Are Jackson Pollock's Paintings Art?

I amend my statement. 90% word games and 10% petulant non-sequitur by a single poster.
 
hgc said:
I just want to point out that this thread, which used to be about Jackson Pollock, is now 100% word games, like so many other threads gone by. Not complaining, but just pointing it out.
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It's a thread about whether Jackson Pollock's paintings are consistent with the meaning of the word "art". I don't think it's "word games" to discuss the nature of meaning and definition in the context of the topic, as originally posed (i.e. a question of semantics). It's actually much more on topic than all the discussion about whether or not it's "good art".

BTW, for anyone interested in defining "game", be sure to consider the use of it as quoted above. ;)
 
Definitions > Semantics > Word Games.

True this thread is about defining art, so I don't think anyone is either surprised or bothered by a little bit of discussion of the words used being brought up, I mean that is sorta the point.

But we seem to have drifted a little far from source.

But I think we're over complicating it. People have used the "X isn't Y" as a off the cuff, colloquial metaphor for "X isn't good Y" since time began. When Bob tells Ted "Hell man a Chevrolet isn't a real car!" He isn't literally saying that he doesn't think a Chevy meets the literal definition of car, he's making an exaggeration for effect to show that he doesn't think Chevies are good cars.
 
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JoeBentley said:
Definitions > Semantics > Word Games.
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Not sure what this means.

True this thread is about defining art, so I don't think anyone is either surprised or bothered by a little bit of discussion of the words used being brought up, I mean that is sorta the point.

But we seem to have drifted a little far from source.

But I think we're over complicating it. People have used the "X isn't Y" as a off the cuff, colloquial metaphor for "X isn't good Y" since time began. When Bob tells Ted "Hell man a Chevrolet isn't a real car!" He isn't literally saying that he doesn't think a Chevy meets the literal definition of car, he's making an exaggeration for effect to show that he doesn't think Chevies are good cars.
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If that's all that people mean by "Jackson Pollock paintings aren't art" (i.e. they don't actually mean it) then the topic is really just about whether or not it's good art. But surely that could have been clarified earlier if it's the case?
 
JoeBentley said:
Definitions > Semantics > Word Games.

True this thread is about defining art, so I don't think anyone is either surprised or bothered by a little bit of discussion of the words used being brought up, I mean that is sorta the point.

But we seem to have drifted a little far from source.

But I think we're over complicating it. People have used the "X isn't Y" as a off the cuff, colloquial metaphor for "X isn't good Y" since time began. When Bob tells Ted "Hell man a Chevrolet isn't a real car!" He isn't literally saying that he doesn't think a Chevy meets the literal definition of car, he's making an exaggeration for effect to show that he doesn't think Chevies are good cars.
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Apparently some Chevy owners are willing to kill to defend the honor of the '58 Impala.
 
cornsail said:
Some words are very difficult to truly capture with definitions. Wittgenstein's example of "game", quoted above, is a good example.

Another example that comes to mind is "bald". Someone with a single hair on their head would be deemed bald.
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I'm not sure that definitions that aren't exact are the same as no definition at all.
 
Belz... said:
I'm not sure that definitions that aren't exact are the same as no definition at all.
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Well, that's a tad on the ridiculous side. If someone uses the example given, "bald", to mean varying degrees of lack of hair, you can't really say "they might as well have used "hirsute" for all the meaning we can get from that", because that's just not true. Baldness, in whatever degree, would never be equated to hairiness.

Just as in this thread. "I think Pollock's art is crap!" is probably what could be gleaned from most* commenters' posts. It's an opinion, stated in a similar fashion to the "No True Car" argument.

*Most. We know there's at least one exception. :p


ETA: Cornsail is right. I mis-read that line. Triple negatives.... always mess me up.
 
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Belz... said:
I'm not sure that definitions that aren't exact are the same as no definition at all.
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Foolmewunz said:
Well, that's a tad on the ridiculous side. If someone uses the example given, "bald", to mean varying degrees of lack of hair, you can't really say "they might as well have used "hirsute" for all the meaning we can get from that", because that's just not true. Baldness, in whatever degree, would never be equated to hairiness.

Just as in this thread. "I think Pollock's art is crap!" is probably what could be gleaned from most* commenters' posts. It's an opinion, stated in a similar fashion to the "No True Car" argument.

*Most. We know there's at least one exception.
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I think you misread him. I did too at first. He's saying he questions the notion that an inexact definition is the same thing as no definition.

I agree, it is not the same thing. Though I didn't say it was.
 
Gawdzilla Sama said:
No. I am not an ignorant, uneducated, naive pig farmer. I know some people in this thread desperately wish I was, but I'm not.
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I know you're not. You're just are unable to comprehend, for whatever reason, why others are able to see something as art, and you're not.
 
Hmmm... interesting for me, is that two of the points I have been making regarding art and the possibility of defining it have been explicitly made by philosophers, with one of them drawing directly on exactly the same Wittgenstein passage I quoted earlier.

I'll quote them here - with some objections to avoid the charge of quote-mining:

Skepticism about the possibility and value of a definition of art has been an important part of the discussion in aesthetics since the 1950s on, and though its influence has subsided, uneasiness about the definitional project persists. (See section 4, below, and also Kivy 1997, and Walton 2007).

A common family of arguments, inspired by Wittgenstein's famous remarks about games (Wittgenstein, 1953), has it that the phenomena of art are, by their nature, too diverse to admit of the unification that a satisfactory definition strives for, or that a definition of art, were there to be such a thing, would exert a stifling influence on artistic creativity. One expression of this impulse is Weitz's Open Concept Argument: any concept is open if a case can be imagined which would call for some sort of decision on our part to extend the use of the concept to cover it, or to close the concept and invent a new one to deal with the new case; all open concepts are indefinable; and there are cases calling for a decision about whether to extend or close the concept of art. Hence art is indefinable (Weitz, 1956). Against this it is claimed that change does not, in general, rule out the preservation of identity over time, that decisions about concept-expansion may be principled rather than capricious, and that nothing bars a definition of art from incorporating a novelty requirement.

...

A fourth sort of argument suggests that a definition of art stating individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for a thing to be an artwork, is likely to be discoverable only if cognitive science makes it plausible to think that humans categorize things in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. But, the argument continues, cognitive science actually supports the view that the structure of concepts mirrors the way humans categorize things – which is with respect to their similarity to prototypes (or exemplars), and not in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. So the quest for a definition of art that states individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions is misguided and not likely to succeed (Dean, 2003). Against this it has been urged that psychological theories of concepts like the prototype theory and its relatives can provide at best an account of how people in fact classify things, but not an account of correct classifications of extra-psychological phenomena, and that, even if relevant, prototype theory and other psychological theories of concepts are at present too controversial to draw substantive philosophical morals from (Rey, 1983; Adajian, 2005).
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cornsail said:
Psychologists have done a lot of empirical research in this area and largely rejected the idea that we have rule-based (i.e. definitional) representations of concepts, except perhaps in some limited situations (but even then the rule would only comprise part of our representation of the concept). Whether prototype theory, exemplar theory, or something else is the answer is less clear. Murphy's "The Big Book of Concepts" gives a good overview.
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Thanks, I would be interested in looking into that book. Does it contain any research from linguists such as Lakoff, Fillmore, Langacker and Tomasello?
 
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