We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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A fragment on the state of culture “A cleaner (janitor) at a London gallery cleared away an installation by artist Damien Hirst having mistaken it for rubbish. Emanual Asare came across a pile of beer bottles, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays and cleared them away at the Eyestorm gallery on Wednesday morning.”
I still treasure that story, which appeared in this item about the art world (thanks to Tim Sandefur for the pointer. He is on a bit of a roll at the moment).
In thinking of art and tracing out the trends, good and possibly not so good, you can do a lot worse than read this book by Ernst Gombrich.
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I obviously don’t know Emanual Asare, but I’m willing to bet that he also just happens to be one of those simpletons who entertain the silly idea that people shouldn’t be spending money they don’t have (whether he thinks of governments as ‘people’ will likely remain unknown). In any case, this report is a commentary on the sorry state of public education in the West. Clearly, it is high time to raise teachers’ salaries and benefits – with the urgent need to increase public funding for arts going without saying.
Well, if it looks like garbage, and it smells like garbage …
…then it must be high art.
…which all gives me an idea. Local councils can collect lots of rubbish, recycle it as art (thus reaching any recycling targets the EU has imposed) and put it out in a large open air art gallery, thus reclaiming rubbish tips at the same time.
The article appears to have somehow accidentally substituted the word “mistaken” for “recognised”
Anything which has to be called an “installation” isn’t art.
Classic!
It does point to the state of our culture.
Where is the great art, poetry and music of this age?
Yoghurt has more.
Same thing happened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC about 25 years ago* – again a workman cleared away an installation that consisted mostly of rubbish..mistaking it for…rubbish. Okay so the rubbish installation is already old hat..unless of course the rubbish was newer, more modern, more cutting edge.
* My Mum was working there at the time.
I may not have the best definition of art, but rule I generally go by is: if someone had to explain it to me, it isn’t art.
A pile of garbage doesn’t respresent man’s inhumanity towards man. It’s a pile of garbage. Church it up all you like, it isn’t art. Random splotches of paint hurled at a canvas isn’t some commentary of Wester society. It’s random splotches of paint. Revolution #9 isn’t music. It’s just noise.
DARN!!! I’ve been throwing my garbage away! I could have been a world-infamous artiste by now! If only I’d known that actual talent is a drawback….
On a brighter note, I was impressed to hear about a real artist who is earning a fortune painting stuff that people recognise as art! Somewhere in Britain, an 8-year-old boy has been called a mini-Monet because of his style, and his paintings have already allowed his family to buy their own house. THAT is Good art, not artifice.
I recall Candice Bergen as Murphy Brown lampooning ‘art’ two decades ago. She picked up a doughnut at random, positioned it in front of her eye and said “Look! Art! I call it… the emptiness at the center of our being!” She then submits one of her toddler’s fingerpaintings to some fancy art gallery, which fingerpainting has the critics gushing about its daring or whatever.
To my mind, the failure of culture is most egregious not so much with the tossers who come up with this crap but with the moronic cowards who talk it up and spend huge gobs of money on it because it is the fashionable thing to do. They are the ones who encourage it, and they are the ones paying for the farce to continue. What is needed is not to fulminate against them but laugh at them, at least insofar as it is their own money they are throwing away like that (government grants and the section of the “art” community dependent on them – high-brow bread and circusses, if you will – are another story). They are liable to get off on being criticised, revelling in an opportunity to brand anyone who’d even furrow an eyebrow as a fascist. Don’t give them the satisfaction – just laugh, briefly and derisively, shaking the head just once or twice, without saying a word.
JJM
The first generation of “modern artists” (back in the early 20th century) really could draw, paint, carve (etc). They made the CHOICE not to do so – for what seemed to them good reasons.
The reeal reason that people like D.H. are despised is that the public (including me) doubt they are making any such choice.
For example, if this man (in order to save his life) had to do a drawing or painting of me (or some other person) and what he produced had to look as much like me as possible – COULD HE DO IT?
In short does he really choose to create a pile of rubbish – or does he create a pile of rubbish BECAUSE HE CAN NOT DO ANYTHING ELSE?
The cynical public (again – including me) think it is the latter.
In short that the man is a phony (a conman) – using a lot of Art School words to cover his own lack of ability.
Steven Rockwell: my above sneering here notwithstanding, art is anything an audience thinks is art – even if that audience is as small as one person. The only other point worth making here is that said audience should be voluntarily paying for the pleasure – all else is totally subjective, and thus irrelevant.
I agree with Steven and add my own criteria which is –
If I can replicated it so closely that the casual observer
( not the original ‘artist’ ) couldn’t tell the difference –
it isn’t art.
Random paint spots, hanging pieces of fabric. three common bricks stacked on top of one another etc. ALL qualify as examples of – Sorry, I don’t care how stupid YOU are, THAT isn’t art !!
Yep, chocolate ice cream isn’t real ice cream at all.
I can define chocolate ice cream and can easily say “this bowl of ice cream is chocolate ice cream because it has the qualities of XYZ. That bowl is not chocolate ice cream because it lakes XYZ”. Can you define art? I can’t. Britannica Online defines art as, “the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others.” How does Jackson Pollack flinging paint count as using skill and imagination, yet he is an artist. And that’s just a single definition and a single example. We have to do some serious mental gymnastics to make putting a McDonald’s hamburger in a glass cube and letting it rot for a year or Piss Christ, or anything Yoko Ono was ever involved with meet that definition of art.
Steven, with all due respect to Britannica, apparently they haven’t heard of the word ‘subjective’ – which is unsurprising, seeing as their job description is to define everything and anything, whether it is definable or not.
Chocolate ice cream is not ice cream, because I don’t like it. But if the government forces me to pay to those who make it, then it must be ice cream, my subjective opinion be damned.
Let me try this another way. If we come up with a definition for art, what happens to stuff that doesn’t fit our definition? If something isn’t art, what is it? If we make the definition of art so broad in scope that pretty much everything either fits or can be shoehorned in, then the word art no longer has any real meaning. There’s no objective standard for what requires subjectivity to define.
I feel about art the way that one (possibly apocryphal) judge did about pornography: he couldn’t define it, but he knew it when he saw it.
Sure, but the problem is that there is always a different judge who just doesn’t see it – while possibly seeing it somewhere else.
The point is that we shouldn’t even attempt to make a definition, because whether something qualifies as art is totally subjective: just like beauty, it is in the eyes of the beholder.
I should have written ‘just like natural beauty’ – art being the man-made variety.
Not quite like steaming a Banksy off the wall.
“Revolution #9 isn’t music. It’s just noise.”
I’m glad that someone besides me feels that way. I loved the White Album, but I could never play that whole side (yes, vinyl; showing my age) because of #9. A pity, because there were a few decent tracks there.
The whole problem is public financing of “the arts”. People can spend their own money however they like; I don’t care in the least. But I do care when it’s my money they’re spending. That’s what makes public funding of the arts so immoral.
Getting back to that dog that was starved to death (or almost) in a gallery as an art presentation.
I guess art can be defined as something that arouses profound or sublime emotion?
And in that case, said dog starving counts as art if it evokes horror, sadness and whatever. (I have never found the joy of horror movies I’m afraid.)
But it does not lead to anything of greatness or nobleness.
A beautiful sunset or country scene is not art.
Painting that sunset or scene that conveys something emotional is art.
It speaks to you without words.
Some folk, keen to be artistic, might pretend to hear things where there is only, in truth, silence.
Tom Wolfe nailed this phenomenon in The Painted Word (1975). The conversion of High Art into Art Theory was funded by wealthy patrons who wanted to be “honorary aides-de-cong” in the great Revolutionary march. The essence of this was “not-bourgeois”.
The more exotic, bizarre, and incomprehensible the work was, the more non-bourgeois it was.
Modern culture would have benefited immeasurably if someone had given Marcel Duchamp a hefty kick in the balls back near the beginning of the 20th century.
Ditto Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and E.E. Cummings. (And it’s not e.e. cummings, because that’s not how we write a name — which is part of my point.)
I don’t know about that, Kim. Is it really our place to tell people how to write their own names? “Jhonny” certainly looks funny to me, but that’s how Mr. Peralta (shortstop for the Detroit Tigers) spells it. Is he wrong?
If we were writing “Edward Estlin Cummings” you might be correct, but can’t “e. e. cummings” be viewed not so much as a name but more as a logo? It’s distinctive, and it’s his trademark. Why do you have a problem with it?
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
For the same reason I have a problem with “Jhonny”, “D’Marcus”, “Tyffynny” and all the other nonsensical “interpretations” of regular names: it’s a manifestation of either pretension or illiteracy. Both make my nuts ache.