Deskilling is a fucking disease. In cultural production today (Art, Design, Music etc..) the receiving public is fully willing to accept the deskilled object without question. People today make no attempt to see artistic production as a discipline (in the fullest form of it's meaning), rather artistic production becomes a game where by any criteria (or principle) applied to a work to critically assess it (determine to what degree it is "good") is dismissed as not essential to the work.
As a result people are making straight up garbage and try to pretend it's conceptual, because they have no skill and no discipline. They hide behind the notion that skill, technique, discipline and craft are passe and somehow unconceptual. Most art is produced in a critical vacuum, an environment free of criticism - your fellow artists don't know shit and wouldn't want to offend you anyway. Not only that, 99% of criticism in magazines/internet/literature is purely masturbatory, artists are marketed as saints. Real criticism is key to art, without calling a work into crisis art can't move forward. The response to criticism should be defensive, but not in words - defensive in action. Defensive by making another, greater work. This is why art is stagnant.
>muh lack of craftsmanship fuck off, retard. i bet you think modernists were unskilled and fap to shitty neoclassic garbage too.
Austin Brooks
While I hate a lot of contemporary art, a lot of old art is just as shitty. Just because you do not understand the skill does mean there is an absence of skill. In your first paragraph you show how you have everything backwards. The key "problem" with contemporary art is not that criticism is dismissed, but that criticism is effectively the only substance of art. Right now, the most important work you do as an artist is the writing of your Artist's Statement, and the next most important thing is to cultivate a rigorous CV. This is why everything is conceptual. Critical theory has so devoured the arts that art has become almost solely an expression of criticism. There is good work produced this way, because there is still a skill to it. The big difference is that whereas older works that were shallow were at least pretty, now shallow work has no redeeming quality at all.
Ian Peterson
>that lack of reading comprehension what are you doing on Veeky Forums? and no, most modernists were extremely skilled conceptual artists, on the other hand...
Josiah Morris
>This is why everything is conceptual Wrong. Conceptualism was the ultimate expression of the modernist project: a break with bourgeois tradition, notions of skill, craft, beauty and art itself. Art was always subject to criticism; the difference is a movement from the retinal (as Duchamp would put it) to the purely mental, post-object art world of the 70s and forward. We need both.
Zachary James
Most modernists, if not all, were conceptual. The "old masters" were also conceptual. A history painting is a conceptual painting. That is why it existed at the top of the academic hierarchy of painting. Not only were they exceedingly difficult, they also held conceptual value. The problem you seem to have actually began with the Modernists, who rebelled against the academic system to say that it was limiting, and so they proposed whole new systems of art, which we now know as Impressionism, Pointillism, Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism and so forth. The transition into Post-modernism was simply the abandonment of any greater principle or stylistic determinant, so that each artist was basically an academy unto themselves with no belief in any overarching structure. Basically, the transition from Art as a craft into Art as philosophy. Not a deskilling, but a lateral movement. Also, your perspective is very narrow. There are still plenty of artists and illustrators and graphic designers who would seem to fit your desires for art. If that's what you think is good, than buy it and share it and make it bigger in the world, instead of letting the things you hate loom large in your mind. The best way to fight bad art is to look at something else.
David Brown
It looks like you didn't read what I wrote, then wrote a worse version of it, and completely missed the point.
Joseph Johnson
You seem to be deliberately misusing the word "conceptual". Art has always had an intellectual appeal as well as an aesthetic one; the accusations Greenberg, Duchamp and many others put forward regarding the "merely decorative" nature of post-impressionist art were mostly fallacious.
>Basically, the transition from Art as a craft into Art as philosophy. Your reading is too superficial: there's always been a philosophy behind art. What Duchamp intended to do was completely deny the retinal dimension of art; he came to abhorre and condemn the visual dimension of artworks (whether that's sincere or an extension of his provocative nature we will never know).
Don't get me wrong, I love the modernists: they were pioneers, both aesthetically and philosophically. What happened here is their vision got corrupted and coalesced into a toxic relationship with the art market, where the fine arts have become an arena for personalities, entrepeneurs and bland political statements instead of controversial, boundary-pushing world.
>There are still plenty of artists and illustrators and graphic designers who would seem to fit your desires for art Those people are mostly working outside the fine arts world. Deskilling is a well-documented phenomenon and it took place most explicitly in Western Europe and North America: traditional art was vehemently pushed outside traditional institutions in lieu of intellectual pursuits like linguistics, critical theory, process-based craftmanship and others.
No. Sorry, but you dont seem to have a grasp of art history.
Tyler Clark
Ok, enough negativity. A skilled creative person is a beautiful thing, worthy of admiration.
PUBLIC QUESTION:
For the writers among us, what are some resources that you think we can consume and use to improve our own skills?
I submit Strunk and White. Maybe Aristotle's poetics? The Bible?
Jason Gutierrez
I'm the same person in both, and going on and on about Duchamp, and posting huffington post doesn't help your case. Kandinsky was, without a doubt, conceptual. Mondrian was conceptual. The futurists were conceptual. As in, they developed a rigorous conceptual framework which they then sought to demonstrate and activate through an application of visual technique. All of the art movements of the modernists began as pure concept. To really drive it home, Duchamp and Dada are, by all art historical metrics, modernist. The very idea of avant-garde is both conceptual and the very height of modernist thinking. Post-modernism is not a corruption of modernism, but the extension of it. There has only been a deskilling of art from a classical, pre-modern, perspective. The modernists stopped emphasizing photo-realism, which many at the time thought was a de-skilling. The modernists held that art was something more than had been understood before, and so this was not de-skilling but actually an improvement in skill. The post-modernists have carried on in exactly the same way. It's not that there has been a deskilling, but that the very concept of art has shifted. If you don't like it, than start putting forward your vision, and champion those artists you think have the greatest skill today, according to your metrics. It's useless to point out what's wrong with a philosophy if you don't have a positive assertion of an alternative.
Thomas Cruz
I don't walk around art galleries thinking "wow, that looks like it was really hard to make I'm so impressed."
Zachary Bailey
I'm not a fan of Strunk and White. English is the most living language today, and holding to style-guides like Strunk and White or Grammarly is a reduction of the expressive range of the spoken and written word. The ideas that are valuable in works like that are practically self-evident, and the practical advice in those works is nothing more than a cold and unthinking rhetoric.
Isaiah Cook
One of the most lasting impressions I've ever had from a work of art was an expo of a schizophrenic guy from PA who basically laid glass inside of medicine cabinets and painted them with nail polish. He was a schizophrenic and he believed that the rapture was going to happen in 1991.
Obviously there was a limited amount of technical skill going on, but the guy had a very clear (albeit pants-on-head crazy) view of the world and he chose a medium and expressed it for better or worse.
Jaxson Bennett
Fuck you. That last sentence of yours is one of the most hideous sentiments in the Western World. "He expressed himself for better or for worse." For fuck's sake, deciding whether it's for better or for worse is literally your responsibility as the audience. Agreeing or disagreeing is one of the most fundamental actions of social activity. Being alive gives you the right to an opinion. Why would you vacate this right? Or, worse, are you using this sentiment passive-aggressively? Because he fucking didn't have a fucking clear view of the world. He was fucking schizophrenic. He was literally insane. That's the opposite of having a clear view. Nothing is stupider than saying "I don't care what his opinion was, I just like that he had one." Nothing is more vacuous.
Mason Edwards
He expressed it by building hundreds of medicine cabinets with nail polish depicting scenes of the rapture in places like hotels and hospitals. What are you doing with your vision? Making hundreds of indignant shitposts?
Dylan Smith
>posting huffington post Do you want me to link academic papers on deskilling? Is jornalism too lowly for you?
>Kandinsky was, without a doubt, conceptual. Mondrian was conceptual. The futurists were conceptual. As in, they developed a rigorous conceptual framework which they then sought to demonstrate and activate through an application of visual technique. All of the art movements of the modernists began as pure concept. Conceptualism began with Duchamp. Conceptualism and "art that has any thought behind the purely material, aesthetic" behind it aren't the same thing at all (I think you know that already but somehow is trying to distort it to make a point).
The modernists weren't "purely conceptual" at all. Purely conceptual art is post-object art, art for the mind; anything that disregards the visual, material dimension of art altogether in favor of ideas. Most modernist movements brought both aesthetic and philosophical innovations to the game: Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism. The unifying factor within all these movements is a reaction to previous academic, traditional values such as the supremacy of mimesis over abstraction, the value of beauty, realism, representation and so on; they reacted to said values for they deemed them coercitive, bourgeois notions that were detrimental to the development of art and the full realization of artistic skill.
Let's make it clear: I'm not criticizing these developments in any way and I'm not also criticizing the schools of thought predicated on them; the problem lies in the art world itself, the way it absorbed these developments and the canonization of conceptual, deskilled art in detriment of all other modes of artistic production. I went to one of the most prestiged art school in Europe and the hatred for anything figurative, traditional or focusing on the graphic dimension of expression was severely put down by our instructors: "that's illustration, not art" was one of the catchphrases of my painting professor, who also happened to be connected to several curators of art galleries in Europe and the United States.
Talent (as in traditional craftmanship) is absent from their vocabulary and skill left the collective toolset of fine artists. What I want is a institutional landscape that doesn't impose deskilling on artists.
It's not about how hard it is to create something. It's about not throwing all craftmanship to the fucking garbage bin
Jaxon Long
"art that has any thought besides the purely material, aesthetic behind it"*
Dylan Nelson
There's absolutely nothing wrong with such works. The problem starts when this mode of deskilled artistic production becomes an incontrovertible norm
Jeremiah Gomez
And so fucking what? Who gives a shit what he did? Why does it matter? What difference is there between him and the schizo that shits on the walls except the fact that we let him do it. Also, did you fucking read? In what way does your answer answer a single one of my points or questions?
Chase Hill
Your weird authoritarianism is literally the antithesis of creativity. Who gives a fuck about what you think about their work? Weird schizo guy has done more for the world not caring about his audience and creating technically shitty but emotionally expressive than you or other people of your ilk will telling people there's no difference between making a piece or shitting on a wall and yelling "art".
Zachary Rogers
Really? That's definitely a part of it to me, because it shows the almost superhuman devotion to the subject, a pushing against the limits of what we think we're capable of.
That's the only reason I ever like sport, too, when I see things that seem like they would be impossible, an expression of what humans are capable with commitment and discipline. Even if the piece of art in itself is conceptually fantastic, the discipline adds to this because you join the artist in worship of the subject and take on their devotion for a brief moment.
Bentley Scott
Your definition of conceptual fails on the very basis that art is not defined by the visual, and even conceptual art requires physical stimulus. And talk about superficial readings. Have you actually read any writings by modernist artists? A unifying factor of all art is a reaction to the art that has come before. A unifying factor of life, if not the defining feature existence, is the reaction to what was to create what is and what will be. I also like how you literally agree with my argument by saying that these changes were intentionally made with the intent to further develop artistic skill. That you seem not to get any of this seems to have a great deal to do with why your teacher kept saying "that's illustration, not art". Photographic works are mainstays of post-modern art and they literally cannot escape the graphical. It is not a lack of craftsmanship that you are looking at, but a completely different idea of what should be crafted. The reason you were accused of illustration is that your work lacked meaning.
Kayden Mitchell
>Conceptualism began with Duchamp Jesus Christ, does all your knowledge of art history come from Wikipedia articles? Conceptualist ideas appeared and existed well before Duchamp was even born. In theoretical aesthetics, in literature and in visual arts. Duchamp's massive contribution to development of these ideas doesn't mean he was the progenitor. >canonization of conceptual, deskilled No need to lump these together. Necessity of conceptual idea does not impose any ramifications on implementation. >"that's illustration, not art" was one of the catchphrases of my painting professor And he's completely right. Your whole brainlet meltdown is basically a petit-bourgeois housewife reaction to modern art in fancier verbiage.
Andrew Russell
But what has he done for the world? For fuck's sake, I'm not even criticizing him, I'm criticizing you for not having any fucking balls. What I'm asking of you is to say something more than "He existed." Of what importance is it that someone has a clear view of the world? Why would a clear, but wrong view be preferable to an unclear, but right one? Why is the clarity of the view what matters, instead of the quality of the view? Your job as a person is to evaluate. Your job as a person is to have an opinion. If you don't have opinions, you don't have a personality. If you don't have a personality, why are you trying to force it onto other people?
Easton Hall
>artwork should ""matter"" >t. person who cries about conceptualism supplanting aesthetics-driven artmaking All of my keks.
Eli Hughes
Conceptual art may require physical stimuli; "pure conceptual" art (something you mentioned) would entail the lack of the material dimension altogether.
The rest of your post is a huge strawman. I never said my problem is with either modern or post-modern approaches, but rather the way the art world is structured.
Conceptualism literally begun with Duchamp: this is not up for dispute. If you think conceptualism in the fine arts appeared somewhere else before him you can't possibly know what is conceptualism.
>No need to lump these together. Necessity of conceptual idea does not impose any ramifications on implementation. It doesn't, but like I said three times now, I'm not talking about theory, I am talking about our de facto art world and the way it receives and digests said ideas. Art that isn't conceptual or deskilled receives no attention
>And he's completely right. You don't know anything about my art. You're basically just trying to get a reaction from me at this point.
Was pic related a brainlet making art for "petit-bourgeois housewife" who hate modern art? He's my main influence
Isaac Price
OP here. You're not responding to me. My posts ITT are :
Kayden Wood
I'm not OP you twat. I didn't say artwork should matter. I'm saying people should care. People should seek meaningful lives. If something does not matter to you, you should not concern yourself with it. If you do concern yourself with something, you should have an opinion about it, or at least be working towards an opinion.
Jeremiah Johnson
So what exactly do you think "both" would look like OP?
Bentley White
What if i like all art i come across in one way or another?
Easton Young
Your post is about aesthetics. Don't get butthurt that it started a conversation about aesthetics.
Evan Roberts
But why do you like it? That it exists is not an answer to why.
Logan Ramirez
What do you want from me? I said in my first post that the man's art left a lasting impression on me despite not being technically impressive. I don't believe in the rapture and I don't believe the man was talented in the traditional sense.
I reserve the right to have a lasting impression from what I saw without necessarily having a critical response to his art.
>Why would a clear, but wrong view be preferable to an unclear, but right one?
Because this is art. Holy shit, if you want "right and wrong" go give your money to some culture war shill and they'll curate what you can react and not react to.
Robert Myers
I'm not the guy you were talking with, but i think the concept that the schizophrenic guy presents comes from his own mind, and that at least deserves some looking into. But i haven't seen it so i dunno.
Kayden Morales
>Conceptualism literally begun with Duchamp: >I'm right, if you don't agree you're wrong Powerful. >You don't know anything about my art. Post it. >rather the way the art world is structured >Art that isn't conceptual or deskilled receives no attention That's factually untrue and smells of personal bias.
Adrian Watson
>you should have an opinion about it He said it left a lasting impression with him, you absolute dunce. Literally fuming over nothing.
Blake Rivera
But what was the fucking impression you vapid cuck? I had a bagel two weeks back. It had a lasting impression on me. So fucking what? I had a dream many years ago that also had a lasting impression. In fact, all of my memories are lasting impressions. To say that something had a lasting impression and nothing else is simply to say that you remember it. Congratu-fucking-lations. You have accomplished the same thing as a hard drive. What did you feel? Was it good for you to feel it, or bad? In what sense was it good or bad. Would your life be different if you hadn't seen it, or the same? Literally, you can have any opinion you want about it. You don't even have to understand the opinion. What I want is for you to stop being an inert mass of proteins and actually live.
Levi Williams
But everything produced by anyone comes from their own mind. What makes one mind more worth looking into than another?
Owen Edwards
see
Jaxson Russell
>What makes one mind more worth looking into than another? If their art shows an idea i find more interesting than another. That's it.
Sebastian James
Like I said, I don't really agree with the view that art previous to the modern era was retinal; I think there has been an intellectual dimension to art at least since the late Renassaince. The surrealists are, in my opinion, one of the most successful marriages between aesthetics and ideas
What exactly are you referring to?
>That's factually untrue How familiar are you with contemporary art exhibitions?
Jeremiah Lopez
Alright, easy there. I was (and am) plenty alive while I had my visceral reaction to said art.
The scenes were mostly people humping while covered in blood and being assumed into the sky and passages from the Gospel of Mark were written around the borders of the scene. The bio I read, as I recall, had something about how he had a big hang up about AIDS and UFO's. There were mock triptychs, full length mirrors, mostly medicine cabinets.
Did not feel particularly good knowing that a fellow human had created hundreds of pieces of art I neither fully understood nor agreed with but appreciated the art itself for its batshit-ness.
I had a lasting impression of it because I found it quite emotional despite its technical ineptitude.
Dylan Cooper
You don't think aesthetics make things interesting to look at? It's all about presenting ideas and personal expression?
Mason Richardson
I do, I'm just saying that i personally find some expressions more worth my time than others, that's not to knock on those other artists though.
Andrew Bennett
Honestly, IMO, don't be super triggered by >deskill, just look at it and if it gives you some ideas about things, that is good. If you can't stand it, there is plenty of Caravaggio or whoever you like to look at and it is not going away any time soon.
Luke Diaz
Also, specifically to OP, I think >deskill is a reaction to the increase of "photorealistic" CG art that is popular and is the cornerstone, for instance, of modern commercial cinema.
Also, drugs. I'm not going to be disingenuous.
Carter Bailey
Pasta is a fucking disease
Camden Rogers
>post-object
NZer spotted
Michael Davis
I understand the argument that conceptualism began with Duchamp but he's really proto-conceptualist because his work doesn't really resemble in anyway any of the big-C Conceptualist works in the latter half of the century, specifically as a critique and continuation of academic formalism. The Renaissance itself can be seen as the point where theory overtook materials as the primary determinate of value in art.
Jacob Roberts
This is a forgotten aspect of 'expression' in art: it was supposed to be about rich inner lives rather than just some average hipster's lazy 'perspective' on a limited life.
Evan Torres
but if you dont know the guy was schizophrenic and believe in the rapture. would have the same impression to you?.
Jose Nelson
>but appreciated the art itself for its batshit-ness Wow. I was giving you the benefit of the doubt so far, but that guy deriding you was right all along.
Lincoln Collins
You might like this dude. He 's a brazilian schizo guy who believed he was sent to earth to pick those god would save once the armagedon came and he spent the rest of his life in institutions doing crafts stuff and sewing / writing the names of everyone who was ever good to him so God would know who to save. Eventually, he was discovered by artists and he's been to at least two biennales that I know of (one in Venice, the other in São Paulo). His name is Arthur Bispo do Rosário.
As for the rest of the thread: It's literally impossible to argue with thos scrutonite faggots, they will refuse any shred of evidence in art history or aesthetics as artist propaganda or whatever while posting ridiculous Yes cover shit as good art.
James Long
>dude doesn't know art history so he uses vocabulary-parrot words for his thoughts >calls folk & outsider artists schizos >is way too upset about art to be artist
credentials yourself on this credenza
Anthony Robinson
What the fuck are you even talking about, Bispo was literally in health institutions for 50 years of his life, I'm just recommending his work to some dude who showed interest for another outsider artist someone he might like for the very obvious similarities.
Sebastian Peterson
>scrutonite faggots where are the scrutonites itt? scruton hates modern art
Mason Evans
I know retard, I'm telling you it's pointless to argue with them, I've done that many times before. I read the thread up until that post, saw that it was the same as always, replied to that guy and then you decided for some reason that I'm some uberclassicist who only likes academic painting and marble sculptures despite not a single shred of evidence supporting that being anywhere in my post (actually, the opposite).
Joshua Ward
>omg you cuck, have an opinion!
I have an opinion
>your opinion sucks
Your worldview sucks you gutless asshole.
Robert Parker
Well, no one really cares about your experience (you're too boring for us to care), yet many people are curious to see what being a schizo feels like.
Zachary Wood
There are people with great skill who can do hyper-realistic drawings and paintings (diego fazio for example). The problem is that people with skill lack conceptualization and people with good concepts lack skill. With photography technology realistic drawing/painting is obsolete. With 3D printing sculpture is going to be obsolete. We are in a time when art has to find out where it is to go from here. For 1000's of years painters tried to be more and more realistic. Now a cheap camera can be better at that.
Juan Nguyen
>The problem is that people with skill lack conceptualization and people with good concepts lack skill. not true you also seem to conflate skill with the ability to produce realistic painting
