Two year old abstract artist

[quarky]

there is an artistic element in worshipping trash.

It's even artsier to not let on that you know its crap...even when you have some hanging in your living room.

The artsiest of all is to sell garbage.

Not everyone can pull that off.

Doing so reeks of art

 

[calebprime]

I smell art

 

[merentha]

The opinions of so-called art experts always brings to mind the incident of the Royal Academy of Arts and the plinth.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Right, because art is a fundamentally subjective. There is very little objective about art, at all.


This only matters as a defect of "Art" if there must be an essential, objective "meaning" to all pieces of art. That's just not the case.

This is a silly argument beloved by woos. It goes "there is a degree of uncertainty about X, therefore any hypothesis is as good as any other!". The problem is that the conclusion only follows if there is total uncertainty, not merely a degree of uncertainty.

Art isn't "fundamentally subjective". The Thinker is an objectively more technically demanding and evocative piece of work than the canoe I made the other day out of Blu-Tac. It's an objective fact that I couldn't sculpt The Thinker. It's an objective fact that to human nervous systems one is more interesting and evocative than the other.

There may be esthetic value to the work- and yes, it may be "accidental"- regardless of the age, species, or method of its production. I have one of these "smears" my daughter did when she was a toddler that I kept and intend to frame someday for just that reason. It is simply more pleasing thant the multiple other "works she produced in the same period, and moreso even than other works she created more deliberately, later.

Both homeopathic medicines and psychic readings of an objects history are intended and pretend to have objective value- they are meant to "work" or be "correct" no matter who the receiver is. That's not so with art.

You wouldn't even try to make an argument like this with regard to other art forms. Opera, plays, TV shows, songs and so forth are judged with a degree of subjectivity, but nonetheless there is also a big degree of objectivity, which is why theatre criticism is possible in the first place. We can say things like "the script was clever" or "the script was cliched", "actor X was believable" or "actor X was a terrible ham" with a significant degree of objectivity.

Some singers are better than others in meaningfully objective ways. Some scripts are better than others in meaningfully objective ways. Some actors are better than others in meaningfully objective ways. Some dancers are better than others in meaningfully objective ways. Some sculptors, painters and so on are better than others in meaningfully objective ways too.

Some food is better than others too - the food at a three star restaurant is better than the food at a corner store, in meaningfully objective ways. Yes, even though there are anosmic people, and even though it's conceivable that there is someone out there perverse enough that they would honestly prefer anything on the menu at the corner store to anything at the menu at the three star restaurant.

In my experience, it certainly is possible. I had that happen to me with "Stranger in a Strange Land", as I dicovered quite recently.

Can you explain that? I don't understand what you are claiming.

"Garbage" is in the eye of the beholder. It is itself a subjective judgement. If it is esthetically pleasing, its origins are irrelevant. A "blinded" test under those circumstances is laughable- it doesn't prove anything because there is no fundamental objectivity to which one can appeal.

There's an additional mistake here. In addition to over-radical subjectivism, you're adding the unsupported assumption that the art scammers in question really do like the junk they wax lyrical about, even though they can't tell it from garbage under blinded conditions. I don't think that's true. I think it looks like garbage to them, and they lie about it.

Esthetic fundamentalism? Your subjective opinion must be the objective truth, therefore they must "really" know they are wrong? This doesn't sound any different that a theist procaliming atheists must be angry at god and are just pretending not to believe.

Sure. And the people really could see the Emperor's clothes. Who are we to say they couldn't, just because one kid couldn't? That kid was a fundamentalist.

Any time a phenomena, including artistic appreciation, only exists when people are told in advance what to see is a delusion. You don't need to be primed beforehand to appreciate an Alma-Tadema, or a Michelangelo. You do need to be primed in advance to see the Emperor's new clothes, or millions of dollars worth of artistic genius in a Pollack.

 

[luchog]

A lot? The overwhelming majority of Renaissance "art", was "corporate" art, produced under the patronage of the Church or private sponsors, with a guiding religious or political narrative. The notion of the individual creative genius simply did not exist in the way that you've implied.
(...)
All the "name" Renaissance painters that you've heard of worked in this way. It'd be interesting to learn of one that didn't.

Yes, I'm aware of how art got produced at the various parts of history. I was a fine art major, after all.

But what you're failing to recognize is that there's a huge difference between commissioned art, and "corporate" art. Simply commissioning a piece doesn't make it "corporate". Most commissioned artwork was created according to the sensibilities of the artist, typically with little input from the patron aside from the subject of the work. While bad artists might tailor the results to the patron to an excessive degree, the great artists rarely did; and the history is replete with patrons reacting less than favourably to the finished work.

Corporate art is arwork that is deliberately created to be nothing more than decorative. It offers no challenge, communicates little, if anything, and serves no purpose aside from filing up an empty space. During the Rennaisance, and increasingly later on in Northern Europe with the rise of the mercantile culture in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Flanders, paintings were commissioned for little purpose other than to be a simple record of a person or event. Nobility would use them to exchange images of children involved in an arranged marriage; Dutch businesses would commission portraits of their leaders in much the same way that modern corporations do. The rising middle classes would commission paintings to decorate walls and serve as visible displays of their wealth. Even so, much of the corporate art produced at the time had some artistic merit, and many of the great artists began their career with corporate portraiture and similar commissions.

Corporate art didn't really become fully divorced from "fine" art until recent times, the result of two major additions to the art world, one technical, one aesthetic. The technical addition was the advent of photography, which resulted in a medium that required far less technical skill to produce than any other medium. This enabled a much larger number of people to promote themselves as artists, without the requirement of spending years perfecting the skills required for more traditional media. (Note: this does not invalidate photography as a legitimate artistic medium, it simply means that it is more prone to bad and pseudo art.) The aesthetic addition was the rise of abstract art movements, particularly non-representational art. This was particularly important in that, while the media were typically the same as traditional art forms; technical skill was greatly de-emphasized. This allowed mere craftsmen who lacked any real artistic sensibility to achieve a certain quasi-artist status, and establish a following among credulous intelligensia by through appeal to a certain aspect of the zeitgeist, independent of the art itself.

That is not to say that abstract art is inherently bad art, or non-art. Quite the contrary. All art is to some extent an abstraction of reality. Good abstract art can evoke images, emotions, and concepts that are readily perceived by its viewers. A classic example is one of Duchamp's early works "Nu descendant un escalier n° 2". An abstract work, it very effectively captures the essense of motion, fragmented in time; giving the viewer a glimpse of the essential components of movement, far more effectively than a naturalistic image of the subject could have. It's the bastardization of abstraction known as non-representational art, pseudo-art which fails to communicate anything of substance, that falls short of the characteristics necessary for it to qualify, a priori, as art.

 

[luchog]

There's an additional mistake here. In addition to over-radical subjectivism, you're adding the unsupported assumption that the art scammers in question really do like the junk they wax lyrical about, even though they can't tell it from garbage under blinded conditions. I don't think that's true. I think it looks like garbage to them, and they lie about it.

I have enough personal experience with those sorts of people to know that for many of them that is very much the case. In a huge percentage, they praise work they personally feel to be crap because necessity for them to do so; because of the social milieu in which the art and criticism exists. Sociopolitical agendas trump objective aesthetic evaluation. Work created by your typical high-school art student wouldn't get a look-in from any of them. But take the same work, and attribute it to a "disadvantaged Black woman", add a socialist/environmentalist/feminist "vision statement"; and the same critics will laud it for its "cultural sensitivity", "powerful vision", and "refusal to be shackled with the archaic, Euro-centric conventions of representational art".

Ultimately the art itself is meaningless. It doesn't matter in the slightest what it is, or how good it is. All that matters is presenting a particular socio-political agenda, or proclaiming one's self in sympathy/solidarity with it.

Any time a phenomena, including artistic appreciation, only exists when people are told in advance what to see is a delusion. You don't need to be primed beforehand to appreciate an Alma-Tadema, or a Michelangelo. You do need to be primed in advance to see the Emperor's new clothes, or millions of dollars worth of artistic genius in a Pollack.

Very well put.

 

[Cavemonster]

-Kevin
1)Name calling doesn't advance your cause or add to your argument. It just makes you harder to communicate with.

2) The same goes for telling someone what they're going to say next and addressing that. That's a straw man and we don't like those around here.

3) I don't think the word objective means what you think it means, or else you're not looking very closely at those things you consider objective. Siskel and Ebert would often disagree about whether a movie was "clever" or "cliched" or whatever. That's why the two thumbs didn't always go the same way. There is television that I think of as tasteless trash, that my brother thinks is brilliant. There are many objective things we CAN say about any type of media, but when talking about the quality, we're rarely making objective statements.

Let's talk about food. My parents went to China, and there were offered gourmet dishes that to them, sounded, smelled and tasted absolutely disgusting. The same can be said for people around the world in cultures not their own. To me a 100 year egg (Chinese delicacy) or Froglegs (Southern Speciality) are both gross. There are some near universals in food, but when you're talking about the best and the fanciest, you are never talking objectively across cultures.

Now, about the OP, let's do a little formal analysis (meaning analysis of form, we won't need tuxedos).
We have a bunch of works in acrylic on canvas.
Some of the pieces are made on multiple canvases arranged together in a row or grid.
On top of a solid colored ground (black or red). The palette is limited to straight white, black, yellow and either blue or red, (in contrast to the canvas color). The paint seems to be applied directly by hand (noticeable handprints) and sometimes directly dribbled from the tube. We've got very worked large smooshy areas, contrasted with small patched and dribbles of clear color where either the paint was applied directly and left, or at the edges of a worked shape.

That's what we see, how does it read?
You may notice three framing elements, not the creation of the 2 year-old artist.
1) Grid imposed on rough organic shapes: a simple and often used contrast.
2) Solid painted backgrounds: Another thing that cleans the whole thing up and makes the smooshes read as deliberate in contrast
3) Limited palette: Black, white and two primaries (mostly red+yellow) is an easy, striking combination the colors of poisonous insects and getting attention. It also goes with almost anything in terms of decoration, by being bold-neutral.

On top of that you have the actual painting by the kid. Just by being done by a kid who doesn't care if she gets messy or get self-conscious about the picture, it's more interesting than an a random adult trying to randomly scatter paint would be. An adult thinks, "oh, I missed a spot there" tries to fill the center of attention, worries about the paint getting too thick and glopping onto the floor. This is why dripping, splashing, marbling, inkblots, peeling paint and a two year-old thrashing randomly sometimes create images that are interesting. Because we wouldn't have composed that way. Google-image "painting" and more than half the compositions you find will have a big old lump of something in or near the middle (the better ones put it at the 1/3 line but that's still pretty predictable) Some of her compositions look like that, and some look nothing like it.

Does that make this work genius? NO! But it does give it a tiny nudge towards being minimally interesting, and along with the framing devices, you've got something with decorative value!

The result is along the lines of the modern art you see in medium-expensive hotels (take a look next time you're in one). How does that fit within this gallery?

Looking at their website They seem to do maybe a dozen group shows a year, with entry fees of $45 - $75 and cash prizes for best in show. Their solo shows are pay-per-wall to exhibit. They have a price range of a couple hundred to a couple thousand for large pieces.

If you're not involved in the art scene, I'll clarify what this adds up to. They make more money from people submitting work, renting walls and taking classes than they do from commissions. Their clients are suburban homeowners and interior decorators. And most importantly, being chosen or one of their group shows =/= being dubbed the next Picasso by the art elite.

For an analogous situation in another medium.
Let's say a parent writes the last word of every line for their child (let's say 7, he's gotta be literate) to fill in the rest of the words. When it's done, the parent cleans up the misspellings and submits it to a small-medium sized greeting card company (with a $50 application fee) who deems it worthy to print in a small run (that hasn't been sold yet)
What this situation says about the state of poetry in general is exactly what the OP says about fine art.

I'd love to talk about other frauds and misunderstandings, but this post is too long already, maybe tomorrow if anyone is interested.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

-Kevin
1)Name calling doesn't advance your cause or add to your argument. It just makes you harder to communicate with.

I don't feel obliged to be polite when I'm talking about a scam.

2) The same goes for telling someone what they're going to say next and addressing that. That's a straw man and we don't like those around here.

It saves time, since art woos are all reading from the same script in my experience.

3) I don't think the word objective means what you think it means, or else you're not looking very closely at those things you consider objective. Siskel and Ebert would often disagree about whether a movie was "clever" or "cliched" or whatever. That's why the two thumbs didn't always go the same way. There is television that I think of as tasteless trash, that my brother thinks is brilliant. There are many objective things we CAN say about any type of media, but when talking about the quality, we're rarely making objective statements.

Oh please.

Just because experts sometimes disagree about how to assess a given work of art doesn't prove the total subjectivity you and Piscivore are trying to establish.

Let's talk about food.

Let's not. We use the phrase "a matter of taste" to refer to things which are valued highly variably between individuals. Trying to compare painting to food preferences is begging the question.

Now, about the OP, let's do a little formal analysis (meaning analysis of form, we won't need tuxedos).
We have a bunch of works in acrylic on canvas.
Some of the pieces are made on multiple canvases arranged together in a row or grid.
On top of a solid colored ground (black or red). The palette is limited to straight white, black, yellow and either blue or red, (in contrast to the canvas color). The paint seems to be applied directly by hand (noticeable handprints) and sometimes directly dribbled from the tube. We've got very worked large smooshy areas, contrasted with small patched and dribbles of clear color where either the paint was applied directly and left, or at the edges of a worked shape.

That's what we see, how does it read?
You may notice three framing elements, not the creation of the 2 year-old artist.
1) Grid imposed on rough organic shapes: a simple and often used contrast.
2) Solid painted backgrounds: Another thing that cleans the whole thing up and makes the smooshes read as deliberate in contrast
3) Limited palette: Black, white and two primaries (mostly red+yellow) is an easy, striking combination the colors of poisonous insects and getting attention. It also goes with almost anything in terms of decoration, by being bold-neutral.

On top of that you have the actual painting by the kid. Just by being done by a kid who doesn't care if she gets messy or get self-conscious about the picture, it's more interesting than an a random adult trying to randomly scatter paint would be. An adult thinks, "oh, I missed a spot there" tries to fill the center of attention, worries about the paint getting too thick and glopping onto the floor. This is why dripping, splashing, marbling, inkblots, peeling paint and a two year-old thrashing randomly sometimes create images that are interesting. Because we wouldn't have composed that way. Google-image "painting" and more than half the compositions you find will have a big old lump of something in or near the middle (the better ones put it at the 1/3 line but that's still pretty predictable) Some of her compositions look like that, and some look nothing like it.

Does that make this work genius? NO! But it does give it a tiny nudge towards being minimally interesting, and along with the framing devices, you've got something with decorative value!

Typical art-woo stuff. "Yes, it's immediately obvious that this is garbage. But if I blather on enough about the state of mind of the artist, it's importance in art history, and the minutiae of the random splotches, I can fool you into thinking it's worth lots and lots of money!".

I notice you have not addressed the elephant in the room - the awkward fact that monkey/elephant/toddler pieces cannot be distinguished from "real" modern art even by experts. If you want to defend woo art, explain that to us.

 

[Cavemonster]

I don't feel obliged to be polite when I'm talking about a scam.

It saves time, since art woos are all reading from the same script in my experience.

Oh please.

Just because experts sometimes disagree about how to assess a given work of art doesn't prove the total subjectivity you and Piscivore are trying to establish.

Let's not. We use the phrase "a matter of taste" to refer to things which are valued highly variably between individuals. Trying to compare painting to food preferences is begging the question.



Typical art-woo stuff. "Yes, it's immediately obvious that this is garbage. But if I blather on enough about the state of mind of the artist, it's importance in art history, and the minutiae of the random splotches, I can fool you into thinking it's worth lots and lots of money!".

I notice you have not addressed the elephant in the room - the awkward fact that monkey/elephant/toddler pieces cannot be distinguished from "real" modern art even by experts. If you want to defend woo art, explain that to us.

Okay, I thought we were all here to explore the truth. If you're going to completely ignore what I wrote and argue against what you think I was going to write, then I guess we can't really communicate.

As I showed above. The piece is "real" piece of mediocre decorative art done in collaboration between a mother and child, that was displayed in a "real" mediocre decorative art gallery.

If you read what I said, it had nothing to do with "the state of mind of the artist, it's importance in art history." It was a formal analysis, just the stuff you can see. I also said nothing to do with how much money it's worth. Like everything else in life, it's worth exactly as much as someone is willing to pay for it.
If you'd like read my post and respond to what's actually there in a respectful way, I'd love to exchange ideas.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Okay, I thought we were all here to explore the truth. If you're going to completely ignore what I wrote and argue against what you think I was going to write, then I guess we can't really communicate.

As I showed above. The piece is "real" piece of mediocre decorative art done in collaboration between a mother and child, that was displayed in a "real" mediocre decorative art gallery.

If you read what I said, it had nothing to do with "the state of mind of the artist, it's importance in art history." It was a formal analysis, just the stuff you can see.

I notice you have not addressed the elephant in the room - the awkward fact that monkey/elephant/toddler pieces cannot be distinguished from "real" modern art even by experts. If you want to defend woo art, explain that to us.

I also said nothing to do with how much money it's worth. Like everything else in life, it's worth exactly as much as someone is willing to pay for it.

On the contrary, if that was all there was to value then a chunk of rock is worth a million dollars, if I'm a slick enough con artist to sell it to a millionaire for that sum. In that sense, sure, the "art" is worth whatever you can get for it. In another, more important sense, it and the rock are worthless, because I strongly suspect it couldn't be distinguished from a million other toddler-splotches produced every day.

If you'd like read my post and respond to what's actually there in a respectful way, I'd love to exchange ideas.

I notice you have not addressed the elephant in the room - the awkward fact that monkey/elephant/toddler pieces cannot be distinguished from "real" modern art even by experts. If you want to defend woo art, explain that to us. Or exchange ideas about it, or whatever. Just do it, instead of finding excuses not to.

 

[volatile]

Yes, I'm aware of how art got produced at the various parts of history. I was a fine art major, after all.

Well, I teach art history at a university, so if we're playing "authority" games, I win.

Nevertheless, I think we may be talking at crossed purposes. The reason I raised this in the beginning was to counter the claim that Renaissance artists were "inspired". That simply isn't true -- the very notion of the inspired artist arises after the Renaissance period. That's not to say Michaelangelo, Leonardo, Giotto, Brueneleschi and the rest weren't great artists producing great art, of course...

But what you're failing to recognize is that there's a huge difference between commissioned art, and "corporate" art. Simply commissioning a piece doesn't make it "corporate".

I would argue to the contrary. If the work is a paid-for commission, where the commissioner essentially fixes the content and theme of the work, that work must be described as corporate, if (as I was when I brought this up in the first place and you told me I was "wrong") corporate is to be defined as work devoid of artistic "inspiration" in the modern sense.

Most commissioned artwork was created according to the sensibilities of the artist, typically with little input from the patron aside from the subject of the work.

Not true -- many scholars of patronage record the patron setting down in their contracts huge amounts of detail far beyond simply stating the subject matter. Again, I can provide full references should you wish to follow this up. Suffice to say though, you're wrong.

While bad artists might tailor the results to the patron to an excessive degree, the great artists rarely did; and the history is replete with patrons reacting less than favourably to the finished work.

Non-sequitor. Many patrons did indeed reject comissioned works, but that is certainly nothing to do with whether the artist is now considered "great" or "bad". As I said, all the big names of the Renaissance worked more or less within the confines their patrons set them, and this is documented by contemporary contract documents.

This is not to belittle the talent or skill or dare I say vision of painters like Michaelangelo or Carravaggio, just to argue the point that they were in any sense "inspired" in the way the original poster who brought this up was implying. As I said, I think we may be talking at crossed purposes. I think we broadly agree.

It's the bastardization of abstraction known as non-representational art, pseudo-art which fails to communicate anything of substance, that falls short of the characteristics necessary for it to qualify, a priori, as art.

And here you've fallen into the trap pointed out by Piscivore and others in assuming that art must be intelligibly communicative for it to be art. Why so? Some of the best art of the past century, in my opinion, expresses itself affectively rather than transparently semiotically; that is to say, the art engenders feeling rather than some clearly communicated idea. Francis Bacon most obviously fits into this model, for example.

 

[quarky]

I smell art

I art smell.

 

[Piscivore]

This is a silly argument beloved by woos. It goes "there is a degree of uncertainty about X, therefore any hypothesis is as good as any other!". The problem is that the conclusion only follows if there is total uncertainty, not merely a degree of uncertainty.

I said nothing at all about uncertainty. Art is subjective for the simple reason that human beings are not identical, they do not have identical educations, do not have identical experience histories, and do not percieve things identically.

Art isn't "fundamentally subjective". The Thinker is an objectively more technically demanding and evocative piece of work than the canoe I made the other day out of Blu-Tac.

You are shifting the argument from artistic value to technical skill. Technical skill may be evaluated by an objective measure (even if that measure may or may not be arbitrary), but technical skill is a very small part of art.

And as far as "evocative"- that's subjective too. To many people a canoe might harken back to summer days spent with fathers, or a first, awkward love at camp, or a honeymoon trip, or an unfullfilled dream of exploration, etc.- compared to which the Thinker is just an ugly lump of metal.

It's an objective fact that I couldn't sculpt The Thinker.

While that may be the case, your canoe and the sculpture are apples and oranges. A sculptor may be entirely unable to make a canoe out of Blu-Tac- that does not make the canoe "better" or more valuable than the sculture, any more than your inability to make a sculpture makes it objectively more valuable than the canoe.

It's an objective fact that to human nervous systems one is more interesting and evocative than the other.

Is it now? And where is the reserch to support that extraordinary assertion?

You wouldn't even try to make an argument like this with regard to other art forms. Opera, plays, TV shows, songs and so forth are judged with a degree of subjectivity, but nonetheless there is also a big degree of objectivity, which is why theatre criticism is possible in the first place.

Like hell. There is no measure for which you can judge any of these things by with which another person cannot rationally disagree.

All a critic, or an "art expert" can do is offer the reasons for their own subjective judgements- judgements with which people often and frequently enthusiastically disagree. "I don't care what the critics say, I liked it!"

We can say things like "the script was clever" or "the script was cliched",

Which is a subjective judgement.

"actor X was believable" or "actor X was a terrible ham" with a significant degree of objectivity.

The only degree of "objectivity" possible here is the extent to which one is deluded in thinking one's own opinion applies (or should apply) to everyone.

Incidentally, this is the very hubris with which you seem to despise in the "art expert". Hubris which I, considering the fact that art is subjective, happen to agree is very foolish.

Some singers are better than others in meaningfully objective ways.

What ways?

Some scripts are better than others in meaningfully objective ways.

What ways?

Some actors are better than others in meaningfully objective ways.

What ways?

Some dancers are better than others in meaningfully objective ways.

What ways?

Some sculptors, painters and so on are better than others in meaningfully objective ways too.

What ways?

Some food is better than others too - the food at a three star restaurant is better than the food at a corner store, in meaningfully objective ways.

What ways?

Yes, even though there are anosmic people, and even though it's conceivable that there is someone out there perverse enough that they would honestly prefer anything on the menu at the corner store to anything at the menu at the three star restaurant.

Thanks, you disproved your own assertion. There is no quality to any of these things you mention that does not have at its root s subjective judgment of valuing one aspect of the experience over another. In your case, you seem to be arguing that technical skill should trump every other consideration. That's okay, and that's fine if that's what you think is important. Soem people value other things over technical skill, though- personal emotional resonance, esthetic beauty, symbolic signifigance, political meaning, cultural identification, and many others. And they are not automatically wrong just because they don't value the same things in art as you do.

Can you explain that? I don't understand what you are claiming.

I first read Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" when I was around twelve-ish. At that time, I had not read very many "adult" books (and was pretty much completely naive and innocent of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, etc.), and I liked it- despite the fact that I realise now that I understood probably about a tenth of what the book was actually about. I liked it because I thought I should. I re-read it last month, and it's rubbish.

There's an additional mistake here. In addition to over-radical subjectivism,

You'll do me the favour of explaining what exactly is "over-radical subjectivism", won't you? Something either depends on a human value judgement, or it doesn't, yes?

It almost sounds like you are trying to use a purely emotive term to cast a negative light on a position with which you do not agree.

you're adding the unsupported assumption that the art scammers in question really do like the junk they wax lyrical about...

No, you are making the initial assumption that they do not. You don't value the things they claim to, therefore they must be lying.

...even though they can't tell it from garbage under blinded conditions.

There you go again, demanding that something is "garbage' just because you personally have no use for it- as well as making an assumption about the outcome of a blinded test that has not occured.

I don't think that's true. I think it looks like garbage to them, and they lie about it.

QED what I said above. When did you develop this remarkable ability to see through another's eyes, or think another's thoughts?

Sure. And the people really could see the Emperor's clothes. Who are we to say they couldn't, just because one kid couldn't? That kid was a fundamentalist.

The existence of clothing is an objective determination- but we are not talking about the existence of the pieces in question- we are talking about how humans value them.

A value judgement.

Any time a phenomena, including artistic appreciation, only exists when people are told in advance what to see is a delusion.

While that may be true, you don't have any evidence this is the case in every case- just your assumption, which you admitted above.

You don't need to be primed beforehand to appreciate an Alma-Tadema, or a Michelangelo.

Ever take a small child to an art gallery? You sure as hell do.

You do need to be primed in advance to see the Emperor's new clothes,

This is just more emotive well-poisioning.

or millions of dollars worth of artistic genius in a Pollack.

Which makes it no different from any other learned subjective value judgement.

 

[joobz]

In the realm of stone-cutting, the craft ended and the artist started with curved lines.
It was implied that the 'artist' had already mastered the 'craft' of cutting predictable shapes.

"Art" was by definition, an extension of 'craft'.
Craftsmanship, however, comes first. Art springs from that.


(Well, it used to.)

I'm pretty certain that the art of war came out long before warcraft 1, 2 and 3.


Sorry, couldn't resist. I did like your observation. although, I still do not know if the craft/art deliniation is so exact. What drove the need to polish stone? What about the varying techniques to obtain matte vs. high polish. Did all of these craft techniques exist before the art or did they feed eachother?

 

[tomwaits]

stuff

Ok, so clearly you know much more about art history than me. However, couldn't you say that within the art, the artist and the patron were sort of collaborators? I mean, I'm sure the patron didn't have the knowledge of the artistic form that the artist did, so there was likely some leeway in what they would do. Obviously there are cases in which the patron had a lot of detail they wanted included, but surely the artist had a lot of their own input?

 

[Piscivore]

I notice you have not addressed the elephant in the room - the awkward fact that monkey/elephant/toddler pieces cannot be distinguished from "real" modern art even by experts. If you want to defend woo art, explain that to us.

There's no elephant. "Experts" are experts only by consent of those that agree with their opinions. There is no such thing as objectively "real" art. The monky/elephant/toddler/"garbage"/"real" art is art only so far as the viewer subjectively judges it to be so.

If someone who previously viewed a piece to be a valuable work, then discounted it when he learned of its provenance, you've learned something about his personal value structure, but nothing at all about the piece in question.

On the contrary, if that was all there was to value then a chunk of rock is worth a million dollars, if I'm a slick enough con artist to sell it to a millionaire for that sum.

Apparently Kevin has never heard of the diamond industry.

In that sense, sure, the "art" is worth whatever you can get for it.

If monetary worth is one's overriding value, that's true.

In another, more important sense, it and the rock are worthless, because I strongly suspect it couldn't be distinguished from a million other toddler-splotches produced every day.

"I think", "I suspect"- aren't you the one arguing for objectivity here? Put up some evidence, instead of your opinion or assumptions, please.

 

[UserGoogol]

In the realm of stone-cutting, the craft ended and the artist started with curved lines.
It was implied that the 'artist' had already mastered the 'craft' of cutting predictable shapes.

"Art" was by definition, an extension of 'craft'.
Craftsmanship, however, comes first. Art springs from that.

Why the hell should any rational person care about craftsmanship? Any work of art could have been done, in principle, through painstaking effort, or have been an accident. You can reasonably estimate how much effort went into the artwork, but then you aren't judging the art, but the artist. A piece of parchment with some paint on it is a piece of parchment with some paint on it regardless of how that paint happened to get on it.

Caring whether something had effort put into it is the real woo, and it is something felt by people on both sides of the argument. You cannot see effort or smell effort or taste effort, once someone puts effort into something it instantly vanishes and is indistinguishable from luck. Ultimately, people who care about craftsmanship are not admiring the art, they're admiring the human.

 

[quarky]

Why the hell should any rational person care about craftsmanship? Any work of art could have been done, in principle, through painstaking effort, or have been an accident. You can reasonably estimate how much effort went into the artwork, but then you aren't judging the art, but the artist. A piece of parchment with some paint on it is a piece of parchment with some paint on it regardless of how that paint happened to get on it.

Caring whether something had effort put into it is the real woo, and it is something felt by people on both sides of the argument. You cannot see effort or smell effort or taste effort, once someone puts effort into something it instantly vanishes and is indistinguishable from luck. Ultimately, people who care about craftsmanship are not admiring the art, they're admiring the human.

I was pointing out a defining line that existed in the past, at least in Europe.

The masons cut the stone. When a gargoyle was added to the stone's surface, the guy that did that was called an artist. It was a different job.
From what I've studied on this subject, the definition of where the craft of stonemasonry entered the realm of the artist could be pin-pointed to a curved line. The masons were able (allowed) to handle roman numerals, for instance.

I'd not be surprised if something analogous were true regarding painting.
There was a time when art was clearly defined. It involved painstaking effort.

The definition has 'evolved' to allow Jackson Pollack into the game. It wouldn't have gone over prior to his moment.

The Back Street Boys are artists.

And we'd be lucky to own a Pollack paint smear.

 

[Cavemonster]

I'd like to address some of the evidence that often gets presented to demonstrate the cluelessness of the art world. Most of this evidence is circulated as either rumor ("I heard that...") or as a human interest story in magazines.

If we were talking about a medical or supernatural claim, no one here would take those too seriously without doing a little more digging, finding primary sources and looking at details and context.

1) The upside down painting.
Here is the most famous upside down painting, Le Bateau by Matisse which hung the wrong way for about two months.

As you can see it is a picture of a boat, clouds and reflection that when flipped becomes...
...A boat clouds and reflection facing the other way. I'll bet you expected something different, huh?

It's a simple, graphic piece, with representational subject matter, that is quite pretty either way (though I prefer it right side up). It doesn't depend on reading the description about the artist's angst, it's just a seascape with symmetry along one axis.

1) The 2-year old artist
As talked about in the formal analysis above, to call this the work of a two year old, is a slight omission. It's a team effort. The kid's mother "frames" the paintings to make them work in the same way that the musician in the youtube vid above "frames" his son's random babbling with instrumentals to make cute music.
She used

a) Limited palette of black white and two primaries
b) On a clean pre-painted (by the mom) solid ground
c) Canvases are grouped together in grids or rows to contrast right angles
with the smooshiness.​

All of these devices added by her mom (a professional photographer) make the work, far from genius, but pleasing on the most basic level of an abstract in a hotel.

They submit the work to a gallery that specializes in mediocre decorative work, and it's accepted. (see above post on this gallery and it's place in the art establishment)

2) The Disumbrationist School of Art
This one's my favorite. A wise trickster (Paul Jordan Smith) fools the arrogant establishment types and shows them to be full of hot air. He submits work that's intentionally terrible and is embraced and applauded by the art world. Let's look deeper.

Art Institute's Annual Exhibition of Artists of Chicago and Vicinity was the biggest deal in the Chicago art scene of the early twenties. Unfortunately, a large number of artists just breaking out into modern styles tried and failed to be included in the show. The Institute didn't appreciate experimental work.

So a group of them got together and formed their own show for exciting new work called the Salon des Refusés. Ah! the revenge of the nerds, salon of the refused! But wait a minute, they didn't have room for just anything, they still had standards, so we have another group who is rejected from the rejects show.

They formed their own group called the "No Jury" Group and that's where Paul Jordan Smith. Now right there, it's clear that calling the rejects of the rejects the voice of the art world is a little disingenuous, but those familiar with art showings can tell something else from the title of the group. No Jury means no judgement. Their charter was that anyone who wanted to pay a membership fee could present any work they wanted.

So our trickster had the great cleverness to sneak his terrible work past the critical eyes of... no one. He had the great cunning to pay a registration fee. That's his great trick. Needless to say, the charter which allowed anyone who wished to show is not mentioned in the Disumbrationist article itself.

He received 4 reviews. 2 from the same person (Comte Chabrier), of whom no record seems to exist except for verbatim repostings of snippets from the same one article which has as a primary source, Paul's autobiography.

Best case scenario, he found a patron who wrote two articles about him and who left no trace on the history of art besides being part of this scam.

But when we look at any other case, and the only evidence for the existence of an individual is in the autobiography of a self proclaimed hoax artist, we could easily assume this person was another fiction.

Looked at in detail Paul's biggest scam was convincing the LA times three years later that he had fooled the art world. His claims seem very familiar when one looks at the rhetoric of certain Proffessorial posters who are very quick to claim victories that only exist in their minds.

That's a doozy of a post, I imagine folks with a strong confirmation bias won't be too changed by it, but I do hope that thoughtful people will be reminded that rumor and puff journalism are no more valuable as evidence for claims about are than they are about anything else.

 

[Piscivore]

I'd not be surprised if something analogous were true regarding painting.
There was a time when art was clearly defined. It involved painstaking effort.

Wow, going from "I'd not be surprised if" to a positive statement of it as fact in the very next sentence. Not even some woos move that fast.

When was art "clearly defined", by whom was it so defined, what was that definiton specifically, and when did it allegedly change? What evidence do you have to support this claim?

The definition has 'evolved'

What is your source for this statement? What definition did it "evolve" into?