ART

his, what is art? Is it a meaningful concept? Why is this can of shit considered art?

The problem is this one: For the last century artists have constantly tried to undermine the concept, resulting in urinals and pic related being considered art.

So the concept is obviously open, changing, and determined by social factors, there is nothing within the art object itself that can be used to tell if something belongs to the category of art or not.

But this doesn't help defining the concept of art at all; if something is art because someone considers it to be art, who decides, and who decides who decides?

The concept does not seem to be purely about describing objects, it is also normative: "This is not art because it is not good enough to be art", or "this is so good it's art".

If art critics/museums/scholars are to say if something is art or not, this means art outside of institutions cannot exist, which seems stupid. It also gets weirdly circular: X is is art because it's in a museum, and it's in a museum because it is art. Also, shouldn't art also be considered so by the public, not only by the institutions?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=NAh9oLs67Cw
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Art is subjective, it's what you make out of it.

It used to be about making the world more beautiful so as to make our lives on this earth more bearable. People would get increasingly good at them, reaching such heights of skill and perfection that everybody was dumbfounded, wondering at how such imperfect beings as we were capable of making such beautiful things.

Now it´s about poop and money laundring.

>poop

This. Cloaca is such a horrible piece of """art""" made by an edgelord who thinks art is dead because he made a shit machine.

>money laundering
Will one of you cunts ever provide evidence for art that you dislike being more vulnerable to money laundering than art you like? The problems with non-disclosure and secrecy with auctioneers that facilitate money laundering are across the board and not limited to any particular genre or group of genres.

Imagine my surprise when visiting the museum that, unbeknownst to me, was holding that piece.

There I am walking around, look at shit and I see one of the most divisive and shitpost fueling pieces of art sat in glass next to a car and across the room from some sort of jet exhaust.

I snapped a picture, but its on my phone.

bump

Art has been used for money laundering since at least 1930s. Many soviet spies were "artists" and "art dealers"

This is Veeky Forums... I thought people were supposed to know these things?

You didn't address the question.

Jews like modern art, so there you go. That's where the laundering is.

>evidence
Try again buddy.

Postmodernism is an art movement that has attempted in conveying exactly one message to the world: that anything can be art. I would say that postmodernism has accomplished it's goal, since most people realize that there can be beauty or at least meaning in the mundane. Furthermore, I would say that postmodernism has accomplished its objective so infuriatingly thoroughly that I would have preferred it never to exist, because I'm very tired of seeing soup cans and abstract metallic sculptures anywhere I visit.

Now, if you're asking what qualifies art in the age of postmodernism, I would say that there is nothing that qualifies art besides the recognition by someone that it is art. Postmodernism teaches the viewer to see art in the world. Often times, it need not even to be created by the artist. That's why its medium is the soup can. It implies that any human, or even nature, can be an artist. So the only requirement for a piece of art in the postmodern age is someone recognizing it as art. There are times when I see a randomly jumbled pile of discarded objects in the trash, and by their juxtaposition I can view that literal trash, created by nobody with intention, as art.

I know what postmodernism is. I'm trying to figure out how the definition can be meaningful post Duchamp.

>There are times when I see a randomly jumbled pile of discarded objects in the trash, and by their juxtaposition I can view that literal trash, created by nobody with intention, as art.

This is too broad, as it provides no way of distinguishing art from non-art. Even though all sorts of objects/acts/thoughts *can* be considered art, not every thought/object/act is art. It doesn't work because..

>So the only requirement for a piece of art in the postmodern age is someone recognizing it as art.

..gives every single individual the power to define art as they wish.

To me it seems obvious that a certain kind of person must have created the work, and a certain kind of public must consider it to be art.

Well I don't think a can of shit is art in my opinion.

I think art is like a genie, e.g enormous cosmic power with extreme constraints. Blowing apart traditional categorization of art to the extent that there are no constraints left doesn't mean art is "free" it means the word and concept of art no longer has any meaning.

Dostoyevsky said that beauty will save the world. The Jews understood the message quite clearly, so they proceeded to undermine beauty in art with modern degenerate "art", and undermine beauty in bodies by promoting race-mixing and negro "culture".

if you'd like to distinguish art from non-art then you should look at the research and speech behind an object and not the object itself. The object itself is meaningless until the discourse grasps it. The clearest way to see contemporary practices is as research on any topic, it's a research with no specific method and that's its privilege for the artist (artist's studio) and curse towards the audience.

I do wonder how to reach people like you, those who grew up in very acultural backgrounds, it's not easy.

>The object itself is meaningless until the discourse grasps it

Yes, this is pretty much what I wrote in OP: the object is irrelevant, the definition lies in the reader/artist/institution-relation and not in the text/object. But off-loading the definatory power from the artwork and moving it to the subjects surrounding it doesn't really provide a useful definition, does it?

>research with no specific method
this is useful

I love how you are aware of Wim Delvoye's machine despite hating it.

He's actually a good shitposter. He also tattoos pigs, which when you see pictures of them as an American living in the midwest, it reminds you of all of the fat, pink-white human boars and sows who have ugly tattoos of their own.

>The object itself is meaningless until the discourse grasps it.
>the object is irrelevant, the definition lies in the reader/artist/institution-relation and not in the text/object
When and how did this happen? Because that clearly was not the case for most of history, when art was primarily about being either a decorative object to beautify a space, or an object illustrating religious or historical scene.

The idea that art is primarily about the artist making a statement and the viewer interpreting its meaning is a decidedly modern phenomenon, but how did the switch actually happen?

>[my comment] gives every single individual the power to define art as they wish
Why should this be problematic at all? I feel as though you're grasping at something else, trying to find some truer definition of art that fits your preconceptions and is appropriately elitist for such a haughty topic. But there just is no such definition.

Postmodernism is expressing the idea that anyone, anywhere, can judge anything as art -- otherwise, you're just putting up artificial, arbitrary boundaries that are as logically strong as a house of dried grass. How else could the face of the movement be a Campbell Chicken Noodle Soup can, literally mass produced by someone other than the "artist" and nevertheless displayed in museums, if this were not the case?

There's art you like and art you don't like, maybe because it's not aesthetically pleasing to you, or because it doesn't fit your standards for art. There's art that gets in museums and art that lies on the streets, maybe for the sole reason that nobody is campaigning for its inclusion in the local museum. But there are no logical grounds to argue what is or is not art. Can you claim to truly understand postmodernism of you reject this?

ART is everything ARTificial, as in created by someone and as opposed to natural -- created by noone.

That's it.

What you can't fit in your mind is that art YOU don't like simply has low to none ARTISTIC VALUE (for you).

through canonic works such as duchamp's readymades and courbet's "origin of the world". Then it all becomes a self-referential system.

The last major trend-setting exhibitions "when attitudes become form" or "Traffic" were showcasing the direction art world would take in its near future.

The art circuit gets very self-referential too. After WWII humanity went aspergers, some people such as Bochner or LeWitt read Wittgenstein and made a mess out of it.

I do claim, however, that art as an a priori non-methodological research actually conveys the state of western civilization: there's confusion and exuberance and a conscious will not to delimit the world.

Has art been used to launder money? Sure, probably. Is it all created to launder money? No. Would it be restricted to just modern art if it were used to launder money? No.

You've clearly actually thought about what qualifies something as art before asking the question which is refreshing and welcome.

'Art' means different things in different contexts (sandwich artist, the art of design, arts and crafts) but in terms of contemporary, critically-relevant art it is qualified and selected by people with knowledge of art history who makes claims to determining what is effective art given social, historical and theoretical contexts. Generally big-A 'Art' is advanced for these reasons, basically to spark conversation (between the public or between works and artists themselves) and enrich discourse if you take it seriously enough. I think Artist's Shit is art -- I actually think it's good art -- for how it relates to this idea of enriching the public with art (a modern idea). What you consume is what you produce, essentially. As a parallel imagine the Renaissance artist practicing his drawing by close studies of natural objects and the human form, then condensing these studies and arranging them in such a way to create the art object. Isn't that a parallel to biological processes?

Dostoyevsky is a typical 19th-century commenter when it comes to the 'point' of art having been lost after the advent of the Enlightenment. Beauty is something art can do, as it can be political as well, but beauty didn't save us from WW1. Bunch of mystical nonsense from when people hadn't realised yet that you couldn't half-ass rationalism.

Do the people who dislike modern art have the same stringent ccriteria for other artforms?
Do they refuse to listen to music after Mahler, or read literature after Henry James, on the grounds that it's all modernist trash?

This is to me the 'switch' (as much as it is a switch but it is a continuation in many respects) from modern to postmodern, which occurred as early as the 40s and 50s, but properly in the 60s and early 70s. Generally people think of postmodernism in terms of the French influence but similar ideas were already being explored in American art before they were published in English.

At the time American modernism was at its height with critics like Greenberg (and the next generation, Krauss and Fried) advocating their brand of formalism, where the content of the work was only its very own material properties as a painting, e.g. the canvas, the paint itself, rather than illusionism or reference to anything outside the object. It was an idea of 'essentialising' the medium so it became an all-over flat surface, basically 'complete'.

A number of artistic strategies developed from the dominance of this theory:
- the process of the work as the work (Pollock)
- retraining the eye to change the way one looks at the image (Johns)
- 'dumb' painting that is what it is -- an object rather than expression (Stella)
- objects in real space shared with the viewer (various Minimalisms)
- different materials other than paint (Rauschenberg and Minimalists, etc)
- the institution determining meaning of art (various Conceptualisms)
- the idea as basis for art (LeWitt)

A lot is owed to Duchamp (primarily, but of course to other avant-garde movements like Surrealism) who was excluded from Greenberg's formalism. His formalism as 'modernism' gives us what artists were reacting to, hence they are 'postmodern'. A good quote opens an essay on this change (is here expanded):
>The old art depicted space as uniform and enclosed. The new art perceives space as organic and open. The old art was an object. The new art is a system.
Willoughby Sharpe

>not posting the entire video
youtube.com/watch?v=NAh9oLs67Cw

I'm not really concerned about whether artists shit IS art or not (I believe it is, and that it's not up to me to decide), nor did I intend to make a normative judgement about the value of that work or postmodern art in general. And yeah, I agree with this:

>critically-relevant art it is qualified and selected by people with knowledge of art history who makes claims to determining what is effective art given social, historical and theoretical contexts.

But like I wrote earlier: this means "fine arts", whatever you want to call it, cannot exist outside of art institutions, making it too narrow.

There is also a new problem; instead of defining art, you now have to define the necessary conditions for someone to be in a position to determine what is art or not. How do you distinguish these people or institutions form other, similar people and institutions?

But maybe the question is stupid in the first place. The more I think about it, it seems more like a political/sociological question than a philosophical one.

Very Good Post.

Well in a way it's true that it can't (yet) exist outside of art institutions, but maybe we're more cynical now that the avant-garde project of revolutionary art basically 'failed' -- there was no unification of art and life. In that early modern context it wouldn't be institutional in the way it is now, but since the middle of the 20th century it seems it has been primarily concerned with official display in cultural institutions like the galleries and museums. It may be too narrow -- when I walk around in a gallery or museum I do feel like I'm pressured to perform in a way and to be unobtrusive, so I don't really engage with the art, I just see examples of it as something I should know. In my previous post I mentioned the curators and directors being educated in art history, e.g. the current critical debates surrounding art. From what I gather they define art by placing it within the context of history, like how art intersects with history, and contemporary art is supposed to be enriching even if I'm hurried through the gallery through whatever anxiety I have about being there. I think the point is that the enriched viewer leaves the gallery, the place of the institution, and takes what they have learned outside its walls. So in a way art is whatever sits in that privileged position of education in accordance with the 'tradition' or 'history' of art, but despite being separate from life still retains some of that avant-garde teleology which is how those trained in art history know what makes effective art.

Am I missing the point of your question? I don't think the art world is homogeneous even though it may seem like it is from how I've been talking about it. There's no real official gallery of art (and as such no real way to look at it holistically), just collections that may or may not be written about by the lecturers and non-curators.

I was waiting for someone to do it.

You forgot art as a pure expression of Colorado and form e.g. Rothko and Morris Louis wich was one of the most important genres of the sixties

Like most people have said, art is subjective. But why? I think art less about giving the viewer a feeling or idea but bringing what was already there forward. The idea that art can be defined as art means that we place some value on the art in question, you either enjoyed it so therfore give it more value then nothing or you didnt like it and its trash. It brought some sort of emotion to your attention and you felt it. Everyone in here has seemed to think of art as the shit cans or toilets but couldnt the act of influencing the world around you be considered art? What about theater? Radio performances/podcasts? Music? Arent those considered "art" as well? Art is the feelings you experiance when you just observe.

Modern art is shit

Someone watched THAT documentary.
(good post tho)

What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch?

I guess your answer is as close as I'll get. I did some reading and found a definition that's kinda similar to some of your points, which defines art as a specific kind of relation between artist, work and reader:

(1) An artist is a person who participates with understanding in the making of a work of art.

(2) A work of art is an artifact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public.

(3) A public is a set of persons the members of which are prepared in some degree to understand an object which is presented to them.

(4) The artworld is the totality of all artworld systems.

(5) An artworld system is a framework for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an artworld public.


It's still kinda muddy and vague, but what's left out is probably better approached by understanding the actual and particular historical/institutional/social conditions.

*starts to drool, wags tail*