of guitar god with a few fret taps, while anyone here would yawn. And playing that doesn't appear or &quot;sound&quot; to be impressive, like one of Victor Wooten's slower songs, will blow any musician away. So any &quot;modern art&quot; is hard to judge if you're not into art, and not into modern art, as the &quot;progressiveness&quot; of it may not be immediately apparent. Like in point 2, someone whose shown a drawing that a caveman painted, but not knowing it's a caveman, probably wouldn't even give it a second glance. The prior knowledge of how the work came to be is just as important as the work itself. I don't know if that 320 ton rock in the PragerU video is truly &quot;art&quot; or not unless I understand the history and mindset of the people who view it as such.
(edit: this forum's formatting sucks)


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## noise in my mind

because of post modernism. everyone is ''right'' nobody is ''wrong''


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## bostjan

iamaom said:


> I find one of the huge problems with the video in the OP is that it seems to only look at a narrow scope of academics. Note I'm going to use mainly musical examples because I'm not familiar with art and this is a music forum.
> 
> 
> The laughable graph showing a "decline" in standards. There's plenty of fine art, from video game artwork to devianart, there are plenty who are still painting in the traditional sense. We live in an age where pretty much anyone who puts enough time into it can paint like Monet or Leonardo, so naturally people will want to explore their own style and stick out from the norm. Claiming that art has somehow "declined" in an objective manner is like saying music has "declined" because Lady Gaga is a worse composer than Mozart. There's plenty of traditional music, there's plenty of jazz, there's plenty of music of all kinds available for free on the internet. Just because popular taste has changed does not mean any form of art has suddenly disappeared forever or no one is working on it.
> Good or bad is mainly subjective. People have paid tens of thousands of dollars for crude paintings by elephants, because they're impressive for an animal. We look back at finger paintings by cavemen in admiration, even if the local elementary school art show exhibits more advance techniques. We marvel at blind or deaf musicians, even if the piece is fairly basic or derivative.
> Improvement is really subjective. Did Miles Davis' "So What" improve on harmonic progression or the way we think about modes? Or was it nothing more than a lazy sheet of bare bones music that he expected his band to fill out? What is "improvement", as if there's some sort of end goal of art that is being raced towards. The Classical era of europe was seen as improvement from the garish and overly tacky displays of wealth of the Baroque, but the music and art in many ways is simpler. Did we "regress" somehow? Why is further reductionism found in much postmodern art somehow seen as a regression then? Terms like "progress" or "improvement" are never defined in the video and are words in a vaccuum.
> Academic artists are going to view art in a much different way than everyone else. Referring to the last point, there might be techniques that are difficult that do not produce seemingly impressive results to the casual viewer, that someone experience in the field might be very impressed by (and vice versa). For example the Mona Lisa. To me it's not that great. It's just a picture of a woman, yet I've been told my entire life that this is the GREATEST work of art ever. Everyone just accepts it, it's famous because it's famous. The same of Shakespeare or of Bach. Anyone not familiar with these mediums probably truly don't understand why they are famous and heralded, their standard is simply imitated by laymen. Someone not familiar with jazz (even a well trained classical musician) might look at Giant Steps and say it's nothing but a bunch of noise, but someone familiar with it will see it for the amazing leap in harmonic progression that it is. And on the other foot, some techniques or forms are impressive to the uninitiated even if the experience don't really view them as impressive. Look at tapping on guitar. I can impress just about anyone who doesn't play into thinking I'm some sort of guitar god with a few fret taps, while anyone here would yawn. And playing that doesn't appear or "sound" to be impressive, like one of Victor Wooten's slower songs, will blow any musician away. So any "modern art"; is hard to judge if you're not into art, and not into modern art, as the &quot;progressiveness&quot; of it may not be immediately apparent. Like in point 2, someone whose shown a drawing that a caveman painted, but not knowing it's a caveman, probably wouldn't even give it a second glance. The prior knowledge of how the work came to be is just as important as the work itself. I don't know if that 320 ton rock in the PragerU video is truly "art" or not unless I understand the history and mindset of the people who view it as such.



That graph was total BS.

I think the comparison between Baroque and Classical is on point.

I appreciate Shakespeare quite a bit, personally, but I get the point there. There are tons of artists who were forgotten. It is reasonable imaginable that some of those forgotten artists could have been onto things that became popular much later, or these artists could have possessed technical abilities on par with famous masters. It's all a combination of doing something worthy of praise, and then being in the right place to get the right people to actually praise it.


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## Hollowway

Eh, conservatives are mainly people that adapt slower than others. Might as well say, "Make Art Great Again." I think Damien Hirsts horse and shark sections are amazing, and seeing them in person is quite an experience. I also think John Cage's 4'33 is genius. But in both of those cases, I don't think all music pieces where nothing is recorded are great, and all sharks sectioned are great. They were original, unique, and made a statement. That got people to feel a certain way, and got them to have a certain emotion. For me, that's good enough to call it art.


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## bostjan

Hollowway said:


> Eh, conservatives are mainly people that adapt slower than others. Might as well say, "Make Art Great Again." I think Damien Hirsts horse and shark sections are amazing, and seeing them in person is quite an experience. I also think John Cage's 4'33 is genius. But in both of those cases, I don't think all music pieces where nothing is recorded are great, and all sharks sectioned are great. They were original, unique, and made a statement. That got people to feel a certain way, and got them to have a certain emotion. For me, that's good enough to call it art.



I agree 100%.

Did I mention that the video I posted was produced by PragerU? Prager makes Trump look like a progressive.

The big thing of it all is that there are still painters out there painting very detailed, traditional paintings. I have a lot of respect for those paintings, but I have a lot of respect for many different types of modern art as well.

But what about the concept of objectifying art, i.e., do we try to appraise art's value objectively and universally, based on some set of concrete metrics?

When you observe art, how do you, personally, determine whether it is good or bad?


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## Demiurge

I think that modern art reflects the direction in which society is going- towards ultra-personalization. People pretend that their private lives are of public import on social media, entertainment & politics are heavily niche'd and curated, and even in some corners of religion it's like the creator of the universe is either your buddy or helicopter-parent that is invested in one's everyday life. Art that trades in non sequitur, that transfers the burden of narrative from the artist to the viewer, is totally consistent with all of that, for better or for worse.

There are levels to it, obviously. I like having something tell me a story, but I like room for interpretation or at least not being completely led by the hand by something. I also know that, if my trip to the MoMA last year taught me anything, that sometimes a slab of pink plastic leaning against the wall maybe only deserves to be comprehended exactly as such and nothing more.


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## odibrom

I've been trying to not dive into this thread, but here goes my 2 cents.

I belieave that ART is/exists as long as someone besides the author recognizes it as so. Therefore, ART is not an object, but a feeling, a feeling of transcendence.

This feeling has, by definition, lots of other small details, like "story telling" purposes or habilities, and is mostly surprising, either in a good or bad manner, that is up to the spectator.

Having this said, ART is not to be taken seriously, but with passion and emotion and, many times also, with laughter. As to my understanding, most of the modern ART productions are to be laugh at or about, their purpose is to bring joy...


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## JohnIce

That video made me giggle, then feel a little sick and ultimately angry. That dude and his elitism really hit the spot for everything I despise not just in art but in people and politics in general. I didn't agree with a single sentence.



Demiurge said:


> I think that modern art reflects the direction in which society is going- towards ultra-personalization. People pretend that their private lives are of public import on social media, entertainment & politics are heavily niche'd and curated, and even in some corners of religion it's like the creator of the universe is either your buddy or helicopter-parent that is invested in one's everyday life. Art that trades in non sequitur, that transfers the burden of narrative from the artist to the viewer, is totally consistent with all of that, for better or for worse.
> 
> There are levels to it, obviously. I like having something tell me a story, but I like room for interpretation or at least not being completely led by the hand by something. I also know that, if my trip to the MoMA last year taught me anything, that sometimes a slab of pink plastic leaning against the wall maybe only deserves to be comprehended exactly as such and nothing more.



That seems like a good observation. Art to me is the social exchange between the artist and the consumer, meaning the art is the sum of the intent and the reception together. Technique is then only needed to whatever extent it takes to get the viewer to fill in the blanks with their own story. That's why I think the old "This is bad because I could have painted that myself" argument is moot because I don't believe you CAN create art by yourself, it's like trying to tickle yourself. I've tried hanging my own work on my walls and no-matter how proud or impressed or happy I am with a painting I made, its artistic value for me is zero as soon as I'm done with it. I get nothing out of looking at my own art, or listening to my own music, because there's nothing left for me to discover and experience in something that came 100% from myself already. So regardless of my own level of creativity or technical skill, I have to turn to other artists to satisfy my need for art. By then the difficulty of producing said art is completely irrelevant because even a slab of pink plastic leaning against the wall gives me a level of surprise and mystique and curiosity that I could never get by being the one who put it there myself.


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## Hollowway

Another thing I'd say on the topic is that, despite their protestations to the fact, the political right is just as much about big government and controlling citizens as the political left. If someone wants to create art, let the person. It's not anyone's job to judge it. If people like it, then the "market" has spoken. If it doesn't hurt anyone, who cares. Anyway, just my opinion. People who get all riled up about what is considered art should consider themselves lucky enough that they are able to ignore the genocide, murder, and rape going on in the rest of the world. /rant


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## Adam Of Angels

vilk said:


> I sometimes listen to music that is just guitar and bass amplifier feedback, and I enjoy it more than Top 40 music, or classical.
> 
> No one _mistakenly created_ aesthetic relativism; aesthetics are inherently relative. It's only just that humans have a long history of forcing conformity of value upon each other.
> 
> However, in modern times humankind has advanced in many ways. We have indoor plumbing, education, internet, and important for this discussion-- understanding of sociology and history, which allows us to think and logically conclude that there is no true metric by which to measure "art".




I can't help but insist that this is just your opinion - it's also more or less the foundation of Post-Modernist philosophy. It's not at all clear that our experience lacks objective meaning (which is effectively what you're suggesting). It may SEEM that way, but life can seem meaningful as well. There's a compelling theory or two that places universal/emergent archetypes at the heart of all Experience, and therefore all artistic impulses. Whether or not the Artist effectively communicates these ideas is a different matter, but because relativism allows for absolute absurdity, I don't really believe in it.

Edit: that doesn't mean that an artist can't find catharsis in creating sheer chaos, and that doesn't mean others won't enjoy it. However, I'm not sure that superimposing a subjective meaning onto sheer chaos makes something "art," and at a certain point this is clearly what's happening.


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## JohnIce

Hollowway said:


> Another thing I'd say on the topic is that, despite their protestations to the fact, the political right is just as much about big government and controlling citizens as the political left. If someone wants to create art, let the person. It's not anyone's job to judge it. If people like it, then the "market" has spoken. If it doesn't hurt anyone, who cares. Anyway, just my opinion. People who get all riled up about what is considered art should consider themselves lucky enough that they are able to ignore the genocide, murder, and rape going on in the rest of the world. /rant



Indeed. The arguments made in the video reek of classism and censorship, and an obsession to judge. It seems like the guy's main issue with modern art is that it doesn't allow him and his work to be adored as objectively better than the art he doesn't like, and that his students that he's drilled with his nonsense aren't seen as objectively better than for example self-taught street artists. He can't win, that's the problem. He also makes a point that political or anti-christian art is ugly compared to hills with deer on them or whatever. He clearly has a distaste for the art and expression of the under privileged and the non-academic, it's not a stretch to believe he leans far right politically. To top this off he turns the whole thing into a sales pitch, saying people should buy art that he makes/likes/teaches so that these other art forms won't be made  Not only is he asking art consumers to deliberately shut out the lower class from from the market, but he's so out of touch that he thinks this art is made through commercial intent and market research and wouldn't be made if it couldn't be sold for millions of dollars at an art gallery. Yeah sure bro, anti-war graffitti is all about just trying to make millions you know, you just do what sells, man, it sure can't be an honest expression that the artist is passionate about. It must be about money.


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## WintermintP

Ah... Prager... I've already been fed up with their antics for a very long time (call me a left-wing all you want, I still disagree with their every word).

I can relate to this topic bigtime. See, I've actually done one of these extremely obscene pieces of art and it got a lot of acclaim for something I, really have to admit, did so quickly. My art teacher loved it to the point he wanted to buy the version he printed on a big piece of paper. I may have sold it for only $10, which sounds stupid, but at the time, I had no clue that I could sell a piece of art like that, and honestly, even the fact that I sold it for $10 and not a huge sum of money actually made me proud because I'm generally not really the greedy kind, for starters, and also because the price I set wasn't something he expected, and I happen to be this weirdo that likes to do certain things that most wouldn't do, or do certain things the way that most wouldn't do, so that was all the more reason to be happy about it.

Looking back, I started to recall what that painting meant. It was based off of a lesson from the novel _The Five People You Meet in Heaven_. One of the five lessons that the main character learns in the novel was from a man known as Joseph Corvelzchik. Corvelzchik tells the protagonist that strangers are merely people he has yet to come to know, and I was trying to create a piece of art based on that (with my limited skills at the time). Now I started to realise that the lesson couldn't be any closer to the truth. An old store clerk I have met for a decade, several of my old classmates knowing several other classmates of mine from different schools, even strangers knowing the same contacts that I know of... there have been so many times when I found out that so many contacts that I thought were completely unrelated actually all knew each other.

While we're on the subject of this weirdo doing weirdo things, the weirdo in me actually goes into my musical compositions as well. Avant-garde is the very term my musical project is based upon. I would do all I can to constantly find something new and interesting because I've been hearing the same exact same thing everywhere all the time and it started to annoy the hell out of me. The kind of music that I wanted to hear just didn't exist, and that was the reason why I wanted to write my own songs in the first place. It started with me taking typical metal riffs and then adding a bunch of guitar melodies and harmonies all the way to combining crazy elements such as trap and EDM elements and downtuning all the way to Drop G and coming up with even crazier compositions where I have a ZZ Top style riff in a melodic death metal track in Drop G and then I have a deathcore morse code chug at the end of it...

I do see the guy's points, however. I look at many anime/manga style illustrations (and try to learn how to draw stuff like that) and the ones that I actually like are the ones that are very neat and not-edgy like the stereotypical anime characters are such as Bleach or Naruto or most other Shounen anime/manga. So I would expect a minimum threshold of realism (but that mostly has to do with the geometry). After all, even if you can draw a band of 20+ people playing together and that might look cool, if the instruments look all flabby and everything looks like something that can typically be found in memes, then it can become a problem.

At the same time, avant-garde artwork and music exist for a reason. It may not look great, but that's not the point. The whole point of it is to understand the concept of breaking boundaries, questioning everything we were taught and told, and railing against what is considered to be the norm; in other words, becoming the outlier. This is what nu metal is all about, no less. Nu metal is considered by many to be a "thankfully dead" genre because they think it's merely a mix between hip hop and metal. That's not even what nu metal is about. This is also why one of my favourite musical piece is none other than John Cage's _Water Walk_. The piece itself isn't enjoyable to listen to per se, but the way he composed the piece was actually something that I truly loved. He set the standard notation aside and scored the piece in a whole new way.



And honestly, I would rather see a bunch of colourfield paintings or sculptures that are geometrically perfect instead of abstract paintings like the Weeping Woman because I love the fact that a piece of art doesn't even have to be done freehand or even be a painting or a sculpture of traditional style at all. It also goes to show you that you can still be avant-garde while keeping things geometrically perfect.




TedEH said:


> ^ It's strange to me that people so often associate the level of difficulty in producing or doing something to the quality of the results.


(I know this is not your context but I really need to get this out there)

Honestly that would be me for one. Writing a good simple song is hard, yes, but in my experience I always found songs to be more likeable when they are very fast-paced, intense, and difficult to play. Simplicity can work at times to a degree, but generally speaking, the more intense and intricate the songs are, the more I can appreciate it because I can actually hear all of what makes the song really hard to write, record, and play. Maybe this is just me being a fan of hyperactivity, but that's what I like.

That doesn't mean simple songs can't actually be great. There are several great songs I know of because of the calm and simple nature, and I love that at times. Just because I'm a metalhead it doesn't make me an outright hater of bossa nova or other calm/simple genres. I even like a few of the hip hop tracks in the world, especially the tracks where the raps are actually really intricate yet also has a very rhythmically smooth feel to it to the point it makes you feel that a slow steady beat can go a long way.

example:


WintermintP


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## odibrom

@WintermintP it's refreshing the read you. I kind of feel the same way, I don't care about main stream expression or things most need to think to be part of something else.

ART has 2 points of view: the author's and the spectator's and they rarely overlay. I've been reading here about "Modern Art" but I'm yet to read a good definition of it.

Many say that abstract art expressions is modern art, but let me tell you that it isn't. Andrea del Castagno (1421-1457) was a Renaissance painter that explored abstract expression. It is said that this "Last Supper" is an excuse to explor abstractionism, lets face it, the marble stones in the back are visually stronger than all the last supper characters:





Check the link and also see the _Illustrous People for the Villa Carducci_ series, the backgrounds are abstractionism expression.

The thing is that only in the 20th century the audience was educated enough to understand/receive abstractionism as a valid expression of one's feelings/thoughts.

So, we take out of the way that abstractionism is modern art, what is left then? Some also say that photography lead to other expressions that gone rogue out of the descriptive character painting and sculpture had. Though it is entirely true, the fact is that it already had expression within the art world through the author's point of view, it just was absent from the public. There is a story about Turner (i do not know if it true) where someone was riding a train with him, there was a heavy storm outside and Turner stuck his head out the window to _feel_ the storm. It is latter said that the passenger felt that storm in a Turner's painting. Turner is also a good example, for living in the 19th century he has been accused of doing abstract paintings (yes, it is said he had to defend himself in court). This was about 60 years before Picasso's Cubism (which is not abstract, but a deconstruction). The 19th century also witnessed the Salon des Refusés which latter became far more important than the expected expression (at the time it was either the romanticism, naturalism or some latter neo-classical expression). This salon saw the birth of Expressionism and some consider it to be the birth of modern art, since from then many other art expressions evolved and born... sprouting like mushrooms.

At the present moment, modern art englobes expressions as different as hyper-realism to minimalism, conceptual and post conceptual expressions. One of my preferences go to this kind of expression, for it takes the ownership of the whole place, granting an awe emotion on the spectator:




This is NOT photoshop, it is a real painting intervention on this corridor. Other examples:










These few examples are PURE geometric expressionism and many won't even understand it until they reach the Prince's Eye (the observer point where all gets together).

But this isn't new, Renaissance, Mannerism, and Baroque painters did this same thing on the ceilings of churches back in the day with tromp l'oeil effects, they weren't just this geometric though.

Then, the question remains, what is modern art?

About the op video, a rant is a rant, it has its time and place and then it dies and from its ashes a phoenix is born.


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## lewis

Ive often wondered this myself.

Its not like people being brilliant at art is dwindling either. If anything, the work people can produce these days is absolutely stunning. (mostly talking about realism and lifelike drawings/paintings)

and instead we get abstract or splash/splatter nonsense on a canvas instead?

The hilarious part of it is when it looks like you just threw all your own paintbrushes at the canvas to create a mess, then have the audacity to pretend the "piece" represents some deep meaningful nonsense.


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## odibrom

Maybe you're looking at those works with a formatted mind set, formatted by the idea that in order to have meaning, you have to understand its forms. That is simply not true to anything art related (music included). Art is expression, either you understand it or you don't, either you like it or you don't. These options don't mean some piece is not art nor that it is, it also doesn't mean it is well done or it's a crap. Everything has its purpose in art, either the author knows it or doesn't and that's the beauty of it, it is limitless... even when some limits are way outrageous...

The main focus/purpose of Art is to move the audience/spectator into an altered state of mind. That can be achieved with several different and sometimes opposed paths, and "altered state of mind" can have many different expressions (rage, awe, indifference, calm, meditation, whatever). Therefore, abstract expressions are as valid as figurative ones.

Questions to think about:

What is abstract art expression? As soon as it is spoken, it no longer is abstract, it is a splash or a geometric pattern or some other shapeless gradient...
What is figurative art expression? Some modeled form that one can relate to some known object, however, made entirely out of something different like paint or food leftovers? As soon as we pay attention to the details, the figure no longer exists...
What is the longevity of art? is it forever? or is it to last only a few seconds?...
Once one gets a firm grip on possible answers for these questions, one may start to appreciate some less common (_more difficult to understand_) art expressions. Until then, laugh or cry at will if you feel like before Tapies, Bacon or Pollock for example...

In other words, ART is like the sand on the beach, it's fun to play with and gets everywhere.


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## KnightBrolaire

lewis said:


> Ive often wondered this myself.
> 
> Its not like people being brilliant at art is dwindling either. If anything, the work people can produce these days is absolutely stunning. (mostly talking about realism and lifelike drawings/paintings)
> 
> and instead we get abstract or splash/splatter nonsense on a canvas instead?
> 
> The hilarious part of it is when it looks like you just threw all your own paintbrushes at the canvas to create a mess, then have the audacity to pretend the "piece" represents some deep meaningful nonsense.


my favorite was when I watched someone cut a hole in their jeans and pour chef boyardee down the their pant leg and say that it's representative of menstruation. Or when that one douchebag literally starved a dog to death as a performance piece back in the 70s. 

God I hate it when people try to overanalyze art or try to overexplain it. Not everything needs to mean something, sometimes it's just fun to paint random squigglies. Don't tell me your drunken paint splatters are somehow of a deeper meaning than my flower-vagina metaphor paintings.





Some of the art major kids I met back when I was taking a lot of art classes in college were such pretentious douchebags. I remember one time in a figure drawing class he had the gall to claim that his drawing didn't suck, only that we couldn't handle his visual representation of reality. I don't know how many of those kind of tools I've run into who try to justify their lack of technical ability by going "but it's muh style". There's nothing wrong with trying to develop a personal style of artwork/how you approach techniques but you need a good technical foundation first imo. It's like building a house with an uneven foundation and then claiming the flaw was a conscious design choice/part of your style.


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## odibrom

So Vincent Van Gogh had a good foundation in art technique, is that what you mean?

Because there lots of douchebags, doesn't mean that everything alike is garbage, does it?

Kurt Cobain had almost none music knowledge and that didn't stop him from _leading_ a music movement back in the 90s, did it?

The thing is, who am I (or you) to say something is not art?

More on this, the ART object has its own life, independent from the author's initial will and that doesn't mean it is wrong, only that it evolved.


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## KnightBrolaire

odibrom said:


> So Vincent Van Gogh had a good foundation in art technique, is that what you mean?
> 
> Because there lots of douchebags, doesn't mean that everything alike is garbage, does it?
> 
> Kurt Cobain had almost none music knowledge and that didn't stop him from _leading_ a music movement back in the 90s, did it?
> 
> The thing is, who am I (or you) to say something is not art?
> 
> More on this, the ART object has its own life, independent from the author's initial will and that doesn't mean it is wrong, only that it evolved.


I was more referring to people who won't even attempt to draw figures in a realistic manner and develop their technical ability and line fluency than ranting about style in general. I know there's no hard and fast rules about being a technical draftsman first but I like to think of it in terms of painting. It's like starting with a palette that has 30 colors versus one that has 1 or 2. Sure you can still paint great art with a super limited palette but it's a lot easier when you have the right tools. I don't think Michelangelo could have painted the sistine chapel in the same manner if he lacked technical ability (like understanding perspective/contrast/contour, etc) or had a poor understanding of human anatomy.

I'll use comic book artists as an example: Jim Lee and Leinil Yu are widely considered to be some of the best pencillers in the business and they both have extensive technical ability and line fluency. Rob Liefeld is also a successful comic book artist who has some of the worst proportions and lack of anatomy I've ever seen in a figure drawing. He also responsible for the horrifying artwork that people think of when they think of Image Comics. There's a difference between subtle distortion of limbs (like El Greco commonly did) or enhancing certain proportions (ie draw bigger breasts) and what Liefeld does.
Jim Lee:







[/URL]

Leinil Yu:








Rob Liefeld:





















For anyone that doesn't quite get why his art is considered "worse". Here's why, he adds muscles that aren't there (this is a huge issue), he also has huge trouble with proportions, he doesn't understand how arm muscles work (a bicep is not going to flex when the arm is straight, it relaxes). Seriously it looks like his characters all injected synthol into their upper limbs.
The captain america picture shows that he doesn't understand perspective, etc.
Compare those to Yu and Lee's works and they consistently exhibit superior understanding of human anatomy/how to draw it but they also consistently have better composition/linework. Like I said in the beginning of my post, all of them are successful artists but not all are widely respected (Liefeld is considered a laughingstock in a lot of comic circles).


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## CrazyDean

What I find interesting about art as opposed to other forms of expression is that once you're famous, you can pretty much do whatever you want. I recently went to the Museum of Modern Art in NYC where there was a huge Robert Rauschenberg exhibit. One of his exhibits was a shipping box that gotten wet. How does that deserve to be in the same museum as a Dali or Van Gogh?

If a musician makes a bad album or a director makes a bad movie, they get called out. Why do we not do the same for artists?

As with music or movies, not everyone is going to like any one thing. However, it is a little confusing as to how the dollar value correlates to certain pieces of art.


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## KnightBrolaire

CrazyDean said:


> What I find interesting about art as opposed to other forms of expression is that once you're famous, you can pretty much do whatever you want. I recently went to the Museum of Modern Art in NYC where there was a huge Robert Rauschenberg exhibit. One of his exhibits was a shipping box that gotten wet. How does that deserve to be in the same museum as a Dali or Van Gogh?
> 
> If a musician makes a bad album or a director makes a bad movie, they get called out. Why do we not do the same for artists?
> 
> As with music or movies, not everyone is going to like any one thing. However, it is a little confusing as to how the dollar value correlates to certain pieces of art.


Modern art is a joke and it all started with Miro/lichtenberg/pollock/warhol. People started treating art moreso as a financial investment than an emotional one. Warhol/Basquiat also helped perpetuate the idea that all you need to sell bad art is a good story. That's the only reason garbage (imo) like Basquiat or Hirsch ends up in a legit museum. The process of creating the garbage art/their story of the meaning of their art ends up being more important than the actual art itself. Pietro Manzoni essentially took a crap in some steel containers and they were displayed in a modern art museum. modern art is literally shit.


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## Necris

I'm pretty sure at some point in time Rob Liefeld decided that humans, women in particular, would look better if their anatomy looked more like that of a wasp than a human being.
Exhibit A: http://unrealitymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/rob-liefeld9.jpg


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## odibrom

You know, Michael Angelo also did invent some nonexistent muscles in his studies, but then, even the scientific community is unsure about the number of muscles the human body has, it is all on how one counts them.

Again, you're focusing on the object qualities, not on the action/thoughts that lead to it. ART is not only the object itself, but the whole context. Marcel Duchamp created The Fountain, an urinol flipped upside down and signed with a marker pen in a time where that was unthinkable. He was a daredevil, always in the quest for chocking people until he got tired and dedicated himself to Chess (world class player, btw). So, modern ART is not about "how good one is with his craft" but more on "how good you are with your thoughts on the unthinkable". In a way it is like connecting the dots between lots of voids in society. You find a hole somewhere? That's where some art will sprout. ART is about the voyage of the thought on possibilities, rather than the object that carries the message. Everyone+1 remembers the LOVE sculptures from Robert Indiana. Those are "just" some Times like font extruded and painted red. What's the fuss about those? though no one seams to disagree on the artistic aspect of them. The artistic object itself is no longer _forced_ to carry "beauty" anymore. Forget that, that's a romantic thought of art, it's 200 years old already!

Robert Indiana's LOVE





Art is statement, it is a blunt "FUCK YOU, I'M HERE AND YOU'RE NOT". There's nothing else to get, it is that simple, everything else is dust in the eyes. Though it may sound awkward, it is also revealing and enlightening, for it soothes one into peace of mind and, rejoice, it may also lead you to the joy of understanding the stupidity of some (please read and understand as _many/most_) curators...

The artists are never to blame, only the curators are... that's where modern art comes from... unfortunately.


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## KnightBrolaire

Necris said:


> I'm pretty sure at some point in time Rob Liefeld decided that humans, women in particular, would look better if their anatomy looked more like that of a wasp than a human being.
> Exhibit A: http://unrealitymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/rob-liefeld9.jpg


He is pure cancer upon the comics industry. the only other artist I can think of with such severe


odibrom said:


> You know, Michael Angelo also did invent some nonexistent muscles in his studies, but then, even the scientific community is unsure about the number of muscles the human body has, it is all on how one counts them.
> 
> 
> Art is statement, it is a blunt "FUCK YOU, I'M HERE AND YOU'RE NOT". There's nothing else to get, it is that simple, everything else is dust in the eyes. Though it may sound awkward, it is also revealing and enlightening, for it soothes one into peace of mind and, rejoice, it may also lead you to the joy of understanding the stupidity of some (please read and understand as _many/most_) curators...
> 
> The artists are never to blame, only the curators are... that's where modern art comes from... unfortunately.


Give me one example where Michelangelo invented a muscle. His drawings came from working with real models and it's easy to tell the difference between Michelangelo and how Liefeld draws. Michelangelo may have been lazy at times and just added breasts to male models, but he still pulls it off better than Liefeld drawing fucking leg-arms with atrophied deltoids/muscles flexing when they should be relaxing, etc. Michelangelo had the prerequisite technical ability to be able to make the idea of drawing breasts on a man's body work. He understood contour, contraposto, how the muscles present beneath the skin, etc. Liefeld does not.
Most art is extraneous. It serves no purpose unless it's adorning a practical object or it's incorporated into something that will be used regularly. I would argue that art SHOULD be beautiful (even if it's ugly subject matter) since there's no other reason for it to exist. Composition, framing, line work, all of those things matter and can make simple art/designs beautiful. There's no room for non-art pretending to be art anymore, that ship sailed back when Manzoni and Duchamp started creating garbage only for shock value imo. It's so played out and boring nowadays that there should be a backlash towards lazy cheap art like that. Art that lacks form or function is the worst kind of art imo. It exists solely to exist, like some amorphous totem to nihilism.
I'm not disagreeing that the curators are part of the problem, but the artist still has to be willing to peddle his art (whether it's literal shit in a can or an extreme close up realistic portrait a la Chuck Close). The artist is as much to blame for making bad art as the curator is for showing it/promoting it.


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## odibrom

About Michael Angelo, I'll try to find some references, since it was a lecture I attended to a few years ago given by an anatomy teacher (she is an Ophthalmologist lecturing human anatomy at the Fine Arts University in Lisbon), so it may take some time. Or, as so I remember the lecture, I may be mistaken here and I'm not speaking of those _manly female_ sculptures you speak of. I remember Albrecht Dürer's rhinoceros... an excellent piece of art with terrible anatomy structure, this was made in the 16th century. Dürer was an anatomist with lots of measurements taken to men, women and children in order to find the "perfect" proportions and made the following representation of a rhino. Truth be told, it was made by following texts and not by actually seeing one live (even if dead). As far as I know about this part of art history, Dürer never met a real rhino. Nevertheless his effort is grand and is a piece of art. There are also his lion studies... they look really funny, but are regarded as art nevertheless.











How is this different to Rob Liefeld art work? Yeah, his designs may be a little awkward and funny, but he does masters textures and gradients...

The thing about art is that as soon as one gets some education on it, one can argue whatever one wants, however, it doesn't mean it will become the main stream truth, it's just a point of view. When I say Artists are not to blame, they aren't because many times the exposed piece is not what the artists wants but what the curator thinks is appropriated for the exhibition. It is often that the curator chooses an unfinished piece or one that the author thinks it is bad. Also often the curators specifically asks for a piece that the authors has to put out in order to have his worked exposed. I've had exhibitions where my worst painting was the first to be sold and those I though to be prime pieces weren't even _checked_... go figure.

Today's art is not based on how pretty a piece is nor how controlled the gradient or proportions are, nor even how near the truth/reality the figuration is. It is about CONTRAST and not only those visual contrasts of color tones (hot/cold, bright/dark, saturation/grey, etc...) or forms, but specially those about context, either cultural, social or simply because it hasn't been done yet. If there is enough contrast, it can be understood as an art form (if given the push in that direction), and that's what happens (imo) with those like Rob Liefeld, they put out some contrast, some big enough difference to the main stream that grants then a spot at the sun. There are so many situations like these. It is not about "quality" anymore, but more on how big of contrast you are (your work is) to those around you, that's what will make you noticed... that and the _surprise feeling_ (freshness, mystery) one gets when exposed to.

In the end, it all resumes to what the client or curator likes and doesn't like. I've read room texts on exhibitions that were totally unreadable due to forced neologisms and incoherent idea flows. These all made by highly though of curators.

EDIT: the following images are studies where Michael Angelo clearly exaggerates existent human muscles... lots of imagination here... Don't get me wrong, lots of talent here, exceptional drawing skills, but some incorrect muscular anatomy. These aren't mistakes, more on the experiment side of art, which may happen also these days. On a side note, Michael Angelo was the most well payed artist, EVER, even today...


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## TedEH

odibrom said:


> Again, you're focusing on the object qualities, not on the action/thoughts that lead to it. ART is not only the object itself, but the whole context. Marcel Duchamp created The Fountain, an urinol flipped upside down and signed with a marker pen in a time where that was unthinkable. He was a daredevil, always in the quest for chocking people until he got tired and dedicated himself to Chess (world class player, btw). So, modern ART is not about "how good one is with his craft" but more on "how good you are with your thoughts on the unthinkable". In a way it is like connecting the dots between lots of voids in society. You find a hole somewhere? That's where some art will sprout. ART is about the voyage of the thought on possibilities, rather than the object that carries the message. Everyone+1 remembers the LOVE sculptures from Robert Indiana. Those are "just" some Times like font extruded and painted red. What's the fuss about those? though no one seams to disagree on the artistic aspect of them. The artistic object itself is no longer _forced_ to carry "beauty" anymore. Forget that, that's a romantic thought of art, it's 200 years old already!



As someone who is "uneducated" in art, this all comes across as pretentious nonsense. As soon as you start telling people what art is supposed to mean to them, you've lost me. I've nothing against an artist being very intentional and trying to make a particular statement, but you don't get to decide how art is received. If your audience decides the art is garbage, well then too bad, they think it's garbage. "Art" is the most subjective thing I can think of- if there is a "point" to art, it's that it's point is defined by the individual, not necessarily the artist or the piece itself. It can mean one thing to the artist, and the opposite to the audience. It can mean something entirely different to every person who encounters it. And each person has the right to interpret a bit of art as garbage regardless of the intent of the artist.


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## bostjan

TedEH said:


> As someone who is "uneducated" in art, this all comes across as pretentious nonsense. As soon as you start telling people what art is supposed to mean to them, you've lost me. I've nothing against an artist being very intentional and trying to make a particular statement, but you don't get to decide how art is received. If your audience decides the art is garbage, well then too bad, they think it's garbage. "Art" is the most subjective thing I can think of- if there is a "point" to art, it's that it's point is defined by the individual, not necessarily the artist or the piece itself. It can mean one thing to the artist, and the opposite to the audience. It can mean something entirely different to every person who encounters it. And each person has the right to interpret a bit of art as garbage regardless of the intent of the artist.



Sometimes I think we might be half brothers or something.


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## TedEH

We do seem to agree on a lot of things.

IMO, doesn't matter how good it is, all art has some element of being garbage to it.  Like I'll justify all the heavier music I like as being "art" to get past other people's inability to comprehend it - and it's not that calling it art isn't valid - but it doesn't negate that you can still break it down to a bunch of weirdos screaming and making noise for not much purpose. I'm willing to recognize and embrace that there's an element of "this is actually kinda garbage" to a lot of things I enjoy.

Like in the last year or so I've been enjoying a lot more dirty/ugly/fuzzy/terrible guitar tones that are great because of how bad they are. I don't need to pretend anything is "good" on some level to enjoy it.


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## KnightBrolaire

odibrom said:


> About Michael Angelo, I'll try to find some references, since it was a lecture I attended to a few years ago given by an anatomy teacher (she is an Ophthalmologist lecturing human anatomy at the Fine Arts University in Lisbon), so it may take some time. Or, as so I remember the lecture, I may be mistaken here and I'm not speaking of those _manly female_ sculptures you speak of. I remember Albrecht Dürer's rhinoceros... an excellent piece of art with terrible anatomy structure, this was made in the 16th century. Dürer was an anatomist with lots of measurements taken to men, women and children in order to find the "perfect" proportions and made the following representation of a rhino. Truth be told, it was made by following texts and not by actually seeing one live (even if dead). As far as I know about this part of art history, Dürer never met a real rhino. Nevertheless his effort is grand and is a piece of art. There are also his lion studies... they look really funny, but are regarded as art nevertheless.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> How is this different to Rob Liefeld art work? Yeah, his designs may be a little awkward and funny, but he does masters textures and gradients...
> 
> The thing about art is that as soon as one gets some education on it, one can argue whatever one wants, however, it doesn't mean it will become the main stream truth, it's just a point of view. When I say Artists are not to blame, they aren't because many times the exposed piece is not what the artists wants but what the curator thinks is appropriated for the exhibition. It is often that the curator chooses an unfinished piece or one that the author thinks it is bad. Also often the curators specifically asks for a piece that the authors has to put out in order to have his worked exposed. I've had exhibitions where my worst painting was the first to be sold and those I though to be prime pieces weren't even _checked_... go figure.
> 
> Today's art is not based on how pretty a piece is nor how controlled the gradient or proportions are, nor even how near the truth/reality the figuration is. It is about CONTRAST and not only those visual contrasts of color tones (hot/cold, bright/dark, saturation/grey, etc...) or forms, but specially those about context, either cultural, social or simply because it hasn't been done yet. If there is enough contrast, it can be understood as an art form (if given the push in that direction), and that's what happens (imo) with those like Rob Liefeld, they put out some contrast, some big enough difference to the main stream that grants then a spot at the sun. There are so many situations like these. It is not about "quality" anymore, but more on how big of contrast you are (your work is) to those around you, that's what will make you noticed... that and the _surprise feeling_ (freshness, mystery) one gets when exposed to.
> 
> In the end, it all resumes to what the client or curator likes and doesn't like. I've read room texts on exhibitions that were totally unreadable due to forced neologisms and incoherent idea flows. These all made by highly though of curators.
> 
> EDIT: the following images are studies where Michael Angelo clearly exaggerates existent human muscles... lots of imagination here... Don't get me wrong, lots of talent here, exceptional drawing skills, but some incorrect muscular anatomy. These aren't mistakes, more on the experiment side of art, which may happen also these days. On a side note, Michael Angelo was the most well payed artist, EVER, even today...


From everything I've read about Michelangelo he worked regularly with male models (many of whom were physical laborers) which explains their lean/muscular physiques. iirc, he also worked with corpse dissections which would be even leaner due to fluid loss as the corpse dries out. I don't see any glaring anatomical issues in his work, and considering his work has been studied for hundreds of years I'm sure we would have heard more about any serious issue by now. 
I don't understand why you're trying to defend Liefeld's work, given the subject matter he regularly works on you can tell that he hasn't put in the same amount of time to master his craft as Lee or Yu. If you're going to draw the human figure/face in a semi-realistic style then realism should basically apply. It's the uncanny valley when humans don't look like they're supposed to (which admittedly can be used as a stylistic choice) but the underlying issue is that Liefeld lacks the anatomical understanding necessary to make them look correct. I wouldn't lump Durer's studies in with Liefeld either, since as you said he was working from text descriptions of the animals, not having actually seen them. Durer was an amazing draftsman like Michelangelo and spent extensive time doing figure drawing as well, so that argument goes out the window. Liefeld lacks the underlying anatomical/perspective drawing foundation that many classically trained artists have and it shows up blatantly in his work. Liefeld generally does the pencilling, he's not responsible for inking the work, so you can't even give him credit for use of textures/gradients, that's more so whoever inks his work.
Some pics of bodybuilders to compare to Michelangelo's studies:












So in the back study he does seem to have an extremely lean model, as that's the only way to see some of the musculature he drew, but none of it is indisputably wrong like what Liefeld draws.


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## odibrom

@TedEH call me whatever you like. I'm not trying to teach anything, only to give some context on modern art. You forgot to quote me on the "FUCK YOU, I'M HERE, YOU'RE NOT" statement that in a way clarifies what really is going on in the actual/present art creation process. Many artists, if not most, don't really care for mine, yours or anyone's likes on their work, educated or not in the area. Also, art is the most useless thing man produces, really, it has no other purpose besides existing, does it? So why bother? It however has the ability to join people... go figure. You're right, I have no right to decide how art is received nor what any individual piece it means to any individual person (never said such thing), we have different educations... how does that proves anything? That is a clear statement of the obvious.

I think it was a grand grand father of mine (so the story is told to me) that at a painting exhibition said "these works are shit" unknowingly right besides the author, to which he got the author's reply "excuse me sir, what do you know about art or painting?". He then answered "you're right, I do not know anything about art, but I do about shit. this is shit."... end of conversation, or so I'm told.

@KnightBrolaire nevertheless, it is known some clear exaggeration on muscular representation from Michelangelo. As "studies" means, those were not about the end product, but the path to it. While walking down the road to excellence, one may fall many times. I've never seen any major deformity in his works besides those female boobs on man bodies at Medici's resting place and in David's oversize head and hands. However, in David, these are intentionally for it was supposed to be seen way high and in this way it would somehow compensate the foreshortening point of view.

I'm not defending Liefeld, only questioning the attitude of an easy bashing on things we sometimes don't take the time to study or understand. I think I've had already proven that NOT ALL MODERN ART IS BAD, right? Yeah, sometimes it really is, and maybe that's its purpose, maybe not, the thing is that it exists and what do you do about it, bashing... does that makes you feel better?, I doubt it. Starving a dog to death is not art, is cruelty and if it is brought up as an art object, the stupidity lies with the curator, the criminal (not artist, may I say) and all of those who applaud it. Yes, sometimes we have to simply say "NO", but not always. Again, in the Liefeld case, I wonder who published him? Who promoted him, who got into having his works being colored and printed? Who gave him stories to illustrate? That's not only on him, there's a team behind and every team has its captain and _agendas_... he is just a pawn in the money process, he is not to blame on having been published, unless it was a self made edition (which I highly doubt since it has the Marvel stamp on it). Through his eye one will probably see the "FUCK YOU, I'M HERE, YOU'RE NOT" point of view... again who cares?

:::

It is easy to bash something really quick, based on preconceive ideas of how things should be. Yeah, we're told by our education models where things fit and don't fit, what is morally accepted or not, what is this, what is that and sometimes we rebel against those (which shows intelligence). However, when we're confronted against something we don't clearly understand we're fast on the trigger, really fast and then we are just mirroring the prejudice we have rebelled against earlier... just saying it is a regular situation everywhere for everyone (me included) and it clearly marks an overall conjuncture of main stream thought. In order to progress, one must not think outside the box, only that there is no box...


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## TedEH

odibrom said:


> call me whatever you like.


My point wasn't to say that I think you in particular are pretentious, but that I can't get behind the idea of trying to apply a bunch of rules on how to interpret art in order to backup your differences of opinion/interpretation. I'd say "the whole point is that people will disagree!" but even that would be imposing my idea of "the point" onto the subject. There isn't a point. If there is a point, it's invented by the artist, or the viewer, etc., and not necessarily shared with anyone else.

Or to put it another way:



odibrom said:


> ART is not only the object itself, but the whole context. [...] So, modern ART is not about "how good one is with his craft" but more on "how good you are with your thoughts on the unthinkable". [Etc.]



If I say I don't like a piece of art because X, you can't respond with "but art isn't _about _X", or "you just don't understand what the artist was trying to do". Says who? Why isn't art only about the object itself? IMO these parts of art are just as subjective as every other part of it.


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## odibrom

TedEH said:


> If I say I don't like a piece of art because X, you can't respond with "but art isn't _about _X", or "you just don't understand what the artist was trying to do". Says who? Why isn't art only about the object itself? IMO these parts of art are just as subjective as every other part of it.



I believe I used the word "only" in the context of "ART is not *only* the object itself", to which you should have replied with "but art isn't _JUST _about X", which would be correct... I think.

The 2nd quote you made of me is in the context of art within the author's perspective, which I think is understandable. However, everyone is an artist when feeling art, everyone has the ability to recreate any piece of art within his/hers own thoughts and that is as creative as being the author of the art. The possibility of free interpretation makes us all artists...


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## KnightBrolaire

Well like I said in my previous posts, both the artist and the curator are responsible for bring shitty art into the public eye. There's a large difference between intentionally distorting anatomy (a la El Greco or Michelangelo's David/men with breasts) and not understanding it (Liefeld).


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## TedEH

odibrom said:


> I believe I used the word "only"


My point stands. To some, art IS only about the object on it's own.


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## bostjan

KnightBrolaire said:


> Well like I said in my previous posts, both the artist and the curator are responsible for bring shitty art into the public eye. There's a large difference between intentionally distorting anatomy (a la El Greco or Michelangelo's David/men with breasts) and not understanding it (Liefeld).



I believe in economic freedom. If someone has ten million dollars to spend on an empty cardboard box with birdcrap on the outside of it, thinking it's some meaningfully artistic statement about consumerism and our reliance on logistics in the globalized economy, then so be it. I also believe strongly in freedom of expression, so if I see someone in the news spending that kind of money on that kind of bullshit, then I will exercise my right to call the buyer a numbskull for doing so. I'm also a capital opportunist, so if it's my shitty box up for auction, then please buy it, and spend as much as you'd like. 

Art is about as subjective as anything gets, I suppose, so you like, you don't like it, or somewhere in between, then either you don't get why other people like it or don't get why other people don't like it... something like a comic book, though, - I don't think most readers buy them solely for the visual art, even if they are buying it over the alternative, for the fact that it has visual art in it. It's about gripping plot, compelling characters, and then the visual aesthetic. Do you agree?

An artist for a comic book is likely hired or not based on deadlines and work ethic as much or more than it is about the artist's level of realism or knowledge of human anatomy. If you ever question that, think of South Park, a show which has been tremendously popular, which uses a style of artwork that is distinctive, yet laughably rudimentary, but because of such rudimentary artwork, the creators can exercise more autonomy over their creation and still crank out an episode per week in real time.

Then you have things like this, which make me shake my head:








Graham Bader said:


> ..._Look Mickey _explicitly situates the painting's maker himself within the self-enclosed narcissistic circuit at its center.


...or maybe it's just a fun slapstick joke?!


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## odibrom

KnightBrolaire said:


> Well like I said in my previous posts, both the artist and the curator are responsible for bring shitty art into the public eye. There's a large difference between intentionally distorting anatomy (a la El Greco or Michelangelo's David/men with breasts) and not understanding it (Liefeld).



Again, I'm not here to defend anyone and I agree that Liefeld's art has some... pointy things there. Only that, as I do not know anything about his objectives when drawing/illustrating, therefore I cannot stand for the statement that his art is shit. That's all. Also, it is thought that El Greco deformities are due to some eye problem and not because of intentionality, which makes some sense since there is a pattern in them.



TedEH said:


> My point stands. To some, art IS only about the object on it's own.



... and that's why they have a hard time understanding modern art. I'd also correct the "To some" for "To most"...

Understanding that modern art is not only about the object is halfway to get where most are simply lost.


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## TedEH

^ You're still doing the thing I'm talking about though. You're deciding that people are understanding art the wrong way. Which is not how (IMO) art works, modern or otherwise. That's a large part of why it comes off as pretentious nonsense- it insists that there's a correct way to receive art, and that someone gets to decide what this correct way is for other people. There may be a correct way to understand an aritst's intention, but that doesn't stop a piece of art from just being bad art from any given person's point of view.

If someone randomly splatters some paint outside and calls it art, I don't care if the location, timing, political climate and the color of the artists underwear that day make some kind of "deep" statement- I'm not going to be convinced it's not garbage. One persons deep interpretation of said garbage has no power to elevate it above the status of garbage in anyone else's eyes.


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## KnightBrolaire

bostjan said:


> I believe in economic freedom. If someone has ten million dollars to spend on an empty cardboard box with birdcrap on the outside of it, thinking it's some meaningfully artistic statement about consumerism and our reliance on logistics in the globalized economy, then so be it. I also believe strongly in freedom of expression, so if I see someone in the news spending that kind of money on that kind of bullshit, then I will exercise my right to call the buyer a numbskull for doing so. I'm also a capital opportunist, so if it's my shitty box up for auction, then please buy it, and spend as much as you'd like.
> 
> Art is about as subjective as anything gets, I suppose, so you like, you don't like it, or somewhere in between, then either you don't get why other people like it or don't get why other people don't like it... something like a comic book, though, - I don't think most readers buy them solely for the visual art, even if they are buying it over the alternative, for the fact that it has visual art in it. It's about gripping plot, compelling characters, and then the visual aesthetic. Do you agree?
> 
> An artist for a comic book is likely hired or not based on deadlines and work ethic as much or more than it is about the artist's level of realism or knowledge of human anatomy. If you ever question that, think of South Park, a show which has been tremendously popular, which uses a style of artwork that is distinctive, yet laughably rudimentary, but because of such rudimentary artwork, the creators can exercise more autonomy over their creation and still crank out an episode per week in real time.
> 
> Then you have things like this, which make me shake my head:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ...or maybe it's just a fun slapstick joke?!


Oh I have no problem with people trying to sell literal shit (Marzoni's shit in a can sold for over 150K GBP at sothebys btw), it's the pretension and attitude some artists/curators display acting like there's more to the art than there really is. If I draw a box, it's a box, it's not some cockamamie metaphor for society's attempt to stifle my creativity. Humans have this insane obsession with prescribing meaning to everything and the art world fully manipulates that.
As far as Liefeld getting work, yes, you're correct, he works hard, puts out a lot of work and is the epitome of the phrase "throw enough shit at the wall and some will stick". The whole reason I even brought him up was to show 2 other prolific comic artists who also get metric tons of work but have superior technical ability.* I was more decrying the fact that there are people out there that willingly hamstring themselves and refuse to advance their technical ability as though it would change their personal artistic style*. It's like playing guitar and saying that I don't need to know scales/ how to tap, slide, do harmonics or any of the fancy shredding stuff since it's not "my style". Having that extra bit of technicality allows you to express yourself with more tools than just strumming some basic chords. You can take someone with a solid technical background ie Paul Gilbert and pare their style down, but it's far harder to take Bob Dylan and try to make him play Paul Gilbert esque runs/songs. It's the same with visual arts. Jean Ingres had impeccable line control while someone like Henri Toulouse Lautrec or John Singer Sargent tended to have a looser style in their drawings. *The main thing is that they all started with the technical foundation and proceeded to deviate from there. That's why I've been harping about Liefeld for pages, he lacks that foundation and it's especially obvious when he's drawing human anatomy. *
Typical Ingres:




this is about as "loose" as Ingres' linework gets:








Lautrec:








Sargent:












Some of my personal favorites from sargent:








Anyways, I don't know how my mini-tirade about people trying to justify their poor technique as their style somehow devolved into this pile of posts so I think I'm done trying to give my opinion about this subject. 
TLDR: A technical foundation is important when drawing. You can always deviate from classical technique into other styles so long as you retain the core understanding of perspective,contour, contrast,etc. It's nigh impossible to do the opposite where you have a limited understanding and try to make more technical art. I've seen it time and time again with people not willing to put in the time/effort to develop technicality and then floundering when they try to do a technical piece.


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## odibrom

TedEH said:


> ^ You're still doing the thing I'm talking about though. You're deciding that people are understanding art the wrong way. Which is not how (IMO) art works, modern or otherwise. That's a large part of why it comes off as pretentious nonsense- it insists that there's a correct way to receive art, and that someone gets to decide what this correct way is for other people. There may be a correct way to understand an aritst's intention, but that doesn't stop a piece of art from just being bad art from any given person's point of view.
> 
> If someone randomly splatters some paint outside and calls it art, I don't care if the location, timing, political climate and the color of the artists underwear that day make some kind of "deep" statement- I'm not going to be convinced it's not garbage. One persons deep interpretation of said garbage has no power to elevate it above the status of garbage in anyone else's eyes.



I am not, I'm not _deciding _what others should think, only adding the fact that modern art is no longer ONLY about the object. I'm am therefore adding possibilities to the thought of what modern art is. The "no longer only about the object" doesn't excludes "being about the object also", so I'm not excluding, I'm opening possibilities of interpretation, so showing a path to a deeper understanding. It is up to you or whomever wants to, to travel that road if it makes sense. One is free to be in the "art is only about the object" thought, I don't really care. However, then, you might be in the same train as Liefeld, though through the viewer's perspective.

@KnightBrolaire all true. So? It is art, which means that, as any commercial area, the public has a voice. There seams to have been enough sales for Liefeld to prosper. Does it mean that he isn't legit, even without all those tools under his hood? Look at Kurt Cobain, he got more than most of us will ever get... The "anti-hero" sells well in all art forms.


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## TedEH

odibrom said:


> I'm not _deciding _what others should think


No, but you're heavily implying that taking a non-deep look at modern art is misinterpreting it.


odibrom said:


> I'm opening possibilities of interpretation, so showing a path to a deeper understanding.


Art is not deep by virtue of being art. Sometimes that depth isn't there. Sometimes that depth is so buried or obscured or overshadowed that it might as well not be there at all. You can just as easily say that I lack a deeper understanding as I could say that you've imposed your own "depth" that didn't exist in the first place.


KnightBrolaire said:


> It's like playing guitar and saying that I don't need to know scales/ how to tap, slide, do harmonics or any of the fancy shredding stuff since it's not "my style".


I'd like to be able to say people don't do this... but lots of people do this.  I don't think it's an entirely invalid view - I can get along playing guitar and expressing myself without being great at sweep picking, but I certainly don't go as far as completely ignoring the fundamentals of the instrument because "that's not my thing maaaaan". At the end of the day, I guess it doesn't hurt anyone to enjoy their art whatever way they want to.


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## bostjan

KnightBrolaire said:


> TLDQE: A technical foundation is important when drawing. You can always deviate from classical technique into other styles so long as you retain the core understanding of perspective,contour, contrast,etc. It's nigh impossible to do the opposite where you have a limited understanding and try to make more technical art. I've seen it time and time again with people not willing to put in the time/effort to develop technicality and then floundering when they try to do a technical piece.



When you have a guy, like the _Look Mickey_ example, who can paint technically amazing paintings, make a simplified Sunday-Papers-looking piece, people lose their minds. It happens in music, too. The drummer from _3 Doors Down_ does some kinda nifty stuff, but then you hear him play in _Martone_ and he just rips. Mike Mushok of _Staind_ used to play with Tony MacAlpine. I imagine he can rip, too. Most guitarists in these commercial bands probably can rip faces off, but just don't, because they know what suits consumer-grade music. Same in visual art - being able to pull of techniques from here to the Sun and back doesn't mean every piece should rival the Apollo moon missions in complexity.
On the other hand, I think we all know popular musicians who couldn't pull off anything any more technically demanding than what they are known for doing. Some of them aren't even rightly good enough to pull off what they are attempting to do in the first place. But whatever they attempted to do, ended up actually being something-or-other that got them wherever they are.


odibrom said:


> @KnightBrolaire all true. So? It is art, which means that, as any commercial area, the public has a voice. There seams to have been enough sales for Liefeld to prosper. Does it mean that he isn't legit, even without all those tools under his hood? Look at Kurt Cobain, he got more than most of us will ever get... The "anti-hero" sells well in all art forms.



Cobain's name keeps coming up over and over, like he's some sort of modern art guy... I think the distinction may be more like "look at this guy who technically could barely sing and barely play, who gets all of this credit as a musical genius." Nirvana didn't invent grunge, they just were in the right place and time to become the poster children for the movement, sure, but it seems to me like Cobain is more the guy who is touted as the guy who is touted for being a genius than he is actually touted for being a genius. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but, I was actually playing out in bands when the whole grunge movement thing unfolded, even if I was not at all connected with it at the time.


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## TedEH

It definitely took me a while to realize there's a distinction between "a generally good artist" and "an artist who can do that thing well". I can't remember where I saw it, but I came across a page a while ago that shows some reasonably well known artists doing something in the style or method they're known for, then trying to do something completely outside of their range and it looks as bad as if I had tried to do it. Any artists I've had to work with were seemingly hired/selected in particular for their range - being able to match guides and stay on brand, or adapt to new projects quickly, things like that. At this point I recognize that adaptability and range as a distinct skill, outside of being good at any particular technique or style - and that applies to music or art or whatever else.


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## KnightBrolaire

TedEH said:


> I'd like to be able to say people don't do this... but lots of people do this.  I don't think it's an entirely invalid view - I can get along playing guitar and expressing myself without being great at sweep picking, but I certainly don't go as far as completely ignoring the fundamentals of the instrument because "that's not my thing maaaaan". At the end of the day, I guess it doesn't hurt anyone to enjoy their art whatever way they want to.


I'm guilty of it to an extent as well. I don't know shit about music theory, but I do know a lot of different techniques and scales from playing classical guitar/electric for years now. It's not like you can't succeed with a minimal technical foundation, it just makes it a lot harder to express your ideas imo, especially in the visual arts.


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## odibrom

TedEH said:


> No, but you're heavily implying that taking a non-deep look at modern art is misinterpreting it.



No I'm not. I'm saying that ART has evolved. You either follow the evolution or not. That is entirely up to you. If you don't follow the evolution, it is very likely that you won't understand some art expressions, same happens with music, obviously.



TedEH said:


> Art is not deep by virtue of being art. Sometimes that depth isn't there. Sometimes that depth is so buried or obscured or overshadowed that it might as well not be there at all. You can just as easily say that I lack a deeper understanding as I could say that you've imposed your own "depth" that didn't exist in the first place.



Again, obvious statement, but I'm not saying you (in particular) is lacking anything. My first small post in this thread stated something like "the purpose of art is to bring joy" and therefore many times (not always) it has to be seen as a joke, to be laugh at. I'm not imposing anything, only adverting that your (?) point of view of "art being about the object" no longer holds absolute and is over 200 years old (kind of a romantic thought)... the art world has evolved beyond. Who's following it is not of my concern nor judgment.

:::

As I see, many of you are too serious about art. Fuck seriousness, mistakes and bad stuff are good to look at, make us realize how good the opposite is. Virtuosos, anti-heros, they all have their place in the art world, why the hell not? Art joins people, does not segregates nor labels them, that is society doings... art is freedom and respect, never less. If one doesn't get this, maybe he is less about one or both of these concepts.


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## TedEH

odibrom said:


> ART has evolved.


No it hasn't.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Artists have changed. Art has not.



odibrom said:


> If you don't follow the evolution, it is very likely that you won't understand


^This statement is exactly you imposing a rule on how art is meant to be understood, despite claiming you're not doing that. If there were no imposed rules on how to interpret art, there would be no such thing as "misunderstanding" art. You can't misunderstand something that doesn't have a defined "correct understanding".



odibrom said:


> the purpose of art is


^ See?



odibrom said:


> your (?) point of view of "art being about the object" no longer holds absolute


I never said it was absolute. It never was absolute. But it's perfectly legit for someone to receive art in this way- you can't dictate what art is or isn't about for someone else. If, for a particular person, art is about just the object - than that's just what it is. Let them appreciate things for what they are on their own terms. Or, let them think it's garbage.



odibrom said:


> the art world has evolved beyond


¯\_(ツ)_/¯ See my first comment.



odibrom said:


> As I see, many of you are too serious about art.


I make no assumptions about the level of seriousness of a comment on the internet. I don't take art very seriously at all in 99% of cases.


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## odibrom

Well, that's just *your* opinion, as the previous was mine. Feel free to quote me out of context to argue your own point of view. Think whatever you like about art and please report back your findings. Peace out.


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## bostjan

odibrom said:


> Well, that's just *your* opinion, as the previous was mine. Feel free to quote me out of context to argue your own point of view. Think whatever you like about art and please report back your findings. Peace out.



I mean, how you interpret art is subjective, but who said what and who said whatever else in a thread is not at all subjective. I'm not really clear to which you were referring.


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## TedEH

odibrom said:


> Peace out.


My point wasn't to argue against your opinion on how to interpret art, but just to point out that saying art is entirely subjective but then also saying it's possible to misinterpret art presents a contradiction. Either it's entirely subjective, or it's not. If your opinion is that it's part subjective, and part context, then that's fine. But if it's entirely subjective then you can't impose the rule that the context has to be included in the evaluation.

It's perfectly fine if you think I don't "understand" art. If there really is any deeper meaning to modern art to some people, then I fully admit that I don't understand it. But I reserve the right to judge something I don't fully understand, in the context that a full understanding isn't really needed when it comes to personal art-valuation systems.

Like if someone hates the music I play or listen to, they think it's garbage because to them because "all that screamo nonsense is just noise and unlistenable" - despite having demonstrated a clear lack of deep understanding of the subject (metal is not "screamo", but people who don't listen to it will call it that because they lack the vocabulary to properly describe it) - it doesn't invalidate their opinion. It's legit for them to call it garbage. To them it is garbage. There's zero requirement for them to understand it on a deeper level for their assessment to be valid. Maybe a little disrespectful to tell a musician to their face that their work is garbage, but no amount of educating them on the deeper meaning, cultural significance, and community values surrounding metal and it's scene are going to convince them to evaluate the music itself as any more than "screamo garbage". And that's fine. I think country music is garbage. And 99.9% of rap.


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## Patri_MA_Ruiz

Hello there! In my opinion modern art is out of control by now.
Modern art started "as a revolution", to make art more "affordable" for everyone. For example, "Puppy" by Jeff Koons, (a huge dog sculpture with flowers all over him), is a piece that everyone can understand. Modern art is a way to defend that anything could be art if there's thought behind it.
The real problem is when people start using that as an excuse so they don't have to learn any technique...


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## KnightBrolaire

Patri_MA_Ruiz said:


> The real problem is when people start using that as an excuse so they don't have to learn any technique...


EXACTLY


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## Patri_MA_Ruiz

People believe that saying "oh no it's my way to express myself" other people will consider their art as good. But that is not true; the problem is, art consumers (most of them) don't really know how it works, and the fact that a piece is in a museum or the same piece costs thousands of dollars is enough for them to consider it as "good art". Nowadays the value of everything is measured in money, not talent or hard work.


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## bostjan

Patri_MA_Ruiz said:


> People believe that saying "oh no it's my way to express myself" other people will consider their art as good. But that is not true; the problem is, art consumers (most of them) don't really know how it works, and the fact that a piece is in a museum or the same piece costs thousands of dollars is enough for them to consider it as "good art". Nowadays the value of everything is measured in money, not talent or hard work.



Absolutely.

Of course, at the risk of sounding too pedantic, the value of everything is always measured in money, it's just that talent and hard work used to better equate to wider exposure, and therefore, higher pricetags. As it got easier for artists to get attention by doing simply more outrageous antics, regardless of the quality of technique.


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## FIXXXER

I have always been a negator of so called "art" as it's being viewed by most people as a subjective thing, instead of observing with commen sense!
For me art means effort and difficulty. Imagine writing an opera? Yeah, that's art! Imagine a painting that looks so realistic and detailed that it appears to be a photo, yeah that's art!
Imagine electronic music (the kind of that can not be done wit a few mouse click) its extremely complicated and elavorate, yeah i'd see that as art too.

"A red blotch" on a green background? 
Hell no, this is not art, no matter how hard people are trying to sell it as such, it's stupid and everyone who thiks of this as art is simply stupid.
This also applies to any "extreme" art, stuffing colour filled egs into your vagina and then squeezing the egs onto a canvas isn't art either.


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## Winspear

FIXXXER said:


> Hell no, this is not art



I once had a debate with a friend about how to define or limit art (the broad term, music etc included, not just visual art) and came to a conclusion myself which I have stuck by since.
I believe that as soon as just one person considers something as art, it becomes so, and is undeniably so to anyone able to follow the logic of how art is defined. To say otherwise pushes us into the territory of trying to set boundaries based on technicality, talent, taste and such, which I think is wrong, completely pointless, and entirely impossible to conclude.
It just takes one person to create something, no matter how small (or even to point out something that already exists for non-artistic purpose) and proclaim it as art. From that point on, we are forced to look at it with an artistic mindset and attempt to perceive things from it. We may fail, and consider the subject to be rubbish, but just the fact that such consideration is being given to a display in a different way to which we look at inanimate objects, makes it undeniably art. We may look at something and not consider it art, but the moment we discover that somebody else _does_, it becomes art to us as well.
As such, art isn't a title to be earned. It isn't special. It is simply any degree of expression. That which separates us from other species who do not engage in art. All such things are art, and we can consider them great, good, or bad - but never _not art. _
I hope this logic makes sense.


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## odibrom

@Winspear I'm there with you. Just because one doesn't understand something as art, doesn't mean it isn't, only that that someone needs to change his/hers point of view on things... As I said in the beginning, many forms and expressions of visual art are not to be gazed upon, but rather laughed at. Other are just the "artist" personal expression of a visual "Fuck You", to the audience, obviously...

The idea of posting what one eats every day in the social media isn't a novelty of the social media, it was already made at the art world, way back in the 50/60s. The Art object is no longer intended to outlive its author. Many are really limited to an instant (and I'm not only speaking of photography). This means that the idea of art is no longer attached to or about the object or its execution. Failing to understand this is not understanding art at all, in any of its expressions, music included.


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## FIXXXER

Winspear said:


> I once had a debate with a friend about how to define or limit art (the broad term, music etc included, not just visual art) and came to a conclusion myself which I have stuck by since.
> I believe that as soon as just one person considers something as art, it becomes so, and is undeniably so to anyone able to follow the logic of how art is defined. To say otherwise pushes us into the territory of trying to set boundaries based on technicality, talent, taste and such, which I think is wrong, completely pointless, and entirely impossible to conclude.
> It just takes one person to create something, no matter how small (or even to point out something that already exists for non-artistic purpose) and proclaim it as art. From that point on, we are forced to look at it with an artistic mindset and attempt to perceive things from it. We may fail, and consider the subject to be rubbish, but just the fact that such consideration is being given to a display in a different way to which we look at inanimate objects, makes it undeniably art. We may look at something and not consider it art, but the moment we discover that somebody else _does_, it becomes art to us as well.
> As such, art isn't a title to be earned. It isn't special. It is simply any degree of expression. That which separates us from other species who do not engage in art. All such things are art, and we can consider them great, good, or bad - but never _not art. _
> I hope this logic makes sense.



I absolutely understand what you are saying but i can't entirely agree!
I still think that it is indeed possible to define or "measure" art and this is by sticking to simple common sense.
Following what you have described and leaving out some key criteria like technicality, execution, effort etc. would automatically render anything into art


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## JohnIce

FIXXXER said:


> I have always been a negator of so called "art" as it's being viewed by most people as a subjective thing, instead of observing with commen sense!
> For me art means effort and difficulty. Imagine writing an opera? Yeah, that's art! Imagine a painting that looks so realistic and detailed that it appears to be a photo, yeah that's art!
> Imagine electronic music (the kind of that can not be done wit a few mouse click) its extremely complicated and elavorate, yeah i'd see that as art too.



If we're talking strictly about craftsmanship and technique, then practically anything CAN be done with a few mouse clicks though. There isn't much in music, cinema, painting or sculpting that between Adobe and CNC and 3D-printers etc. can't be perfected far beyond the skill of the artist, with little difficulty or effort. In other words, unless you're physically present while an artist is making something, you will never actually know for sure how difficult it was to make. The other thing is, according to Dunning and Kruger, to accurately evaluate difficulty you yourself have to be as capable or more so than the person you're judging. What you refer to as "common sense" doesn't cut it. Case in point: People who don't play guitar think tapping is the most impressive thing in the world. Their "common sense" is a useless way to measure difficulty or effort and by extension it's a useless way to define art.


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## bostjan

That guy or gal painting the red blotch on a green background might be in possession of incredible technical painting skills, though. In that case, the blotchy painting is not because of a limit of available skills, but because of some statement the artist wishes to make.
At the end of the day, it's still a blotch, though, so, it's up to the viewer to determine its value. I don't think skill level is a good gauge.
When an artist outputs some art and simply says "here is some art," it seems that people generate their own interpretations and try to push those onto each other. Usually when an artist exhibits a piece with some forced explanation, I find myself disbelieving its honesty.


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## FIXXXER

JohnIce said:


> If we're talking strictly about craftsmanship and technique, then practically anything CAN be done with a few mouse clicks though. There isn't much in music, cinema, painting or sculpting that between Adobe and CNC and 3D-printers etc. can't be perfected far beyond the skill of the artist, with little difficulty or effort. In other words, unless you're physically present while an artist is making something, you will never actually know for sure how difficult it was to make.



This is incorrect and i can explain why. Art can not be done with a few mouse clicks!
Do you know how much work it is to design something on the PC?
No matter if it's music, illustaration or even a "code" for a CNC ma chine, this is extremely time consuming. 

Additional to this you need A LOT of skill and knowledge, so yeah, you can not simply put anyone in front of a pc and let 
"him" design something this is not how it works.



JohnIce said:


> The other thing is, according to Dunning and Kruger, to accurately evaluate difficulty you yourself have to be as capable or more so than the person you're judging. What you refer to as "common sense" doesn't cut it. Case in point: People who don't play guitar think tapping is the most impressive thing in the world. Their "common sense" is a useless way to measure difficulty or effort and by extension it's a useless way to define art.



This is actually how i "judge" almost anything in life, combine it with common sense and you'll have a pretty straight forward way to differentiate "art" from "crap"


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## FIXXXER

bostjan said:


> That guy or gal painting the red blotch on a green background might be in possession of incredible technical painting skills, though. In that case, the blotchy painting is not because of a limit of available skills, but because of some statement the artist wishes to make.



I do understand your point but to be honest, this is a pretty blue-eyed view!

It's like saying, yeah i can play the guitar perfectly, i have literally mastered the instrument like no other but,
i'd rather play absolutely incoherent notes with no rythmical or tonal context and i only do it because i wish to make a statement...


----------



## JohnIce

FIXXXER said:


> This is incorrect and i can explain why. Art can not be done with a few mouse clicks!
> Do you know how much work it is to design something on the PC?
> No matter if it's music, illustaration or even a "code" for a CNC ma chine, this is extremely time consuming.



Originally, yes. But then that code can be copy/pasted (or stolen) by someone and only modified from there, or given a GUI that opens it up to the billions of people who can't write code, eventually made into an algorithm included as a keyboard shortcut in the next software update and finally neatly packaged in $5 iPhone apps. The complex stuff I can do with one key press in an Omnisphere preset would take EDM visionaries a day to program 10 years ago, and probably took whoever made the preset a good while too. But for me, "the artist", it was handed to me on a platter as part of a download. And you, the consumer, have no way of knowing any of this. I, the artist, can choose to do everything from scratch or I can speed up the process with presets, samples and templates and YOU probably couldn't tell the difference, that's my point. The effort I put in, or lack thereof, isn't something you get to see so how would you know? All you can do is guess.



FIXXXER said:


> Additional to this you need A LOT of skill and knowledge, so yeah, you can not simply put anyone in front of a pc and let
> "him" design something _this is not how it works_.



It kind of is. These examples are possibly on the more complex side but there are hundreds if not thousands of iPhone apps basically doing the same thing. Give it 2-3 years and your dog can make this on your phone:
http://www.flow-machines.com/tag/listen-to-artificial-intelligence-music/
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/rutgers-artificial-intelligence-art-1019066



FIXXXER said:


> This is actually how i "judge" almost anything in life, combine it with common sense and you'll have a pretty straight forward way to differentiate "art" from "crap"



You judge "almost anything" by being better at it? Combined with "common sense", which is to knowledge what colloidal silver and magnet bracelets are to medicine. Don't get me wrong, you can view art anyway you like, I'm not judging, but your whole definition of art is full of logical holes to me, that's why I replied  If it makes sense to you then by all means keep at it.


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## FIXXXER

JohnIce said:


> Originally, yes. But then that code can be copy/pasted (or stolen) by someone and only modified from there, or given a GUI that opens it up to the billions of people who can't write code, eventually made into an algorithm included as a keyboard shortcut in the next software update and finally neatly packaged in $5 iPhone apps. The complex stuff I can do with one key press in an Omnisphere preset would take EDM visionaries a day to program 10 years ago, and probably took whoever made the preset a good while too. But for me, "the artist", it was handed to me on a platter as part of a download. And you, the consumer, have no way of knowing any of this. I, the artist, can choose to do everything from scratch or I can speed up the process with presets, samples and templates and YOU probably couldn't tell the difference, that's my point. The effort I put in, or lack thereof, isn't something you get to see so how would you know? All you can do is guess.



I absolutely understand, though the Omnisphere example is a bit far fetched as Sound design can be a more intuitive process where, writing a code
can not be done with intuition only. It's also what you make out of the sound, playing a simple note or playing a complex melody with the exact same sound is
two different things, this is where the common sense comes into play.




JohnIce said:


> You judge "almost anything" by being better at it? Combined with "common sense", which is to knowledge what colloidal silver and magnet bracelets are to medicine. Don't get me wrong, you can view art anyway you like, I'm not judging, but your whole definition of art is full of logical holes to me, that's why I replied  If it makes sense to you then by all means keep at it.



Haha of course not, maybe i did not describe it properly!
I'll try to explain,

If i see somebody who plays guitar but not as good as i do, i am in some way eligible to criticise the guy be is positive or negative criticism.
If i see someone who plays guitar much better than i do, i am still "allowed" for criticism as i can logically judge the playing.

Now the thirr, if i do not know anything about guitar and see the first guy playing, i can think that he is a guitar god, which can be seen as my opinion but not
as a solid statement and that's what i mean by using "comon sense".

Another example:

I do not know how to speak chinese!
So, does that make people who can speak chinese all artists or let's say better than me? Definitively not!

I also do not know how to paint!
So, does this make the guy who can paint stuff so realistically that it looks like a photography!? Yes, absolutely!


It's a matter of how you do something and what is required to do it and IMHO this can only be judged by common sense,
everything else leaves too many loopholes open for "fake art". Taste is also often described as a main factor when it comes
to jsuging art of any kind but that's also a even bigger loophole, as it basically allows anyone to do anything and get a reaction,
be it positive or nagative.

Basically i am trying to say that art should always be taken with a grain of salt! 


EDIT: about personal Taste:













Person A: well it's the Mona Lisa this is true art!

Person B: yeah, well, OK but for my personal taste the smiley
face is just as good if not better.

This is where common sense SHOULD come into play, no matter how you twist this,
person B can simply not be right, especially if the only "fact" is the person's own personal taste. 

Allowing personal taste in art is basically eliminating any kind of filter,
everything goes through and using common sense is the only was to filter out
the bullshit.

People in general are mostly not able to differentiate these things as many other
factors like, expectation, bias, group pressure, self-display etc. play a role.


----------



## bostjan

FIXXXER said:


> I do understand your point but to be honest, this is a pretty blue-eyed view!
> 
> It's like saying, yeah i can play the guitar perfectly, i have literally mastered the instrument like no other but,
> i'd rather play absolutely incoherent notes with no rythmical or tonal context and i only do it because i wish to make a statement...


...which is what I hear non-musicians say about John Petrucci or Misha Mansoor or even Alan Holdsworth all of the freaking time.

I think it's more about context and audience reaction. If John Fogerty busted out a crazy sweep-picked diminished seventh arpeggio solo during "Bad Moon Rising," people would hate it, but we know that doing such a thing would require a level of technique mastery we had never seen from him before. Same reaction if Ron Jarzombek put together a Blotted Science show that surprised the audience with all CCR cover songs, just for the opposite reason.

So, if I go to the museum of modern art and see the actual Mona Lisa on display, my thought is going to be too look as closely as possible to see what is "wrong with it," because the context isn't logical, whereas the smiley face would fit right in.

Art isn't simply about making something that happens to be difficult to make, it's about cultural relevance.


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## JohnIce

FIXXXER said:


> I absolutely understand, though the Omnisphere example is a bit far fetched as Sound design can be a more intuitive process where, writing a code
> can not be done with intuition only. It's also what you make out of the sound, playing a simple note or playing a complex melody with the exact same sound is
> two different things, this is where the common sense comes into play.



Omnisphere is 100% code though, and the DAW you use it in is code. The Midi keyboard you control it with is code. The "intuitive process of sound design" is only intuitive because someone, not the artist, took care of the code already. And I don't know if you've used Omnisphere, but a ton of the presets are made in such a way that they automatically play complex melodies and rhythms out of one key press. My point is I can create something that seems incredibly difficult and complex using tools that are designed to make it butt-simple. I can edit my guitar takes to sound like I have flawless rhythm. I can lift a sample and call it my own. It's incredibly easy in 2018 to seem more skilled than you are, which leads me to think skill is a so-so quantifier for artistic value.



FIXXXER said:


> Haha of course not, maybe i did not describe it properly!
> I'll try to explain,
> 
> If i see somebody who plays guitar but not as good as i do, i am in some way eligible to criticise the guy be is positive or negative criticism.
> If i see someone who plays guitar much better than i do, i am still "allowed" for criticism as i can logically judge the playing.
> 
> Now the thirr, if i do not know anything about guitar and see the first guy playing, i can think that he is a guitar god, which can be seen as my opinion but not
> as a solid statement and that's what i mean by using "comon sense".
> 
> Another example:
> 
> I do not know how to speak chinese!
> So, does that make people who can speak chinese all artists or let's say better than me? Definitively not!
> 
> I also do not know how to paint!
> So, does this make the guy who can paint stuff so realistically that it looks like a photography!? Yes, absolutely!



I don't know if you're familiar with Dunning and Kruger's research, but what you said about being able to "logically judge the playing" of a far more experienced guitar player, is basically what they found to be untrue and that's why their study became so famous. They also found the inverse, that someone who's incredibly skilled and experienced may _*under*_estimate how difficult something is. Steve Vai probably looks at John Petrucci and thinks: "that's just alternate picked 3-note per string sixtuples in E Phrygian, what's everyone getting so excited about?" Again, my point is that your individual evaluation of how difficult something is, is biased and possibly way off, so in the end what you think is a logical judgement is actually just your subjective taste. Like everyone else's.



FIXXXER said:


> It's a matter of how you do something and what is required to do it and IMHO this can only be judged by common sense,
> everything else leaves too many loopholes open for "fake art". Taste is also often described as a main factor when it comes
> to jsuging art of any kind but that's also a even bigger loophole, as it basically allows anyone to do anything and get a reaction,
> be it positive or nagative.
> 
> Basically i am trying to say that art should always be taken with a grain of salt!



Given that you're German and I'm Swedish and we're talking english to each other, maybe what each of us mean by "common sense" is different. I think common sense is a placeholder argument when you can't explain something and don't want to learn more. The only difference between common sense and subjective taste is that subjective taste is honest about not being based on scientific evidence, whereas common sense isn't  But again, maybe you and I are using the term differently.



FIXXXER said:


> Person A: well it's the Mona Lisa this is true art!
> 
> Person B: yeah, well, OK but for my personal taste the smiley
> face is just as good if not better.
> 
> This is where common sense comes into play, no matter how you twist this,
> person B can simply not be right, especially if the only "fact" is the person's own personal taste. Allowing personaL taste IS basically eliminating any kind of filter,
> everything goes through but if you use common sense you can easily filter out
> the bullshit.



Does either of them have to be "right"? Both of them say what their opinion is, both of them are honest. If Person B genuinely doesn't think the Mona Lisa is more enjoyable than the smileyface, then the Mona Lisa doesn't do Person B any good. Even if the Mona Lisa is in the dictionary as THE definition of true art, it doesn't do Person B any good. Do you think Person B doesn't deserve art and entertainment they can enjoy simply because they don't like the Mona Lisa?


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## odibrom

... again, art is not about the object. It is not the MonaLisa versus the Smiley (or anything else). Not being about the object, it doesn't really matters how hard or well it is executed. So, what is art about? That's the question everyone should be asking.

Here are some ideas:

Art is about possibilities and mind expansion.
Art is about feelings, which includes every single one, good or bad.
Art is about sharing, meaning that social media could be understood as an art form.
Art is about surprise and mystery (similar to the feelings thing).
Art is about investigation and discovery... of the self, for example...
So, with this in mind, we can say that Art is subjective, meaning that it is related to how the observer perceives it. What is art to some may not be to others... or can it be?

I like to explore the idea that a painting only exists when there is light upon it. In the dark there is no painting. However, the painting image can still exist within a viewer's memory, either in the dark or miles away. When that happens, that painting can be called art... right? So art is what is left when everything else is gone... how about that?


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## TedEH

odibrom said:


> I like to explore the idea that a painting only exists when there is light upon it.


The light part of this seems inconsequential. The only thing the light serves to do is enable to you to perceive something. If your eyes are closed or you face the other way, you are equally unable to perceive the piece at that time. Does then everything cease to exist while you don't perceive it? The next time you stub your toe in a dark room, I don't imagine you'd be doubting the existence of things you can't see.

The best way that I can define art (and I'm sure it's not a good definition either, someone could probably poke holes in this easily) is that it's anything that serves as an expression, whether it's intentional or not. It's just the word we use to describe our valuation of something we think of as an expression. If we see a painting or hear a song or evaluate something that a person built, we see that as an expression of the artists talent or intention, so we evaluate it under that umbrella of art. The things we exclude from "art" are the things that we either don't think are trying to express anything, or that we're just excluding intentionally as an attempt to devalue the thing that we don't like very much. But that's all it is. Subjective evaluations of whatever we perceive to be an expression.


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## odibrom

errr... a painting is because of light. Without light the painting ceases to exist as a painting an only as an object, besides, it is an idea to explore, not the truth (whatever it may be). The suggestion of "someone facing away from it or closing eyes" is present in the following sentence of that paragraph, so your point was???. A painting not being lit is not a painting, it's only a 3 dimensional object. Color, which is THE OBJECT of a painting, is another dimension, didn't you know that? Its material existence (pigments and paint/inks) is only a vessel for the color it intents to transmit. In the absence of light, there is no MonaLisa.

You're reading me too literally, expand your vision, express some poetry...


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## TedEH

odibrom said:


> a painting is because of light.


I thought a painting was because of paint.



odibrom said:


> Color, which is THE OBJECT of a painting, is another dimension, didn't you know that?


I'm pretty sure that's not how color works. The properties that cause you to perceive those colors when light is present don't cease to exist along with the light.



odibrom said:


> You're reading me too literally


If you're going to use actual physical properties to define what art is, then I don't see any other way to read it than literally. Otherwise you're just diving deep into less-than-meaningful subjective interpretations of the world. The physical properties of the world are not made of poetry. Does a song stop existing when it's not playing? Does something make a sound if nobody is around to hear it?

Don't get me wrong, I understand the separation between the sort of concept or intellectual value of something (the song vs. the tape it's recorded on vs the speaker transmitting it to you, the content or message of an image vs. the canvas you painted it on vs. the light hitting your eyes, etc). But that kind of breakdown, IMO, is meaningless without rooting it in some kind of reality.


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## odibrom

A painting is because of light, no light = no painting... or can you paint in the dark with the precision of Leonardo? You could get close if you knew where everything is and use your touch senses to do the painting, however, you'll only know what you'd do with some light on. That's what many street artist did back in the 80's on New York (and other places) subway trains. The paint material can be transported and applied in the dark, but one will only know the result when it is lit. Therefore the meaning of a painting is because of light and that color (which is light, btw and does not belong to physical objects) is it's OBJECT (meaning that color is the underlying theme of a painting).

Yah, I know too many parentheses in that previous paragraph makes it hard to read, sorry about that...

And I'm also pretty sure that you're either not following or doing this "witch hunt" on purpose... so be it your way if you will, you're right, take the bike.


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## Hollowway

I find it interesting that many conservatives feel that we should “let the market work it out” when it comes to business and finance, but want all sorts of regulation and rules when it comes to social issues and art. Bottom line is that if loads of people prefer a smiley emoji to the Mona Lisa, why do you need to regulate it with your idea of common sense? I personally don’t find the Mona Lisa anything special. But I LOVE modern stuff, and will fight all day long that I like Damien Hirst’s stuff over Rembrandt.

And it should be pointed out that conservatives, by definition, do not like the present as much as the past. So what a conservative finds artistic now wasn’t probably not in the past. Things like jazz, distorted guitar, flatted fifths, etc were all regarded as “unmusical” in the past. People found The Beatles inappropriate, for Pete’s sake. There is no measure to say that John Cage’s 4’33” is not art. Irrespective of whether he can play piano no not, whether the audience was pissed off or enjoyed it, or whether one person likes it or not, there are plenty of us who think it’s art. I, personally, think it’s one of the coolest pieces of music in history. I don’t care if other people like it or not. I happen to find classical art boring, and I artistic. Technically good, but my brain doesn’t start firing off alpha waves when I see it. 
So from my view, if someone doesn’t like the art I like, no worries. But I still like it.


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## JohnIce

Hollowway said:


> I find it interesting that many conservatives feel that we should “let the market work it out” when it comes to business and finance, but want all sorts of regulation and rules when it comes to social issues and art. Bottom line is that if loads of people prefer a smiley emoji to the Mona Lisa, why do you need to regulate it with your idea of common sense? I personally don’t find the Mona Lisa anything special. But I LOVE modern stuff, and will fight all day long that I like Damien Hirst’s stuff over Rembrandt.
> 
> And it should be pointed out that conservatives, by definition, do not like the present as much as the past. So what a conservative finds artistic now wasn’t probably not in the past. Things like jazz, distorted guitar, flatted fifths, etc were all regarded as “unmusical” in the past. People found The Beatles inappropriate, for Pete’s sake. There is no measure to say that John Cage’s 4’33” is not art. Irrespective of whether he can play piano no not, whether the audience was pissed off or enjoyed it, or whether one person likes it or not, there are plenty of us who think it’s art. I, personally, think it’s one of the coolest pieces of music in history. I don’t care if other people like it or not. I happen to find classical art boring, and I artistic. Technically good, but my brain doesn’t start firing off alpha waves when I see it.
> So from my view, if someone doesn’t like the art I like, no worries. But I still like it.



Top post  I prefer art that's "disposable" in a way, I'd rather go through life exploring a never-ending stream of new and thought-provoking art, rather than just enjoying my classics decade after decade. Art with some longevity is awesome, but not crucial for me. And "Timeless" art is to me not as interesting as urgent, surprising art, art that captures what is happening this week. I LOVE how social media makes it possible for us to experience art straight out of the oven like that. To me the Mona Lisa, or Zeppelin, is more anthropology at this time, still fascinating and enjoyable but it's a different experience.



Hollowway said:


> I find it interesting that many conservatives feel that we should “let the market work it out” when it comes to business and finance, but want all sorts of regulation and rules when it comes to social issues and art.



I'm confused by this too  But I guess the inverse of that (unregulated art and social freedom, but hard regulations on everything else) is the left's bag. So even though what you point out about conservatives boggles my mind too, maybe it's one of those "we dislike the left so much we must disagree with them even when they agree with us" kinda things.


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## TedEH

odibrom said:


> not following or doing this "witch hunt" on purpose


It's not a witch hunt, it's two posts in which I happen to disagree with your interpretation of things, don't take it personally. It's very possible that I just can't/don't follow your line of thinking. Although, I don't think I'm misunderstanding, just disagreeing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I disagree with the idea that a painting is only a painting (or that it only contains any artistic value) because of light. Nothing says we have to agree on that.



odibrom said:


> or can you paint in the dark with the precision of Leonardo?


To be fair, how many people can do that in the light in the first place?


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## lurè

bostjan said:


> That guy or gal painting the red blotch on a green background might be in possession of incredible technical painting skills, though. In that case, the blotchy painting is not because of a limit of available skills, but because of some statement the artist wishes to make.
> At the end of the day, it's still a blotch, though, so, it's up to the viewer to determine its value. I don't think skill level is a good gauge.
> When an artist outputs some art and simply says "here is some art," it seems that people generate their own interpretations and try to push those onto each other. Usually when an artist exhibits a piece with some forced explanation, I find myself disbelieving its honesty.



This is true because you can, from an academic point of view, teach how to paint, draw and make a sculpture but none can teach you how to make a masterpiece.
There is no scientific,logical or rational process which lead something to be considered art or a masterpiece.
Forcing an explanation or a philosphycal meaning doesn't automatically make something art: some of the most famous mastepieces have been made with apparently no meaning and for quite futile reasons ( Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel because he signed a contract with the Pope).
Someone could say that even a 10 years old kid could paint better than Picasso:


But Picasso at 16 yo made this:



Sum: skill + no meaning doesnt mean art
no skill + meaning doesn't mean art
no skill + no meaning doesn't mean art

So what does "art" mean? I hoestly don't know and I think none knows. Probably the day we'll figure out what it means , art will stop to exist.


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## odibrom

TedEH said:


> (...) I disagree with the idea that a painting is only a painting (or that it only contains any artistic value) because of light. Nothing says we have to agree on that.



Feel free to disagree, but please explain where have I spoke about "artistic value" related to a lit painting? Please, also develop your idea of how you think/know colors work.



TedEH said:


> To be fair, how many people can do that in the light in the first place?



There are far too many you know, the level of execution has exponentially grown since the 1500s... there are far better brushes, paints, pigments, solvents, canvas and other surfaces to pain over, as well as, who knew, far more forms of artificial light to lit the object during its execution, which did not exist in the 1500s (obviously), which means that there is far more time to dedicate to the execution than there was back then... and you know, artist are traditionally nocturnal persons... hey, no light at night!... and far too many comas in this sentence... shame on me.


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## odibrom

... and deepening the idea of art not being about the object, allow me to risk a comprehensive (I hope) definition of art.

Art is a metaphor within a given social context. As so, it is most relevant in a specific period of time and space of the human cultures (plural). It has, however, the ability to outlive its context and to grow beyond its limits, absorbing and transforming other social contexts. As a metaphor, it is not necessarily about the social context where it is born, but rather about whatever the author feels on... anything.

These sentences explain why art is sometimes difficult to understand and also why some objects are _universally_ considered as so.

What say you?


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## TedEH

odibrom said:


> but please explain where have I spoke about "artistic value" related to a lit painting?


Is that not what you mean when you say a painting doesn't exist without light? Because clearly that's not *literally* true. Like I said, things don't stop existing when you stop perceiving them.



odibrom said:


> Please, also develop your idea of how you think/know colors work.


It may not be your intention, but this kinda just comes off as condescending. I know how color works well enough. I understand the idea of how we technically are just perceiving the different wavelengths of light as they hit our eyes - but the light is (in my opinion) just the transmitter of the information, not the information itself. I just assign the value of "which part of this is the art" to the item that causes the light to take that form, not the light itself. To me, it doesn't become art at the point that you perceive it as such- it already was. It's a difference of opinion/interpretation, and there's arguably not much real-world basis to either argue for or against either interpretation. It's as vague as the definition of art in itself.

Yes, I'll give you that I could have presented my opinion in a less argumentative way. I don't think you're "wrong", I just don't share your definition of what makes art.
In terms of not following you I'll admit I had no idea what you meant by "the color/object of a painting is another dimension".

I think our big difference of opinion lies in where we interpret something to go from being not-art to being art. Your focus is on the experience, and my focus is on the creation or the expression. Sort of like, to you, you're saying "art is in the meaning of what I experience", whereas I'm saying "art is in the process and the expression as much (or possibly moreso) than in the experience on the receiving end".

Another way to say it maybe is that you're defining art as "this becomes art when I experience it as such".
And I've defined it as "this becomes art when someone has created it as such."

In that sense, I call a painting art because it was the painters expression, but I don't call a nice looking view art because as an atheist I don't consider it to have been anyone's expression. Someone else might look at a nice view and say that this is art to them because they've defined art by their experience. Neither is wrong per se.


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## Hollowway

lurè said:


> This is true because you can, from an academic point of view, teach how to paint, draw and make a sculpture but none can teach you how to make a masterpiece.
> There is no scientific,logical or rational process which lead something to be considered art or a masterpiece.
> Forcing an explanation or a philosphycal meaning doesn't automatically make something art: some of the most famous mastepieces have been made with apparently no meaning and for quite futile reasons ( Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel because he signed a contract with the Pope).
> Someone could say that even a 10 years old kid could paint better than Picasso:
> View attachment 60233
> 
> But Picasso at 16 yo made this:
> View attachment 60234
> 
> 
> Sum: skill + no meaning doesnt mean art
> no skill + meaning doesn't mean art
> no skill + no meaning doesn't mean art
> 
> So what does "art" mean? I hoestly don't know and I think none knows. Probably the day we'll figure out what it means , art will stop to exist.



Wow, that realism one is really good! I had no idea Picasso could do that sort of work! It reminds me of when I saw Steve Lukather tearing it up, and I had always assumed from his playing in Toto that he didn't have serious chops.


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## odibrom

@TedEH going from a painting to it being art or having artistic value is a big lip of faith and I did not write that.

Let's go back a lot, before the word art comes into play with man made objects. Also, lets speak a little about light, energy and communication.

I've read somewhere that any form of energy can be used to generate communication from entity A to entity B. Light is a manifestation of energy, it exists, for us humans, between the Infra Red and Ultra Violet frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. Other animals sense different intervals. It's curious that the limits of the human visible spectrum of light have names of colors... That's because all visible colors for humans exist between the Reds and Violets, it also means that color is light... and without any light within this limited interval, there is no color... for us humans.

There are multiple forms of communicating with light, but those can be resumed to basically 2: one removes light frequencies while the other adds light frequencies, which are then named as subtractive or additive (there is also an hybrid mode, but is difficult to explain and doesn't add to the conversation). The subtractive mode is related to print and paint, and drawing, writing and so on. The Additive mode is related to almost all forms of screens, TVs, datashows, PCs, Cinema, etc. Nevertheless, color is light and without a light source, there is no color. This also means that we only see reflections of light over most common objects as these do not emit light. We see a red object because it is reflecting a spectrum of Red frequencies and absorbing all others. This means that it must be lit with some sort of light. If we see it red under white light then its pigments are reflecting the red color. If we change the light color, we'll see something different... and this is why white is the sum of all colors at the same intensity...

... then...

All communications imply the existence of a few elements: an origin, a "path", a code and a target. Any break or deformation in this system means that the message does not meet its objective. If one is to communicate something with colors, light is the path and without it there can be no communication nor message. As you read these words, there is light being emitted from your screen to your eyes, if the your screen dies before you read it, this message also dies for you, it becomes non existent for you, you cannot access it.

...

These are the rules that bind art, any form of art. Art is, foremost, an open communication, to anyone with open mind to accept it as so. Without an open mind there can be no understanding of the message's code within the art object. Those who consider modern art as crap are at least failing to read the code of said communication, or can simply not be the intended final target, it doesn't mean that the art object is crap nor that the viewer is stupid or close minded.

For someone to read a painting, there must be some light used as medium. This doesn't transform the painting into an art object per se, maybe only if when the lights go off the image persists in the viewer's memory and...

More so, art is not the message, the author, the act of creation, the path, the code nor the target. Art is what is left after all those are gone. It can exist in the individual expression of the author, it can exist inside the path or the message's code for example. The object that triggers the art feeling can be anything within the communication workflow. Also add to the mix that the author is simultaneously a target of himself and creating something that reaches the boundaries of art is creating some sort of a feedback loop that grows inside him... therefore, art is an experience that manifests itself through many forms, it is a "binder medium", it "adds" or builds to anything.

So when does an object becomes a work of art? When it is accepted as so. Accepted by whom? By someone else besides the author...


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## TedEH

^ I understand everything you said. I just disagree with parts of it. Like I said in my last post, I think we have very different interpretations of what art is. To me it is the expression, and to you it is the experience. To me the artistic value lies in the origin or the message, whereas you've described the artistic value to lie within the transmission and reception in the target. Without reconciling the differences between those two, we're not likely to agree on the details that stem from that core difference. We've each attributed the value of art to a different part of the process.

Such as:



odibrom said:


> So when does an object becomes a work of art? When it is accepted as so. Accepted by whom? By someone else besides the author...


In my opinion, art is art as soon as it is expressed. And it definitely doesn't require an audience outside of it's author. If someone makes a painting, is it not art if they don't show it to someone else?


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## odibrom

TedEH said:


> (...)
> In my opinion, art is art as soon as it is expressed. And it definitely doesn't require an audience outside of it's author. If someone makes a painting, *is it not art if they don't show it to someone else?*



That is exactly the point, it isn't. Art is a cultural phenomenon and therefore needs more than one person to acknowledge it as so (one person is not culture in my books)... please pay attention that I did not say that the author's expression is excluded. One (the author also) can recognize art in the author's gestures, performance, expression, as well as in the work's message, context or even concept. Your definition of art seams to be limited to the author's expression or am I reading it wrong? The thing is, it's not (only) up to the author to determine what is or what is not art.

Also remember that in many performative arts there are several levels os artistic value. Most of the time, the author is not the performer, so one needs to understand the different elements do evaluate correctly, there is the author's expression versus the interpreter input... There are also many expressions in visual arts where the author is not the person who executes the work (huge sized sculptures, for example), where there simply is no gesture from the author in the final piece. What if the work of art is conceptualized by 3 or 4 persons and executed by 100s - architecture, maybe...? Does this makes sense now? Yes, art may start at the author's gesture, but that doesn't mean it is art. There are also lots of instances where the author does not intent to do art with something, but it becomes so after a few years gone by.

Don't get me wrong, without extraordinary performance (either intellectually or physically performed) of some people so that the object becomes out of the ordinary and gets people to admire it as something unique, there would be no art. Yes, art starts at the author's intent to communicate, but it is not immediate...


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## TedEH

We have very clearly defined art as something entirely different, and that's fine. Like I said, our disagreements are something I don't think we could reconcile without agreeing on the fundamental differences in how we define what art is in the first place.



odibrom said:


> please pay attention that I did not say that the author's expression is excluded.


Did you not say exactly that?


odibrom said:


> So when does an object becomes a work of art? When it is accepted as so [...] By someone else besides the author...



I also appreciate this line:


odibrom said:


> What if the work of art is conceptualized by 3 or 4 persons and executed by 100s - architecture, maybe...?


This describes what I do for a living very well. A handful of designers whose work is technically executed by a large team rather than by their own hand. I disagree that there's no "gesture from the author" in that work though (depending on what you mean by "gesture", they way you pick your works often makes your statements really vague).

If someone conceptualizes it, but another person executes it, which one is the artist? Is it the designer? Is it the performer? Or is it both? I would argue it's both, but for different reasons.


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## KnightBrolaire

Hollowway said:


> Wow, that realism one is really good! I had no idea Picasso could do that sort of work! It reminds me of when I saw Steve Lukather tearing it up, and I had always assumed from his playing in Toto that he didn't have serious chops.


Picasso was an excellent draftsman:


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## odibrom

TedEH said:


> (...)
> 
> Did you not say exactly that?



No, I did not, again, a little later on I wrote that art can be triggered by any of the communication elements. Some love the tone of a guitar while others will love the phrasing of said guitar player, while others will only understand the concept in which the music resides and care less for all those _minor_ things... What I think you are not understanding is that I think that it is not up to the author to define what is or not art, but to the audience (culture). A man or woman is called an artist after being recognized as so. The opposite is the so called maestro... (the one with lots of patents in guitars and so on, you know whom I'm talking about). An artist couldn't care less about words or labels, an artist cares about what he /she does. It's the culture that calls art to what a creative person do. Sometimes, when one such as Picasso, grows above all others, anything he writes or sneezes is automatically called art.

I think you're only focusing on the creation part of the problem. I think there's way more than just that, and that it is far more complex.


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## TedEH

odibrom said:


> What I think you are not understanding


I'm understanding everything you've said. I'm disagreeing though. Big difference. Don't assume that someone who disagrees with you is only because they don't understand what you're saying.

And you're right -> I am focusing on the creation part. I've said *multiple times* that this is how I define art, and that it's different from how you have defined art. We disagree, can we move on?


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## stams

I have never seen anything interesting in the modern art


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## bostjan

stams said:


> I have never seen anything interesting in the modern art


Tell me more. What sort of art *do* you like?

To me, it's all totally subjective. I think any person could be totally justified in looking at a piece of art, no matter how well received by other people, and say "meh."

As musicians, we deal with it all of the time. I make an album; people say "meh" to it; we all move on to making more albums and saying "meh" to more new music.


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## fps

What, all of it? There's always been a glut of bad art.


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## possumkiller

I blame those damned millenials and they're free online pornography!


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## wankerness

They are?!??!


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## DudeManBrother

possumkiller said:


> I blame those damned millenials and they're free online pornography!


I literally laughed out loud and choked on a pestachio


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