Now here's a thought.

I don't disagree! I agree with you. I mean, I agree with the OP. I'm not sure you get the full implications of what you've posted. It's not as if people saying Picasso is awesome stops you disliking Picassos, does it?

There are those of us who create art, not only for ourselves, but also for others. Those who can't, criticizeritize or write about it. The way of the world it is.

pdr said:

define what ART is, rubarbb.

McDuff, you still haven't told me what is ART as defined by society. The fact that I am lacking in ART appreciation because I cannot see Picasso as a great artist seems bloody cheek to me.

The fact that the majority of the British public were not happy to see money spent on half a dead cow as ART is not seen democratically as: It
is their money, they have a right to say. No it was seen as: Well, they are ignorant peasnats who don't know about ART.

Rob: come on, define ART and stop enjoying your fight with SOKAL.
Why do you seem to think that society, i.e. art experts, can define ART even though the general public say That's not ART.

We get it in the writing world. Some writers are held up as greats and others are not. Personal preference doesn't seem to be allowed. Some idiot in a University Lit department claims that XYZ is the new great English language novelist and we are all supposed to agree. I am always amazed that other Universities then join in. Readers vote with their pockets and don't buy the great writer's works yet we are still told XYZ is the new great English language novelist. Sigh!

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There are actually rules of thought on what universities say is art and what museums say. Or simply what the artist says.

I remember in philosophy class, I challenged that Andy Warhol's Brillo pads and Campbell's soup cans we're simply grocery items (I know, I was asking for it. ).

McDuff, you still haven't told me what is ART as defined by society. The fact that I am lacking in ART appreciation because I cannot see Picasso as a great artist seems bloody cheek to me.

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Well, I didn't tell you that. I think that Picasso was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century and that can be one measure of greatness. On the other hand if you don't like his work you don't like his work. I don't care. I'd far rather you paid attention to art that you liked rather than tried to force yourself to like Guernica.

As far as Hirst is concerned, "The British Public" is hardly a monolithic block. Plenty of people like Hirst -- I'm one of them. Newspapers like the Sun and The Mail make lots of hay about conceptual artists and, while they sometimes have a point, there's no reason that lowest-common-denominator populism is actually a better metric than elitism. In my personal opinion pretty much everything by the Pre-Raphaelites was soulless, pretentious dreck, but most people like it all well enough because the dudes could mostly paint a pretty lady fairly well. I'm not going to ban it from galleries because I don't like it and the peasants should know better, but nor am I going to cream my jeans because there's a pre-Raph exhibition in Manchester or Liverpool.

My whole definition of art is that there kinda isn't one, and nor does there really need to be. You can go to all the art galleries in the world without once having a discussion about what art is, and you'll have a good enough idea and expectation from art that you'll know in your own mind what it is, even if you can't define it.

"I don't know if it's art. But I like it." Somebody said that, I'm just repeating.

If it's any consolation, I love Picasso. It's good to look at paintings from the full scope of his work though. He evolved so much.

But when I look at a Pollack, all I can think is "breakdancing, schizophrenic, pidgeon with diarrhea". It's better than parroting what art historians and critics tell me to think. At least I'm being honest. At least I'm admitting what I see. Sometimes the emperor is strutting around starkers. Someone has to be the child who calls him on it.

What is art?

pdr said:

define what ART is, rubarbb.

Hello, I will define what art is im my mind. There are many types of art, writing being one of them. I prefer to paint as well as write. I create something from nothing that evokes a feeling or sends you on a mind trip. Something you can look at and say "wow, I really like that". Not all people will like my art (which doesn't bother me as I can't please everyone) and that is fine. I still evoked a feeling even if it is of unpleasure. As they say, art is in the eye... Question: Do you not appreciate art? rubarbb

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I think that people here are having a difficult time separating "art" from "stuff I like." A bad painting is still art. Novels you dislike are still art. A play you find tedious is still art.

Arty confusion

McDuff said:

I think that people here are having a difficult time separating "art" from "stuff I like." A bad painting is still art. Novels you dislike are still art. A play you find tedious is still art.

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There is currently an immense range of confusion where any culturally-based, symbolically-mediated, personally significant, more or less meaningful things are concerned. I'm sure I'm not immune from this problematization of all things cultural; it is hard to avoid. My attempt at not being confused makes me think it is important not to let things run together, and above all, to avoid posing problems or questions in such a way that the particular problem is obviated by a generic gesture at the general confusion. After all, there are plenty of ways that the determination of what constitutes "stuff I like" is a lot like determining what constitutes an Art (as in an Art that can have a proper name and an implied aesthetic, such as "Mannerist Art"...or "High Renaissance Art" both of which owe a lot to being stuff that Vassari liked). This parallelism between the aesthetics of "stuff I like" and the aesthetics of a particular Art (that is an Art that can have a proper name) is in many ways far more instructive than the other point that seems to confuse people which is that the appellation "art" confers an indefinite and weirdly confusing extra value to any object (however unworthy) to which it is applied.
Now, I know that the lack of some special extra value's being conferred by the appellation "art" is totally counter-intuitive since the designation of an object as "art" seems to confer the value of a lot of money on odds and ends if the designation is made by say Duchamp...but note that (maybe even more paradoxically) the designation still happens within a particular aesthetic frame and that is as fragile as any other aesthetic frame. A revealing negative parallel example (and one that is almost equally counter-intuitive) is the one I'm trying to point out (see my attempts in "Starting from Nothing" and "A Beard of Mary Beards") --
which is that Classic Art is an utterly traditional area of art, seemingly in no way arbitrarily designated as such by anyone, that is effectively losing its aesthetic frame (or in fact is an Art that generated Art History by the progessive loss of a whole series of aesthetic frames for the same set of objects).
Well...I seem to have generated yet another confusing term: "Aesthetic Frame"...but I hope it amounts to a gesture at the body of aesthetic terms that Art History has put forward for different Proper Arts (such as "Classical Art" or "Hellenistic Art" or "Mannerist Art")...

Definition?

pdr said:

there seems to be, in most Western societies, some definition of ART. So who came up with it an dwhat is it?

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How would a general definition help you with the aesthetic judgements needed for particular cases? For example, if you wanted to articulate why you don't like Picasso much, what would you do? And which definition would you apply to which object if there were different possibilities? Suppose for example, Vasari said that the valuable essence of painting (and painting in his view was the highest art), was in the underlying assembly of recognized subelements in terms of inventiveness of design. This would be hard on Picasso, and easy on Bronzino, but why would it make sense to apply Vasari's artistic theories to Picasso? Not that there may not be a good way to do that, but it is not inherent in any overall definition.
So, it seems to me, that, if you want to know what is up with an Art, you have to look at what lies behind its assemblage and assessment under a limited set of aesthetic frames. Since there are cases where the same objects were assessed and assembled (forged and copied if necessary) in totally different successive sets of interpretive frames (or even altered to fit a new frame), the particular sets of interpretive or aesthetic or evaluative frames takes precedence over any overall definition of art, which at best can only give you a very rough and abstract idea of what might be going on over time and space with different assemblages and different interpretive frames.

Only Moreso

pdr said:

In a culture that is supposed to value individual freedom why are we not free to make assessments for ourselves?

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Our culture is like any other, only moreso. In any culture there are areas that are in flux and areas that are relatively fixed. It's nearly impossible to even traverse the fixed areas at all in terms that are engaging for most of the participants. Look at what happens whenever I post about Classical or Mayan Art in this subforum. Zero. That's all obviously in a fixed area. There's nothing engaging about it. Kind of strange. It may be that since our culture at least seems to have methods for representing aspects of other cultures (such as the Classic Mayan Art) or cultures that are not quite entirely other cultures (such as Classic Art) this very apparent ability has to be to some degree frozen or fixed or ignored or else this culture would become something other than a culture. A non-cultural post-culture or a purely technical realm with its own very rapidly evolving ways of evaluating things. Well...sort of like parts of the online world already are. Sort of like an Art or a Science at the moment they move into new territory with new techniques.
But what about an idea about re-evaluating Picasso? Let's suppose Picasso is still in a part of some culture that is in flux (but not either in the frozen realm that must be kept at bay if cultures are to remain cultural and not in the possibly post-cultural realm)...how do people manipulate their own cultures without introducing anything from "elsewhere" (the frozen nothing inside or the outside altogether)? I'm thinking there are some well-known possibilities:

Via personal power and influence (say when Saatchi buys some of Hirst's stuff)
Via symbolic manipulations such as myth or religion or purity cults or Ghost Dances
Via entertaining manipulations such as paintings or hallucinagens or online games or writing
Via statelike ideological power (as in the authorities burn all paintings of type x or command a pyramid to be errected or )
Via an address to the structural relations between reality and culture (science and scholarship)

Of course you can mix and match these options and have say an Entertaining Cult of Saatchi or a church with mosaics of the Empress Theodora...but those are the universal options. Individual freedom is a legal theory, not a cultural one.