Are Jackson Pollock's Paintings Art?

angrysoba said:
The post in which you added "elitism" was one in which it was argued that people are "conned" into liking things.
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I think the other poster used "con" in the sense of "fooled", quite simply. You can fool yourself, sometimes knowingly, and I've mentioned that I have witnessed this phenomenon. Combined with the fact that I didn't say or imply that this was everyone, and you are quite simply wrong.
 
hgc said:
Lots of people like to say "I could do that," or "my 10 year old nephew could do that," or "anyone could do that." But funny enough, there aren't a lot of people out there creating Pollock knockoffs, or knocking off other abstract artists who people seem to think are making dead simple frauds that are mistaken for art. I wonder why. Maybe it's not as easy as it looks. Just once I'd like to see one of you boors actually go out and buy some paint and show the world your stuff. Just once.

I would bet that the people who could manage to passingly copy a Pollock are skilled painters who could also probably make decent copies of representational art works.
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Exactly. There are all sorts of things that seem obvious in retrospect, but someone has to come up with the idea in the first place, before anyone else. That's the trick.
 
rustypouch said:
Exactly. There are all sorts of things that seem obvious in retrospect, but someone has to come up with the idea in the first place, before anyone else. That's the trick.
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That's kind of a trap I try to keep myself aware of when looking for something to create. I don't try to deliberately copy someone else's work, I use what I find as an inspiration point. If I were to directly copy, I'd have to write somewhere that it is a copy and give the original creator credit.
 
angrysoba said:
You and others here forget the more prosaic possibility that people actually like the type of art you hate. The idea that it must be about marketing or elitism is really a displaced argument from incredulity: you can't believe people like it so it must come down to some deficiency in that person that you have invented for them.
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Actually, for some of us, it's an argument from experience. While patronage, image, elitism, and politics have always been a part of the art world, starting in the late 1960s there was a movement that dramatically altered the focus from the art itself, to the artist. It was no longer about the quality of the work, but about controversy, and the position of the particular artist in relation to society. The sort of art you owned or appreciated didn't matter nearly as much as whether you owned or appreciated the right kind of art, and if it was made by the right kind of artist.

Critiques based on technique and execution gave way to critiques based on political viewpoints, social position, and in-group/out-group membership. This movement exemplified and fed off of the pseudo-intellectualism of post-modernism and deconstructionism; and created a highly incestuous community of artists who became much better known for their social presence than their actual work. Manufactured outrage was the product they were selling.

The heyday of the move was spearheaded by Andy Warhol's appropriately-named Factory. His genius was in convincing others that the antics of the artist were more important and interesting than the art he produced. The spectacle was king, the actual work was window-dressing. Artists began vying with each other to be more and more outrageous, more and more popular, commodotizing their images to sell art that no one would have thought twice about purchasing from anyone who was less well-known. This movement peaked in the 1980s, before fragmenting into various cliques and "schools" that devoted increasing amounts of time and effort into deriding and attacking each other, and less to art and spectacle.
 
luchog said:
Actually, for some of us, it's an argument from experience. While patronage, image, elitism, and politics have always been a part of the art world, starting in the late 1960s there was a movement that dramatically altered the focus from the art itself, to the artist. It was no longer about the quality of the work, but about controversy, and the position of the particular artist in relation to society. The sort of art you owned or appreciated didn't matter nearly as much as whether you owned or appreciated the right kind of art, and if it was made by the right kind of artist.
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But what does that mean for me, a guy with no art training who wandered into a museum and connected with a work? I have no preconceived notions of good art; in fact, I never really cared about art.

If I like Pollock, have I been fooled or am I elitist . . . or do I just like it for it's own sake?
 
xjx388 said:
But what does that mean for me, a guy with no art training who wandered into a museum and connected with a work? I have no preconceived notions of good art; in fact, I never really cared about art.

If I like Pollock, have I been fooled or am I elitist . . . or do I just like it for it's own sake?
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I like a lot of things I would never call good art. There's a difference between liking something because it's decorative, or is your favorite colour, or whatever; and appreciating/understanding something.

Some of it is about education. I like math, but I don't understand much of anything above Trigonometry, and won't without a good deal more education. I can appreciate the beauty of some types of math; but cannot appreciate the beauty of higher maths, because I don't understand them, they're just gibberish at my current education level.

Some of it is about universal, or semi-universal, human themes. Symbols and emotions that are common to us as humans; that almost anyone can see and understand.

A more important question here is "why" you like Pollock. If it's just because it's "pretty", then that's a perfectly good reason to like it; but it doesn't really make it good art. Good art should communicate with those who experience it.
 
luchog said:
I like a lot of things I would never call good art. There's a difference between liking something because it's decorative, or is your favorite colour, or whatever; and appreciating/understanding something.
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Like this?

1504124_437647409696811_498528813_n.jpg
:D
 
Gawdzilla Sama said:
So, non-Pollock bollocks can fool "experts".
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So can non-Shakespeare "bollocks", non-Raphael "bollocks", &c.

The point is that successful forgery is not evidence that the originator is a fraud. It's a non-sequitur. It does not follow.

We're sort of repeating ourselves, but I bring up my earlier analogy: I can replicate Einstein's equations and nobody would be able to tell the difference between his and mine. Does that make him a fraud?
 
luchog said:
I like a lot of things I would never call good art. There's a difference between liking something because it's decorative, or is your favorite colour, or whatever; and appreciating/understanding something.

Some of it is about education. I like math, but I don't understand much of anything above Trigonometry, and won't without a good deal more education. I can appreciate the beauty of some types of math; but cannot appreciate the beauty of higher maths, because I don't understand them, they're just gibberish at my current education level.

Some of it is about universal, or semi-universal, human themes. Symbols and emotions that are common to us as humans; that almost anyone can see and understand.

A more important question here is "why" you like Pollock. If it's just because it's "pretty", then that's a perfectly good reason to like it; but it doesn't really make it good art. Good art should communicate with those who experience it.
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Then it is you employing the elitist criteria that someone must be initiated in art theory before they can opine on what they think is good and bad art. This flies in the face of Belz and others who claim good and bad art is merely subjective.
 
blutoski said:
So can non-Shakespeare "bollocks", non-Raphael "bollocks", &c.

The point is that successful forgery is not evidence that the originator is a fraud. It's a non-sequitur. It does not follow.

We're sort of repeating ourselves, but I bring up my earlier analogy: I can replicate Einstein's equations and nobody would be able to tell the difference between his and mine. Does that make him a fraud?
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Equating Pollock to Einstein? My cardiologist will be calling on you. :mad:
 
angrysoba said:
Then it is you employing the elitist criteria that someone must be initiated in art theory before they can opine on what they think is good and bad art. This flies in the face of Belz and others who claim good and bad art is merely subjective.
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I don't think he said they have to learn "art theory" before they can judge good or bad art.

He said art has to communicate. If you can understand that a message has been made through the art (even without knowing art theory) then you could say its "good art".
 
Segnosaur said:
I don't think he said they have to learn "art theory" before they can judge good or bad art.

He said art has to communicate. If you can understand that a message has been made through the art (even without knowing art theory) then you could say its "good art".
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But why? What message does the Mona Lisa communicate? If I do not know does that mean I am not competent to judge it good art? Or does it mean that devoid of a message it objectively fails some good art standard?
 
Gawdzilla Sama said:
Equating Pollock to Einstein? My cardiologist will be calling on you. :mad:
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It's an analogy, not an 'equating'.

The point was to illustrate a logical fallacy on your part. The ability to copy something does not mean the original creator is a fraud.
 
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