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Your Thoughts On Art
#81
RE: Your Thoughts On Art
Here in the UK, if you put your money in the bank, you don't even get enough interest to cover inflation.

I've taken a punt.

I invest in art.

Life was so much simpler when I was broke.

Now I have just a little money, I have to be obsessed with it because, if I wasn't, I wouldn't have it any more and I'd be broke again.

Art, with a capital "F".
I don't know whether I need a bottle in front of me or a frontal lobotomy. Diablo
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#82
RE: Your Thoughts On Art
(April 14, 2019 at 2:13 pm)Belaqua Wrote:
(April 14, 2019 at 7:43 am)Thoreauvian Wrote: aesthetically satisfying or emotionally evocative, and hopefully both.  

Yes, those sound like good criteria.

The rest, if it's truly nothing but personal judgment, seems not to be something debatable.

I'm surprised you didn't point out that my two criteria are also pretty subjective.
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#83
RE: Your Thoughts On Art
(April 15, 2019 at 7:44 am)Thoreauvian Wrote:
(April 14, 2019 at 2:13 pm)Belaqua Wrote: Yes, those sound like good criteria.

The rest, if it's truly nothing but personal judgment, seems not to be something debatable.

I'm surprised you didn't point out that my two criteria are also pretty subjective.

I'm doing my best to avoid seeming hostile. 

I do think that absent any further way of specifying what exactly counts as "aesthetically satisfying," the term ends up being a way of saying "I like it" that is only slightly more descriptive. It narrows down what you like about the painting to just -- how it looks. As opposed to, I don't know, how it covers the stain on your wall.

For example, people might say that they like something because the colors are beautiful. But without any rules for what constitutes beautiful color, the term "beautiful color" becomes a synonym for "colors I like." 

I am not saying that we can or should describe such rules. Only that a lot of the terms we use end up being little more than tautologies.
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#84
RE: Your Thoughts On Art
(April 15, 2019 at 7:58 am)Belaqua Wrote:
(April 15, 2019 at 7:44 am)Thoreauvian Wrote: I'm surprised you didn't point out that my two criteria are also pretty subjective.

I'm doing my best to avoid seeming hostile. 

I do think that absent any further way of specifying what exactly counts as "aesthetically satisfying," the term ends up being a way of saying "I like it" that is only slightly more descriptive. It narrows down what you like about the painting to just -- how it looks. As opposed to, I don't know, how it covers the stain on your wall.

For example, people might say that they like something because the colors are beautiful. But without any rules for what constitutes beautiful color, the term "beautiful color" becomes a synonym for "colors I like." 

I am not saying that we can or should describe such rules. Only that a lot of the terms we use end up being little more than tautologies.

Do you think you have some objective basis for the arts?

In my own case, I made efforts to extend my appreciation to any number of artists and styles, but have mostly reached my limits in that regard.  At a point, I think those who try to make art into something it really isn't, through elaborate theories or undermining the basics, don't really love the arts.  They might be happier as performers or writers.  What art does best is capture beauty and emotion, not intellectual ideas (except perhaps about art itself).  So the criteria I mentioned have as much to do with the strengths and limitations of art as with any subjective responses.
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#85
RE: Your Thoughts On Art
(April 15, 2019 at 10:07 am)Thoreauvian Wrote: Do you think you have some objective basis for the arts?

All the discussions about "objective morality" on web sites have made me wary of the word "objective." Let's say that I can name some qualities, and then people can think about whether they are the qualities they want to encourage. 

For example, I would say that the kind of art I respect opens up the world for people -- it adds to the richness and variety of life. While the kind of art I don't want to encourage -- which I will call "bad" in conversation -- does the opposite. It reinforces clichés and received ideas. In a way, it makes us stupider, by repeating to us what we think we know and shutting out alternatives.

Now, can I prove that the former type is "objectively" better for the world than the latter? I don't think so. But I think that given a work of art, I can make the case that it does one thing or the other. Then it's up to other people whether they want the cliché or not. 

So we could name some things we respect about art, like maybe originality, a challenging nature, intelligence, etc. And without any final proof that these things are better than their opposites, we can argue that a given work deserves attention more than another. Nor is there absolute proof that one work is more original, challenging, and intelligent than another. But we can ponder this and think about quality in that way. 

Quote:What art does best is capture beauty and emotion, not intellectual ideas (except perhaps about art itself).

Well, I think that one of the wonderful things about art (and literature, music, etc.) is that it's woven into the web of civilization. We can look at it any way we want, but it's inextricable from the culture that made it, including that culture's intellectual ideas. 

This goes all the way down, so to speak. Adorno says that sitting by a window doing nothing is a political act, because it is removed from the web of buying and selling which runs our own culture. And I think Thoreau says something similar. Likewise, just the choice to spend your time making a work of art is a choice that has all kinds of meaning, conscious or not. If I choose to devote large parts of my life to personal, beautiful, intricate, time-consuming, painstaking, not especially attention-getting, objects, then I am working in direct opposition to many values in the modern world. The return on investment, quantitatively, is less than working at a cash register. Is that an intellectual idea? I think it kind of is. 

You can enjoy a Brueghel for its color, and you can enjoy it for what it says about the value of people and the ambitions of early Protestantism. 

One of the reasons I don't like the big-money artists today is that they reinforce the capitalist status quo. These are the ones ridiculed (I think rightly) in the videos posted earlier on this thread. Those people make things, but their real medium is not paint or plaster -- their real medium is exchange value. And they are masters of manipulating exchange value. One little thingy becomes wildly expensive, through skillfully operating business institutions. This praises and reinforces capitalism, since the ideal capitalist item is one that costs nothing to produce but sells for astronomical prices. So even those dumb little nothings have intellectual ideas behind them, which we can identify and criticize.
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#86
RE: Your Thoughts On Art
(April 15, 2019 at 8:45 pm)Belaqua Wrote: For example, I would say that the kind of art I respect opens up the world for people -- it adds to the richness and variety of life. While the kind of art I don't want to encourage -- which I will call "bad" in conversation -- does the opposite. It reinforces clichés and received ideas. In a way, it makes us stupider, by repeating to us what we think we know and shutting out alternatives.

I agree with and support much of what you wrote. I have to comment on the above, however.

It would seem, by what you said, that you dislike much of historical Christian art because it "reinforces clichés and received ideas. In a way, it makes us stupider, by repeating to us what we think we know and shutting out alternatives." This is similar to my point about propaganda.

Also, I can understand art reinforcing received ideas which are worthwhile, like the love of the natural world or even the love of diversity. So I do not think art must necessarily be progressive. It can function as art quite well if it is conservative. It all depends on the quality of its ideas.

One of the reasons I love big art museums like the Philadelphia Museum of Art is that they are like time machines. You can walk from one room to another and be immersed in different historical periods, with different art and furnishings. The propaganda from different periods with different religious myths tend to cancel each other out, and what is left are aesthetics and emotion. The overall message then becomes the support for diversity even if the original intention behind the artworks was in many cases religious propaganda. When art is contextualized differently, the messages are different.

So since art appeals mainly aesthetically and emotionally, its difficult for me to consider such ideas as the intellectual content of the art itself. More often, art illustrates intellectual content from elsewhere, which is why so many artists talk so much about what their art is supposed to be. You can't really put all that detail into the art itself because of the limitations of the media used. This is why I also say that some artists, who try to expand on those limitations by "stretching the boundaries of art," might be happier as writers or performers.

(April 15, 2019 at 8:45 pm)Belaqua Wrote: Adorno says that sitting by a window doing nothing is a political act, because it is removed from the web of buying and selling which runs our own culture. And I think Thoreau says something similar. Likewise, just the choice to spend your time making a work of art is a choice that has all kinds of meaning, conscious or not. If I choose to devote large parts of my life to personal, beautiful, intricate, time-consuming, painstaking, not especially attention-getting, objects, then I am working in direct opposition to many values in the modern world. The return on investment, quantitatively, is less than working at a cash register. Is that an intellectual idea? I think it kind of is. 

I don't think there is any reason to call such actions "art," since that tends to muddy the waters. Call it philosophy perhaps. Creating art is arguably a better use of time than religious devotion or getting drunk in bars, for instance, but that still depends on the art.

What kind of art do you find worthwhile to create?
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#87
RE: Your Thoughts On Art
One of my favorite films on modern art and art forgery:

[Image: 220px-Modernsposter.jpg]
"The world is my country; all of humanity are my brethren; and to do good deeds is my religion." (Thomas Paine)
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