I just came back from my local art gallery, and I've never felt more retarded in my life. Do you recommend any books about understanding art?
Not sure if I would get a better answer here of on /ic/
>>7864782
My advice is 99.999% of all art is shit
if you didn't like what you saw it was shit.
Theres no "getting it".
>>7864782
What was showcased there?
This is closest I have as to understanding of art, without the bull.
>>7864794
Sorry, I meant to say museum. It was the National Museum of Art in D.C.
OP you won't read the below link but let me assure you that it answers your question in a way you will understand.
If you absolutely won't read it then the gist of it, with respect to your question, is that you already know the answer to your question(s).
http://culture.vg/features/art-theory/on-the-genealogy-of-art-games.html
Sad!
>>7864791
I hope this is bait
>>7864782
All contemporary art is shit. Almost any painter after post-impressionism is shit. It's just like art music and post-modernist poetry: all fucking shit.
History, if there is even such a thing as "history" in like 100 years, will blame our time. We will be seen as retarded assholes who didn't get anything about what art is about.
>>7864803
Dude, you may simply not relate to paintings as much as to other forms of art. You should remember that today's world is more accustomed to moving pictures and live tv than painting itself. That's why the meaningful, striking part of it might fly over your head.
>>7864817
>art music
care to say it again?
>>7864821
I don't know what is the exact word in english. I'm, of course, thinking about art music ("serious" music? what's the fucking word) written after the 1940's.
>>7864817
My gott stale bait straight from the youtube dadrock comment section
>>7864804
> The death of an artform is thena reality, a real event which, setting aside all pathetic sentimentality and nostalgia, we are called upon to grasp. Thus painting, for example, is for all intents and purposes over — and HAS been over since 1822. I am sorry, but it's over. No flower can bloom for ever. And for this flower to bloom another one had to wither away and die. This is what it means to be immersed inside a universe in flux. "Everything flows", said Heraclitus, and he really did mean everything — including artforms. Things are being continuously created — but at the same time other things continuously die. Our job is not tomournover this death; we can safely leave that to women and the elderly — but to analyze, and therefore understand, exactly how this death occurs.
>>7864829
Contemporary classic?
I think that most contemporary art is like pixel art; it can be crafted to something beautiful, but most gay-me developers will still use it because it's "simpler" and time saving - while butchering it, obviously.
>>7864817
I have just the right image for this feeling, anon.
>>7864831
>blank is dead since blank because blank philosophy
To figure out what that is we need to ask ourselves and answer the following question: What is it about a work of art that we find worthy of reverence? — Essentially, two things:craftsmanship, andimmersion. To begin with craftsmanship, one of the effects of the introduction of technology into the various artforms is to lower the level ofcraftsmanshiprequired to produce a given work. What diminishes in technology-powered art is our pleasure incraftsmanship, in the idea that what stands before us has been created entirely by human hands. When one looks at such a work one is no longer looking solely at human skill, as previously, but more and more atmachineskill (though, to be sure, it was ultimatelyhumanskill that created also the machine, but this belongs to thescientistswho made the relevant discoveries and theengineerswho built it — not to the artist who made the work...) Put simply, the actualtalent,training,disciplineanddedicationrequired to create one of Rembrandt's paintings ison another plane entirelycompared to what is required to create one of Brom's or Terada's illustrations (— let alone to take aphotograph, however skilfully shot and aesthetically pleasing this might be), and the same goes for a theatrical acting performance compared to a screen-based one, or for a piece of electronic music compared to a classical one, and so on and so forth. This is why, apart from whatever pretentious tendencies we are still infected with, we accord classical artists a greater degree of respect than we do to modern ones — and rightly so (and by modern artists I mean illustrators, photographers, cinematographers, etc. — i.e.genuine modern artists, not "modern artists" — not, that is to say,pseudo-artistslike Duchamp, Picasso, Warhol and their descendants, for whom we have nothing but contempt to all eternity).
>>7864877
But the plot thickens at this point, for the influence of technology is, of course, not altogether absenteven from classical art, since after all brushes, canvases and paints do not exactly grow on trees. Consequently, when we consider the matter a little more carefully, it becomes clear that even classical artistsemployed technology to a certain extent, and, what's more, were not at all averse to adopting new techniques where possible as a means of increasing the complexity and effectiveness of their work — as can be seen, for example, by considering the bewildering array of musical instruments employed by classical composers, of which the Greeks and the Romans knew nothing, or the evolution of theatrical stage devices from the simple masks and costumes of the Greeks to the monumental "total work of art" extravaganzas of the Wagnerian operas. So the technological transformation of the arts is not something that occurred suddenly, or that began at one point and stopped at another — it is an ongoing process that has been unfolding for countless millennia, and whose end is still nowhere in sight.
>>7864883
What creates difficulties for us, however, is that this process suddenly went into overdrivein the previous century, transforming the arts so radically in such a short time that the idiotic pseudo-theorists tasked with tracking and analyzing these developments, the so-called "cultural critics", assailed as they were on the one side by sweeping political and social changes, and on the other by the seemingly unintelligible shenanigans of the artfags and the rich, finally lost the plot completely. — If only Nietzsche had lived a couple more decades! — But hedidn't, and the only genuine philosopher to appear in the next century wasBaudrillard, whose analyses of art, however far ahead of everyone else's they might have been (and they were so far ahead it's as if no one else's theories existed...), are still wholly inadequate to solve the problems we are now facing (— quite apart from the fact that on many points they are quite simplywrong). It remains thenup to usto figure out what the hell happened between Nietzsche's death and now, and by doing so perhaps get closer to achieving somethingeven more important: predict what's going — more clearly what'sboundto happen in the future.
And this, at bottom, is what happened — what hasalway shappened and what willcontinueto happen until the entire comedy of art finally comes to an end (or, more accurately, comesfull circle... and starts over): a gradualincrease in the immersionfactor of new artforms, accompanied by a corresponding decrease in the percentage of value of each individual artist's contribution of craftsmanship towards each completed work. If you are having trouble visualizing what I mean here by "immersion", try for the time being substituting for it the term "engagement". Put simply, a chicken-scratch on a cave wall isless engaging than a wide variety of colors mixed and painted onto a piece of canvas (i.e. a painting), which isless engagingthan a photograph (which is nothing other thana photorealistic painting...), which isless engagingthan a movie (which in its classical, analogue form is nothing other than 24 photographs per second plus a sound track...), which is less engagingthan a movie which responds to the viewer's reactions (i.e. a videogame), and so on and so forth (actually, that's it — for, reality aside, nothing could ever be more immersive than a videogame, and reality, at least as far asweare concerned, does not count and will never count as art).
>>7864892
And now we can begin to grasp the nature of the trade-off between craftsmanship and immersion, which works in the following way: every technological advance incorporated into the arts transforms them in various more or less subtle ways, on the one hand rendering the current standard of artworkseasier to produce, and on the other making possible the creation ofhigher, more complex and consequentlymore engagingartworks. But at the same time as the amount of technology injected into an artwork increases, so does the percentage of craftsmanship of the overall work due to a single persondiminishes. This explains why, at the same time as we accord the individual modern artist LESS respect than to the classical one, we neverthelessenjoymodern artworks MORE than classical ones — because enjoyment of an artwork is proportional to immersion, whilst respect for the artist who made it depends on the percentage of craftsmanship of the completed work for which he is responsible.
It's a seemingly paradoxical situation, this apparently inverse relationship between enjoyment of a work and respect towards those who made it, and one which demands further elaboration; but before we move on to that we should clarify an essential point, namely, the nature of the relationship betweentechnological level of the means of artistic creation, amount of respect towards the artist concerned, andoverall level of complexity of the completed work. This goes as follows: we accord LESS respect to artists who use MORE ADVANCED means of artistic creation to produce a work of THE SAME level of complexity. So Rubens used paint, brush and canvas to create the "Massacre of the Innocents"; if someone uses a $2,000 PC and Maya to create something on the same level, then as an artist he obviously stands on alowerlevel than Rubens, even if the works are aesthetically equivalent. But when he uses his computer to create, for example, a videogame all of whose art looks like a Rubens painting (basically the Western equivalent to what Clover did withOkami), then we accord the artist, or at least we SHOULD accord him, if we finally manage to rid ourselves of our pathetic middle-class-inherited snobbery and pretentiousness, the same amount of respect we do to the old master. It is the same with any sport. The reason you are given more powerful tools is TO USE THEM — if, e.g. in tennis, you are achieving the same ball speeds with your modern carbon-fiber racket as the pioneers of the sport were getting with their flimsy wooden ones, then in terms of skill you are obviously BELOW them. But if you are getting proportionatelyhigherspeeds than them, then, all else being equal, you really are at least on the level of the older champions, and should be accorded at least as much respect as them.
>>7864914
To get back to the case of art, what happens as works become more complex, both in terms of technology and number of artists involved, is that the artwork becomes more of acollectiveeffort. So whereas a painting is the result of the work of its author, as well as the few people who made the brushes, paints, canvas, etc., and the other few who invented the techniques of manufacturing of all these things, a movie is the result of the work of an astonishing number of individuals including a Newton, a Faraday, a Maxwell, an Edison, and so on and so forth — not to speak of a videogame, which includes also a Leibniz, a Boole, a Tesla, a Turing, a von Neumann, and ultimately the entire of line of scientists and inventors leading up to them (and of course also all the manufacturing people, and the software people, and the middleware people, etc. etc.) Works, therefore, become ever more collective as time goes on; with extremely complicated works such as movies and videogames it can become at times even impossible to figure out who "the artist", the so-called "auteur" is supposed to be — i.e. the person who is more than anyone responsible for the overall quality of the completed work (consider, e.g., the movieFight Club: who is the auteur here, Chuck Palahniuk or David Fincher? OrKiller 7: Shinji Mikami or Goichi Suda?) — an enterprise which at times becomes hopeless and which we are therefore forced to largely abandon. And all this without even taking into account the (far more fundamental) contributions of the scientists and engineers, without whom there would have been quite simply no movies or videogames at all, let alone Fight Clubs or Killer 7s.
>>7864924
Thus with every technological advance injected into an artform the contributions of a particular individual are drowned in those of an ever-increasing number of others, diminishing his apparent worth — but this diminishment is compensated for, and indeedovercompensated, by the increase in pleasure we derive from the enhanced immersiveness of the completed work. What should be taken away from this is that, ultimately, the overall level of craftsmanship, and thus our pleasure in it, never really decreases — on the contrary, it is plainly obvious that it continually increases — what decreases is the percentage of craftsmanship PER PERSON (artist/scientist/engineer) involved. Consequently, our gratitude towards the makers of a work is just as great as ever, if not greater, it's only that, as the arts advance, we are obliged to DIVIDE it between an EVER-INCREASING number of individuals. And this is one of the things that can be found at the bottom of all pseudo-intellectual complaints against advanced artforms: that they thwart our natural (and naturallyidiotic) propensity to direct all of our gratitude towarda singleartist, toworshipa single person like a sort of artistic god or demi-god. The slow, the dense, the thick, the stupid, those lacking discernment and critical ability — but who at the same time wish to seemthe oppositeof this — in short, the pseudo-intellectuals — simplystand aghastin front of a work of such complexity that it required the combined efforts of three or four hundred individuals to produce — they stand aghast and blink. "These are way too many gods for us!", they cry. "The relationships and connections between them and the various aspects of the work are mind-bewildering!" "Who among them are we to worship?" "And if we don't know who to worship we can't make a big show out of SEEMING to worship!" "And if we can't put on this show then we can't CONVINCE OTHERS that we are INDEED worshipping, and in fact worshipping far more thantheyare!" "And if we can't do this we can't trick them into according us more respect than they do togenuineart lovers!" "So let's just go back to the primitive arts were things are much less complicated!" "And since we are too thick to figure out how to handle the advanced arts we are just going to have toslanderanddefamethem, and claim that they are not arts!"
