Can we have a discussion about art?
Do you consider paintings like this to be artistic? Where do you draw the line between art and no-art?
I believe that art doesn't necessarily have to be beautiful or aesthetically pleasing, but it has to elicit at least some kind of reaction from the viewer.
>>469058
>I believe that art doesn't necessarily have to be beautiful or aesthetically pleasing, but it has to elicit at least some kind of reaction from the viewer.
Literally everything in the world elicits some kind of reaction, on some scale. Is everything art?
>>469062
Only if it was made with that purpose.
>>469064
So if you see the Mona Lisa, and enjoy the background more than the Mona Lisa herself, even though the Mona Lisa is meant to be enjoyed more, does it cease to be art?
>>469062
Yes. And history filters what is the best. Some reactions are more lasting than others, but all reactions are valid. The lasting ones are the best.
>>469076
This seems about right. After all, no one remembers anything of the modern art meme. Except maybe that shitter Picasso.
>>469058
YOU DON'T SEEM TO HAVE READ ARISTOTLE OR LUKACS SINCE LAST THREAD
>>469081
do you ever look at a post and just not know where to start
>>469058
For each object, there is a definition of art under which such an object is art.
>>469068
>if i take a big fat shit on this thread and call it art then it's art
so sick of this high school shit. Youngest board on the site.
Once again, let me post some good modern art.
>>469072
Well, the background behind her was still created with the intention of being art
Marcel Duchamp pretty much took a giant shit on the line between art and non-art. He was the greatest shitposter of the 20th century.
Post rare urinals
my favorite art is that of paintings of girls from the range of 9-14 years old.
>>471642
Pedos leave pls
>>469058
I don't know what art is and I doubt there's even a definition of art that isn't omnicomprehensive.
I don't like that painting. Maybe someone else does and I would love to hear why.
In a perfect world, the standards of art are decided by the masses. Unfortunately, we live in a world where the art which is distributed on large scales and which is displayed in museums isn't what the masses like, but what the wealthy art community decide what is good.
>>471658
i'm not sexually attracted to little girls
>>469058
i like this picture. it calls forth many touching feelings.
>>473340
It brings on many changes.
And you can take or leave it as you please.
But please take it, do please do.
The way I think of it this way is "would it actually look cool on my wall?" The rich these days like to over fetishize certain object because they have so much money they don't know what to do with it all. Also art in particular is also seemingly used as a vehicle to launder money and store wealth for the 1%. That's not art's fault. A Rothko painting might not be deserving of all the hype or worth millions of dollars... but it still looks cool on a wall. His pieces are legit - they are very evocative in a way that's not obvious from tiny internet pictures and I'd love to have one.
Second is if a piece captures something special. Be it an innovative art form, evocative feeling, display of technical skill, or crystallizes a certain moment in culture or the artist's life. The last option is easily underestimated because it seems banal in contemporary times.
This is why I'm personally soft on crazy disgusting piece of shit modern art works like "My Lonesome Cowboy" in Superflat. The thing is I can imagine being in a museum 200 years from now and being able to say "yes this actually does transmit something visually about the culture it was created in. This tells you something about the people that created this work." Yes it looks incredibly stupid, gaudy, plastic, vulgar, and commercial. But you know what? So was Japan at times in the 90s. This is the side of them they maybe didn't want to draw attention too or display in mainstream art. It captures the feel of the NEETs, fake happiness, forced cuteness, cheap replaceable products everywhere, ennui of an old salaryman alienated from his home life reading porn mags on the late subway home. At least I think it kind of does. Also it's funny and looks kind of cool when you get over being offended by it.
>>469058
That looks like a tequila sunrise
I do like a tequila sunrise. Idk what this gay ass thread is about but I'm going to say maybe
>>473537
>I do like a tequila sunrise
The only thing gay about this thread is you.
>>469058
Art is propaganda, and that propagandizes modernist ideas.
>>469058
Modern art nowadays are just money laundering schemes
>>469058
Here are a few things that make this Rothko piece art other than the fact that it was called art by the artist, the galleries, and the critics.
>Gallery space
Your image doesn't even fill up the browser of my laptop screen, but Rothko intended for it to be placed on the wall of a gallery. The originals are huge and imposing. It's hard to describe in words––
>the best art uses its own medium perfectly and is untranslatable
––but when you encounter a Rothko in real life (as it was intended), then you feel like you're staring through a window onto a landscape of colors, a distinct world devoid of characters but pulsing with emotion. This cannot be reproduced onscreen because the environment is all wrong. I'm in a cluttered white room and the piece is on my laptop: that's not the same Rothko. Although different people will have different opinions on what looking into a Rothko feels like––
>good art allows multiple interpretations, unlike polemic ("political art")
––many viewers experience a sudden separation from reality, which it was once fashionable to call by the French term "frisson" (=shiver). Anything that gives people a frisson is indisputably art, whether it's the "artist's shit" posted above (>>471663) or more traditional paintings (>>471576, >>471642). This is a definition less sophomoric than "everything is art," so I would like to see if this anon (>>471548) is any more convinced by it.
>Style
I didn't look up whether the piece you posted was a Rothko or not. No one had to reverse-image search this. His style is distinct enough that learned people recognize it immediately, without context. That is maybe a working definition of "artist" rather than art, and again, it helps to separate us from the pretty boring claim that "everyone's an artist." But it's interesting to see that in Rothko's later career he purposefully produced bad paintings to sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
(cont.)
>>473655
>muh dubs
(cont.)
Was it still art when the artist was using only his fame and style to sell it? Is art that the creator considers shitty in any way worse than the works he thinks are good? I don't agree, but in terms of defining "what is art," I think we should admit that any change to the artwork's environment (location, presentation, or public/private opinion) changes the work itself, transforms it from one piece of art to another.
Anons please discuss.
>>473666
tl;dr
Art is anything that condenses an idea into a more digestible format.
Traditional artistic convention is not required to illustrate an idea.
>>473684
Fair enough. Look only to the greentext if you wanna.
Art is anything people recognize as art.
Art is an individual experience and has no collective meaning.
>>469058
>a work that convey ideas and emotions.
>>473655
You tried. As I have in the past. But this board just doesn't seem like it's capable, or willing to understand.
>>473655
I felt a shiver reading this but I'm just cold. Great read tho
Art is something that induce thoughts.
>is selfie art?
If you choose reflect on the cultural circumstances that led to the arise of selfies and look deeper into the picture abs ponder on the why I guess it could be art
I would start by reading some work on aesthetic.
Essentially, art is a reflection and representation of "reality," and it is through engaging with this dissociated representation of reality that people are often forced to deal with the world around them.
Good art should force you to engage with yourself and your perception of the world.
In my opinion, something is not art unless it is capable of causing the viewer to experience a specific emotion/thought when they look at it.
Focusing your attention on any specific item will make you feel or think *something*, but making your viewers feel or think about what you want them to is not so easy.
This is what pisses me off about a lot of modern art pieces. It's often shit that only makes sense to either the artist or a very tiny group of people.
>>473845
Give a sermon if you want people to think about something in a specific, unilateral way. That's not what art is for.
>>469058
In my opinion, art is a means of communicating an idea or concept through a medium. If you can draw understanding from an art piece, then it is art in your eyes. If you can't draw anything out of an art piece, either you aren't the intended audience for the art or the artist is just bad.
As a side note, I believe that nature can't be art. Since most art is in some way inspired by nature, a facsimile can't possibly be the real deal.
I consider things like the OP art. Even though it's very simple, the orange color is very calming and produces good feelings in me the same way the Birth of Venus does with it's calming sky background, sexually alluring woman with beautiful long hair, etc.
Stuff like the Urinal is not art. Now, if you painted the Urinal or even just put some extra parts on it to make it different than just a urinal, that could be art.
Abstract art like a random swirl of rainbow colors is meant to be seen as beautiful. It's meant to have the kind of mixture of colors and other such things that people find beautiful, in the same way that a more standard painting like the Birth of Venus would.
Simple things can be beautiful. The Spanish flag is a complex drawing meant to be seen as beautiful, and the Japanese flag is a simple drawing meant to be seen as beautiful. You can say that the Japanese flag is beautiful without being seen as weird, even though it's less complex than the Spanish flag.
Conversely, little kid's drawings of a family and some trees just look weird and stilted despite being technically more complex than the Japanese flag.
Paintings of dark, gory scenes, like HR Giger's stuff, can be art too because there's definitely a subset of people that consider them beautiful. People find a ruined old castle beautiful even though it's not an ordered, symmetrical thing, like a landscape painting of a valley, and it's not a pleasant scene, so why not a dark abstract painting filled with nothing but black and brown splatters.
>>474499
(cont'd)
I think we have to consider some things not art though. It's just not useful to have an enormous category that could include everything.
So a lot of "conceptual sculpture" is out. Stuff like Tracy Emin's "My Bed", which is not meant to be beautiful, either in a light-hearted way, or a dark and spooky way, is also out, That kind of stuff is just there to make a philosophical statement, not to uplift people with interesting scenes or combinations of colors. Stuff that's just a blank wall that's been sold for a million dollars isn't art, unless you actually put something on that wall.
>>473655
I've always been underwhelmed by the argument that "Seeing the Piece in Person" is substantially different.
Though I've not had the fortune of seeing a Rothko in person, the other day I was shooed away from a Cezanne because I was too close. I had been studying one of his still-lifes in oil, noting the weaving of subtle greens in orange tones and reds in navy blue tones, when I was told I had to step back. So I did, and could no longer see those extra details and gazed blandly at that Cezanne, and Corots and Picassos and Monets and Manets before sitting in defeat across from a portrait by Gericault looking upon it as I would a jpeg on my monitor surrounded by people milling about.
I would contend that the Museum is hardly a more fitting venue than one's Desktop, in fact it brings to mind the idea of Andre Malraux's "Museum Without Walls" which in short is what it sounds like: The promotion of wide publication of books that print images of art for all to see, but now we have even better in the digital form. The very purpose of the Museum is to bring art to the masses for all to see, it has already been stripped of context and slapped right between another pair of paintings like a random page slipped between two others... but here we are to think there is something special about the "experience" of seeing a painting in person? In the Museum?
There are many things to admire of Rothko's famous paintings, that it is huge and hangs on a wall is not one of them.
>>473655
>>473666
As to the arguments of what "Art", I'll repeat the simple notion that literally everything can be Art. This does not degenerate art-objects themselves, but is merely an indicator that the word is broken. The word "Art" has lost its functionality. At best it describes a relation we have with art-objects, but makes no judgment upon what can or cannot be Art.
The problem that people have with this is that it is vaguely understood what it means for us to treat an object as Art, there is a certain expectation of reverence and seriousness and that is hard to provide for a can of what is presumably shit. So to reserve this reverence for things they deem "appropriate", there are continual arguments of what is proper "Art".
But the reality of the situation, by an assessment of all the things we have made into art-objects, is that there is no criteria for what is eligible for being "Art" and the term only dictates how we are meant to feel towards such objects. This situation is most clear with objects that are little else but Art, such as the aforementioned Can.
The claim that "everyone's an artist" is petty and boring because Art itself has become petty and boring. Which is fine, Art can be that after all. In that vein, when Rothko made "bad paintings" to sell for gobs of cash that was Art. So too, were the paintings of Thomas Kinkade.
A critique of a piece of modern art.
Title: lakeside peepers
Artist: Casey Roberts
Size 42"x42"
This is such a great piece. Using cyanotype, he paints this scene with such a great sense of depth in a way one would not think even possible with such a medium. The birds sit upon what feels like a foggy lake with three figures peeping through the cat tails. The sun hides almost at the perfectly implied horizon. You can almost put yourself in the place of one of the figures; feel cool air, hear the ducks quacking, smell the all too familiar smell of a lake. The contrast in this piece is stunning. The deep blue of the cyanotype against the washed out yellowish-brown with the clean white in front of that. Somehow, he also managed to give a soft blue reflection here and there. All in all, a great piece, and I would be honored to have it in my wall.
I am a very progressive and liberal person, but very conservative when it comes to art, for reasons I can't explain. Not saying crap didn't exist before, but these days it seems the only emotion art wants is shock value or disgust. Obviously there's beautiful and traditional art made even today.
>>474772
If you're a progressive and liberal person, it should be simple enough to see the embodiment of shock and disgust as a progressive and even natural development of Art.
If Art can be expanded from the Beautiful to include the Sublime, why can't it be expanded to include other things such as Shock and Disgust? Although the Art you're reacting to is probably quite a bit older than you're letting on, for example I'd argue Ai Wei Wei (to grab a famous name) isn't really about Shock in his Art. Irony perhaps? When people cry about the destruction of monuments in Afghanistan then Syria and Iraq, but applaud the destruction of vases in China. Or perhaps simple Nihilism? Showing just how worthless those vases are, that they are in fact merely vases.
It's terribly difficult to be shocked by extreme acts now, we are all aware of basic history and are exposed to so much on a daily basis. If you do not see this as a natural progression where we moved onto the Shocking and Disgusting then beyond, you may not be as progressive as you think since Art is basically the world about you.
>>473809
>pay for something which you can print out yourself
WHEN WILL IT END
when you make sweeping statements about art, please think about all historical genres of art, such as portrait, landscape, and still life. are these about eliciting a response? are they about self-expression? of course not. or take history painting; is it about accurate rendition of real life? no. i can't apply many theories of art here with this holistic view of art history in mind.
also yes anything 'can' be art but not everything 'is' art. art deals with contexts
>>469076
sometimes the ones that last are just the ones that survived
>>469081
sadly most people here couldn't remember many of the names from before the modernist period. i doubt many could give a number of artistic periods in chronological order either
>>474499
>Stuff like the Urinal is not art. Now, if you painted the Urinal or even just put some extra parts on it to make it different than just a urinal, that could be art.
do you mean 'fountain'? it was placed upside-down, signed with the name 'r mutt' and the date '1917', and its purpose is hidden by the name of the piece. is that not a transformation?
>>474772
>thinking art is about emotion
Top uneducation lad.
>>476897
>also yes anything 'can' be art but not everything 'is' art. art deals with contexts
This a million times.
Thank you based 1-in-a-million anon who has thought about this subject for more than 5 fucking minutes before tipping their fedora and pressing their fat fingers into the keys.
