what passes as art

Dektol Dan said:
The art business is gay. If you aren't gay, find a gay friend.
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That's just not helpful at all.

About the French language analogy, because I don't understand it, no one who speaks French has anything valuable to say: art critique and art language is not a foreign language, it doesn't HAVE to be unintelligible to most folks. (French acually is a different language, it can't help but be very difficult for a non French speaker to understand.) How would you feel if doctors only spoke to you in highly technical medical terms that you couldn't understand? The art world seems to be doing this on purpose to demonstrate its superiority. Perhaps it needs to be unintelligible, because if it explained itself clearly, more folks would realize it's all hype and verbage with no substance. I guess the snooty attitude is mainly what gets to me.

Again, I'm not all hot and bothered about all this, it's just an interesting topic, I think.
 
FrankS said:
That's just not helpful at all.

About the French language analogy, because I don't understand it, no one who speaks French has anything valuable to say: art critique and art language is not a foreign language, it doesn't HAVE to be unintelligible to most folks. (French acually is a different language, it can't help but be very difficult for a non French speaker to understand.) How would you feel if doctors only spoke to you in highly technical medical terms that you couldn't understand? The art world seems to be doing this on purpose to demonstrate its superiority. Perhaps it needs to be unintelligible, because if it explained itself clearly, more folks would realize it's all hype and verbage with no substance. I guess the snooty attitude is mainly what gets to me.

Again, I'm not all hot and bothered about all this, it's just an interesting topic, I think.
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The "Decisive Moment" comes to mind....
 
There is a story that when one of Pablo Picasso's paintings was first put on exhibit at an art exhibit in Paris, one "critic" said it looked "like an explosion in a shingle factory". But Picasso went on to become world-famous.

Be it art, music, literature, drama, or whatever "critics" may "criticize", I have long held the opinion that they are just giving their own personal opinion. Yes, it may have some experience to it, but it's still their opinion.

There has to be some difference given between new productions and things that have "stood the test of time". But even in the academic world, there's a lot of tendency to just regurgitate what they had thrown at them when they were slaving away for their Ph.D's.
 
sitemistic said:
In what way, nextreme? Toward or away from conceptualism?
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Toward it. I guess you can say I finally saw just what a photograph could be about. It could be the geometry, the tonality, the color or the moment captured.
BTW, I like bluegrass music, a genre even more disliked than classical !

Cheers.
 
I would argue the definition of what art is, is whatever the artist thinks it is. I don’t think anybody else can decide.
Weather it’s good or bad or if you like it or dislike is a decision for the audience, the impressionists didn't stop being artists in the 1870s just because a the jury at the Académie didn't understand it.
 
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sitemistic said:
So what art do the posters here have hanging on their walls? Lets bring the discussion home.
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No time or space for that sort of things. My bedroom is more of a hacklab than anything else =)

Sparrow said:
I would argue the definition of what art is, is whatever the artist thinks it is. I don’t think anybody else can decide.
Weather it’s good or bad or if you like it or dislike it is a decision for the audience, the impressionists didn't stop being artists in the 1870s just because a the jury at the Académie didn't understand it.
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I think this is very well thought!
 
FallisPhoto said:
Personally, I think if a guy throws paint at a canvas from across a room, he is an artist -- in the same way that a pigeon taking a dump on a sidewalk is an artist.
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I've had that feeling with certain paintings I've seen. Less so with photography.

At least the guy throwing the paint makes more than the pigeon...
 
sitemistic said:
So what art do the posters here have hanging on their walls? Lets bring the discussion home.
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I have some of my photography, but i don't admit to it when asked (it came with the frame) 🙂
I can definitely state though, there are some photos from the RFF gallery that I said: Man I wish I had a print of that, it would be on my wall !
 
sitemistic said:
So what art do the posters here have hanging on their walls? Lets bring the discussion home.
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I have a Winslow Homer print my parents hung in their house and a painting of a mission in Arizona by a local artist from Eastern PA. And a print of an old map over my desk in the corner of one room. Pedestrian stuff mostly, but I like it.

I also have maybe 5 or 6 photographs I have taken over the years.
 
Hi Frank,

Art/design/form is very similar to language. Text and visuals have a symbiotic relationship. I think there definitely is a visual language and one must be visually "literate" to talk about it and understand how it works.

Art and design use a visual language to communicate. Where the words are line, colour, texture, shape, and whitespace; and the grammar is repetition, alignment, contrast, and proximity. These elements can be used to give emphasis, group like information, and communicate hierarchies of importance—all to enhance clarity. Visual language can be used rhetorically and to illustrate complex abstract ideas. Artists look for visual metaphors, similes, and puns to tell a story… taking images beyond the obvious.

Just because people have eyes, it doesn't mean they can "see". For example, I did not understand Picasso for many years and it was through a long period of study and my own practice that I finally came to understand how important his work was. It's not a bad thing that his work is not accessible to everyone, in a way it is a reflection of his greatness---that there is so much depth to be explored.

Yes, the language can run away with itself and fall in love with itself. Just because I can speak English doesn't mean I can use it like Marin Luthar King. (To continue my annoying language analogies 😉 )
 
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There were a bunch of interesting podcasts from the publisher of Lens Work Magazine (Brooks Jensen I think) on the price being asked for by galleries. I think he is of the thinking that lower prices would make owning (and buying) photography more accessible to the general public. He podcasts a lot, but they're usually quite short. I found them interesting (I have no knowledge of fine art photography sales).
 
sitemistic said:
But if you care about art, you buy it and support the artists.
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For me, that is what it is all about. An artist makes something heartfelt, giving a gift. The viewer finds something moving and heartfelt in their experience of this piece of art, the reciprocal act of receiving the gift.

The crazy thing is that an artist can intend to give one thing, while the viewer can receive something completely different than what was intended!
 
sitemistic said:
"Come on, you can’t confine art to the wall of your den"

But if you care about art, you buy it and support the artists.
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No if I care about an art I try to understand it and it’s artist, no money need change hands.
I can experience and appreciate art that I could never own, I don’t think you can own art anyway.
 
Aren't books way more convenient?

Anyway I think this quite irrelevant, unless strictly speaking about visual art. Buying a record and sticking on your wall won't change anything to help you understand the whole thing =)
 
FrankS said:
art critique and art language is not a foreign language, it doesn't HAVE to be unintelligible to most folks. (French acually is a different language, it can't help but be very difficult for a non French speaker to understand.)
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sirius said:
Art/design/form is very similar to language.
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To push this further, I think the distinction between the language "French" and the language "art critique" (just in spoken/written form, not the art itself as a language) is not as strong as one might think. Back to the mathematics analogy: I have problems explaining my research to people. sometimes people think I'm being snooty, because when they ask me about my research I say "It's hard to explain". It's not that I think the person (or anyone, really) couldn't fundamentally understand, it's just that they don't know the language (a language which took me years to learn, so I'm probably not going to be able to bridge the gap in two minutes). The problem is that the language of mathematics (well, of mathematics "in English") sounds a lot like the day-to-day language of Enlgish. People think that they ought to be able to understand it. This isn't the case with French, because it sounds quite clearly different. Both French and "mathematics" have some overlap with common-use Enlgish (i.e., "Bon voyage" or "exponential growth"), but the overlap with mathematics is greater. The language of art criticism has the same problem, multiplied by ten. But if you consider "language" to be the literal language, combined with the context, and history, and special context-specific meanings of words and phrases (i.e., jargon), then I'd argue that art criticism really is a foreign language. And maybe necessarily so... we certainly couldn't, practially, convert mathematics into the langauge of everyday English (just image trying to do your taxes without the notation of numbers... "I earned fourty-two thousand one-hundred fifty-six dollars and twelve cents, of which thirty percent is..." Good luck completing your T1 this century). I'm not saying for sure that what the art critics are saying can't be said in plain Enlgish, but it doesn't seem totally implausible either.

I'm not hot and bothered, either... I'm just glad that other people worry about these things!
 
MickH said:
Conceptual Art is bollocks. Emperor's new clothes or what?!

I have loads of ideas, does that make me an artist?
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As far as your ideas are well executed, yes.

Unfortunately, most "artists" nowadays just crank out stuff and call it "art", diluting what really is art.

Since "art" is very subjective, the so-called artists (as opposed to the "real" artists), they get away with the loophole question "what is art"?

Art used to follow a set of rules and skill. Rules and skill are inconveniences nowadays.

Rabid conservative absolutists don't make this any better.
 
sitemistic said:
chikne, but you do buy records (or cd's, or mp3's) when you enjoy a piece of musical art.
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Actually, I don't.

I think art should be accessible to everyone, it's a part of local or general culture, and so as someone mentioned earlier, artists should be supported by governments/councils or whatever you want to call it.

A photograph is a piece of paper with stuff printed on it. It's worth nothing....
 
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