The problem with "art"

[Michi]

Agreed. You may not be able to define it, but you'll knows it when you sees it. And only the truly pretentious SOB's will try to call you on your opinion. [...]

Most of the so called "professional" art critics don't even know what they're looking at anyway

Wouldn't that make yourself a truly pretentious son of a bitch?

No. Does calling me out make you one

I'm saying everyone has a different aesthetic taste. Some people like more realistic art and others like modern art. Everyone is different. Just because you like one or the other doesn't make your wrong no matter what some 'professional' art critic may say. They have their taste just as you have yours. It's the same way with movie critics. Just because they give it a bad score doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't see it. And if you do see it and it has flaws, that doesn't mean you can't appreciate it.

What I'm saying is that everybody's opinion is different and just because a critic or someone else says your opinion is wrong doesn't make them right or give their opinion more weight than yours. But that doesn't mean you can't listen to others opinions, judge for yourself and form your own. Art is subjective after all.

And as for the link I posted, those 'professionals' mentioned in the relevant part of the Cracked article mistook an forger's work as Vermeer's and couldn't tell the difference between the work of a human being and a chimpanzee. So yes. In those instances, those people didn't know what they were babbling about..... which is sadly a trait found in most professions.

[Erik_Twice]

I'm saying everyone has a different aesthetic taste. Some people like more realistic art and others like modern art. Everyone is different. Just because you like one or the other doesn't make your wrong no matter what some 'professional' art critic may say.

I agree. I think there's no such thing as bad taste. If you like something, more power to you. Many people are obsessed with liking the good or the bad and that's not the question here.

What I'm saying is that everybody's opinion is different and just because a critic or someone else says your opinion is wrong doesn't make them right or give their opinion more weight than yours. But that doesn't mean you can't listen to others opinions, judge for yourself and form your own. Art is subjective after all.

As I have stated somewhere else, I do not think that art is subjective, it's as objective as anything else we just don't have the precise tools to measure and discuss it we have in other fields.

I also don't think a critic should ever write an opinion* but should write a a reasoned explanation instead. Simply stating the quality of the work is neither useful not relevant to the profession.


*As in "unfounded claim" not as "expression of professional judgement". Opinion is a terrible word to use in these discussions I'm afraid.

And as for the link I posted, those 'professionals' mentioned in the relevant part of the Cracked article mistook an forger's work as Vermeer's and couldn't tell the difference between the work of a human being and a chimpanzee.

You seem to think that forgeries are easy to spot, that is simply not the case. You would need a great amount of study to be able to tell the difference, specially when you face the best forger in the twenty century.

Note that it's also not the job of a critic to spot forgeries. That is better left to curators, historians and chemists.


It's also impossible to know whether a painting was made by a human, there's nothing a chimpanzee can do that cannot be replicated by a human. It wouldn't matter much either as the quality of the work doesn't rely on who the artist is.

I also find ironic that by trying to "fool" critics to see if they could spot monkey art from modern art the trickster already made modern art. The entire process makes him an artist but choosing what drawings to show would already make him an artist in the first place if he doesn't think that a monkey drawing is not art.

[neilencio]

Man Drops Cow, Explodes It

Human society invented art so there would still be pictures of breasts in case all the women got eaten by dinosaurs. It evolved into transcendent expressions of man's quest for meaning, then finally into depressed fruitcakes rubbing their feces on pictures of Jesus. But now everyone can stop. Last Thursday, an Austrian man, Wolfgang Flatz, set the limit of what art can achieve.

First, he covered himself in blood and hung naked from a helicopter. I agree with you that at this point he should have been been beaten by the pilot until he wiped himself off, put on some pants, and promised not to be such a queer anymore. But instead, and lucky for us, Wolfgang dropped an entire skinned cow 130 feet down into an abandoned building, which then exploded. The Mona Lisa might be worth 50 billion dollars, but name one part of her that's better than a skinless dynamite-filled cow dropped from a helicopter.

THE MEANING OF ART:
It's a common misconception that art has meaning. I've been to enough gallery critiques to know that after 8 years of art school, a person can trick themselves into thinking some ass-colored paint splat is telling them something about how smart they are. Don't fall for this. Any painting that has a secret meaning is just an artist sucking his own dick about how some people can't unriddle their profound wisdom. And their profound wisdom is usually that yellow looks pretty next to purple, they don't like television, or how the government should fill their asshole with sexy miniature firemen.

This is a true story: when I was in art school I had a dipshit in my painting class that painted a guitar on fire. He stood in front of the class and actually said, "I painted this to show my burning desire... to write songs for the guitar." I still hadn't stopped laughing by the time another girl showed her swirls of nonsense colors and said, "I was trying to show the emotion... of anger." It was about there where the professor asked me to laugh the tears out of my eyes somewhere else.

That is exactly what's wrong with artists. In the 10 or 12 hours you spent on a painting that someone might interpret to mean that you love the guitar, you could have knocked on 800 people's random doors and told them all, with no misunderstanding, that you're one hundred percent behind the success of the guitar. Or better yet, if it's really that important that everyone knows you enjoy the guitar, FUCK YOU.

Art would like to think that it's some sort of secret communication device between the intellectual elite, but all it's doing is circling a message through the same group of fags that they're all pissed off. It's a waste of time; you can tell someone you're pissed off with a simple karate chop. Karate attacks or just words about karate attacks are a cleaner and faster means of communication than painting floating eyeballs with your body fluids ever will be. That's what makes this exploding cow so special. It wasn't a visual interpretation of some profound statement. It needed to happen because there are no words that will ever be as rad as filling a cow with dynamite and dropping it from the sky. Unless you're a hypnotist and you say the words, "Take off the Wonder Woman outfit and make out with your twin sister."

[fvgazi]

Fuck art, let's dance.

Everyone can argue about what art is while I and whoever else is moved by anything will just enjoy it for what it is.