How do i get into art and art history?

very good kino this

Art: The Definitive Visual Guide by Andrew Graham-Dixon is a good start. Also check out his documentaries about art history, especially the ones about Germany and Russia.

vump

Anyone know where I can read Ashbery's essays/criticism on art?

Some important painters i should know about?

This.

But if you want to start at easy mode I suggest watching art documentaries (Power of Art is a good starting point). Having art explained to you and given context of it while you're watching selected pieces is excellent for your purposes. Then just google image artists you like, look up related movements, google artists from them, feel through it.
DO NOT be held back by trying to like art which gives you no emotions. Da Vinci may be a genius but if he does nothing for you, move on.

t. Someone who sent from knowing NOTHING about art to know being at least fairly educated about it, in a short amount of time.

Leonardo Di Caprio.

thanks for the tips man, i've been thinking about that quite a lot.

what im caught up in right now is how to measure art's objective worth with how it makes me feel. something can evoke a lot of emotion out of me, but that doesn't necessarily make it a good piece of work, it would seem. i'm curious about the objective qualities any certain piece of GOOD art would have that makes it discernible from bad art. anybody got any tips for me on that?

Don't fall for big names. If you don't feel anything, it's not yours.

Think of an object you enjoy the look of greatly, now relate that object to a style of art or architecture or design.

Begin looking into more objects of that style.

If you want I can help you if you post some things you like the look of.

Herbert Read isn't exactly entry level reading for the visual arts but he expresses something pertaining to this in 'The Meaning of Art'. three ways you might want to gauge objective worth are by cross referencing it against either realism, idealism or expressionism. that is to base its merit on how well it represents natural forms in a mimetic fashion, or how well it idealises form but perhaps distorts reality or how well it explores and appeals to a universal emotion. If you're looking deeper for a direct aesthetic virtues its going to be hard to give a set of rules of what to look for because these values are so diffuse and changeable in regard to the time in which something was painted or sculpted; Picasso was one of the first to truly re-embrace ugliness as an aesthetic virtue since primitive art (in regard to its use as a sublime idea) . But for the time being, bear in mind that there are objective standards, don't be mislead by those who equate the transiency of aesthetic trends with the subjectivity or art. When the big names start coming up you'll get an appreciation of what unites them in their greatness and from there everything will become easier to understand and you'll subconsciously cultivate your tastes

also nice dubs

thanks a lot, senpai.

Memes can be fun, but these are the posts that I come to /lit for. What do you think of Huysmans's treatment of Odilon Redon in Au Rebours, user?

It may be tendentious, but I love John Berger's Ways of Seeing.

oh, also, here's an example of what i was thinking about today, and this partly why i am looking for objective qualities in some forms of art in order to be able to discern good art from bad art.

say, an artist sets out to accomplish a particular goal, and he accomplishes that goal EXACTLY as he wanted to do it. it seems to me that that wouldn't necessarily make any certain piece of art GOOD. if i shit in my hand and take a photo of it and that is everything i set out to do and i did it perfectly, does that make that photo good, well, no. i understand that example is pretty silly, but, still, that is the question that i have right now.

it's very tantalizing to look at a piece of art that is seemingly great but having no other way to discern whether it is or not due to "taste".

i understand these are pretty basic things, but, then again, i'm a complete pleb. if you have any other recommended readings for me i'd appreciate it a lot. i feel i have a nice list to start with already, but, i'm very interested in the topic and i have a lot of free time, so i'm going to be blowing through probably a book a day. so, any other recommended books i'd appreciate a lot.

thanks again dude, you make the board worth it.

thanks lad

Can't say i've read it user, sorry to disappoint. I'm not actually as well read on art history as id like to be. I love Veeky Forums but I wish there was a board exclusively dedicated to fine art. /ic/ is ok because I do a bit of digital painting as a hobby but they rarely have threads on stuff like this and sometimes good literature on the subject can be hard to find. thanks for the recommendations

Sorry to piggyback off of your post, OP, but . . .

Can anyone offer any opinions of What is Art? by Tolstoy? I remember I was assigned an excerpt for an Aesthetics class, but I can't remember any details that would even allow me to track down the excerpt.

I also remember reading something (or an excerpt from something) titled simply "When is Art?" for the same class. Any idea who wrote that? Can't find it either.

Its the same sort of questions that Marcel Duchamp was asking in 20th century. Moreover, what makes a work of art a work of art to begin with? by placing a urinal in an art exhibition he succeeded in his GOAL of making an iconoclastic statement in response to the obsession with optics he felt was stultifying art at the time, but was it the fact that he placed it there more the 'art' than the urinal itself. was the aesthetic virtue of the art contingent on the context and not at all on the actual urinal (the 'ready-made')?

Im going off on a bit of a tangent here but you have to understand that very similar works of art have been produced similar to literally 'shitting in your hand'. (look up 'artist's shit' by Piero Malzoni) If you want a fundamental basis for what makes a work of art 'good' objectively then start from the high renaissance where the old masters were refining the technical side of painting. perspective was a massive hurdle for example. ideas about harmony, unity and symmetry and proportion were very important too and continued to be so until probably the end of the 19th century.

I went through the same experience as you when I first started to learn about art history, just initially try to understand aesthetics in the western chronological context of Giotto to Cezanne and then look elsewhere be it, eastern art or modern art or even primitive art.

Also dude ive noticed people dump top tier art books in charity shops for some reason thats where i got most of mine

work out how to do this

Not completely about art, but more about visually seeing and how it works. Yes, seeing needs to be explained.

once again, thanks a lot, seriously. i guess i've just got to jump in somewhere. starting right now by reading art/art history for dummies to get a broad overview of things and then i'll jump into some works on aesthetic and things that seem interesting to me.

also, i live in a pretty poor area so i don't think i'll find any worthwhile literature at any charity shops around here, but i'll try. i was thinking about trying to find moby dick or some classics at a shop nearby.

...

Au Rebours isn't criticism, although Huysmans did do art citicosm from time to time. It's a very strange book about a dreanged rich hermit obsessed with aesthetics. There is a lot of discussion about Redon in it though.

Bump

>The modern assumption, which masquerades as a nuanced critical stance, is that art is some kind of deeply subjective thing that can only be experienced uniquely by the observer, and that great depth of feeling is the reward of "authenticity" of subjectivity, rather than any honing of critical skills or knowledge. This is a bourgeois assumption for bourgeois retards in an age where the last drops of spirit are being wrung out of Western man until there's nothing left. Appreciation requires cultivation.

this. Do not fall for the Picasso meme under any circumstances. You will hear so much pretentious verbiage that you'll be tempted not to believe your own eyes, but trust your eyes. there is no excuse for the glorification of shit except the smuggest elitism and contempt for mankind and barbaric loathing of civilization

Why is Cezanne praised so highly when his paintings look so sloppy and almost childish?
yet Renoir paints pretty pictures and he's starting to be loathed by pretentious critics, probably because his paintings are so appealing even if they aren't deep or sublime.

cunt, suck a dick, dumb shit.

>Moreover, what makes a work of art a work of art to begin with?

imitation of nature

No, that doesn't reduce art to photography, there is more to nature than how it appears in the lens of an eye

don't get mad, it was not good advice

Which is why so-called hyperrealism is actually in philosophical terms a kind of phenomenonalism, because its object is the visual phenomena of the eye, and is not at all realist in the Platonic sense that nature is made up of separate essences or forms.

I made this awhile ago but it didn't get much attention: drive.google.com/file/d/0B6475ZpbH_cGSWxsZjdtY05ySGM/view?usp=sharing

For Art History, I'd recommend in the following order:
- Gombrich's Art Story
- Hal Foster and co. Art Since 1900
- Anne D'Alleva's - Methods and Theories of Art History (pic. related)
For more in depth content:
- Both anthologies 'Art in Theory 1900-2000' and 'Art in Theory 1805-1900'

Also, here is a good site with a extensive list of art documentaries: art.docuwat.ch/videos/?channel_id=0&skip=0&subpage=channel

Ways of Seeing by John Berger: youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk

Rules of Abstraction by Mathew Collings: youtube.com/watch?v=Bg3oQ_OqQ_o&list=PLM4S2hGZDSE5SOht-nruKVOvuR5lrCw2T

Understanding Contemporary Art (Excellent, a bit of a Deleuzian spin into Art History): youtube.com/watch?v=7YotPhheuHw

good kek

toBH i love you desu senpai

i'll make sure to share this in the future

You can find all of these on libgen in some capacity. Aside from the the anthologies, of which I found one on tpb.

Anyone else feel little from pictorial art?

It doesn't reach me (or vice versa) the way literature or music can.

Why do you think Thomas Kinkade sold so many puzzles

on a less related note, can anyone tell me where to begin with visual anthropology

Compressed digital images don't do the paintings justice

15,000 B.C.

ok i understand it's a broad question, i just meant in terms of specific works etc

Does anyone know of that of story about Picasso - may be apocryphal - where he went to look at some recently discovered cave paintings and remarked something to the effect of "We have created nothing".
Did this actually happen?

>Many claims have been made, and continue to be made, concerning PICASSO’s reaction to Ice Age cave art — in particular, it is said that he visited either Altamira or Lascaux, and declared that “we have invented nothing” or that ”none of us can paint like this”. The paper investigates these claims, and finds that they have absolutely no basis in fact. PICASSO was minimally influenced by Ice Age art and expressed little interest in it.
euskomedia.org/PDFAnlt/munibe/aa/200503217223.pdf
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascaux
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauvet_Cave

First post best post.
Actually a very good starting point.

>First post best post.
Do people who say this not read the rest of the thread typically?

I flip a coin.

>i wasnt particularly moved by a photograph of a painting i saw on google images in 400x1200 resolution so obviously i dont like this artist

dont pass judgement until you can actually go to galleries. the textures, the subtleties of composition, the way the work interacts with the light. . . it all adds up to become something more. Passing judgement on art based on google images is like judging a book based on its wikipedia article. You need to directly engage with a work in order to accurately judge the artist. I'm not saying you cant hone in on certain artistic movements, but dont act like an art snob over pieces youve only seen online.

also if anyone has anything negative to say about my post art isn't for them.

>drive.google.com/file/d/0B6475ZpbH_cGSWxsZjdtY05ySGM/view?usp=sharing

Make lit great again

Looking for these as well, if anyone has an idea.

one of the better posts on Veeky Forums but plebs will get triggered. see and

Here's what you posted:
>go read some books
>go read some books by some guy, I won't specify which
>trite, angsty whining.
Your post was terrible.

not my post retard but it's amazing how butthurt you are

Erotic.

Story of Art is how I got into it. I would supplement with Glittering Images by Paglia and Nothing If Not Critical by Hughes

He's not meming but genuinely trying to help. Crazy right?

...

>this. Do not fall for the Picasso meme under any circumstances. You will hear so much pretentious verbiage that you'll be tempted not to believe your own eyes, but trust your eyes. there is no excuse for the glorification of shit except the smuggest elitism and contempt for mankind and barbaric loathing of civilization
lel are you the same fag who got BTFO in that Veeky Forums thread? Why does Picasso make you so butthurt?

probably not, he hasn't called anyone a shit-eating conformist

because of the way he treated shapes, colours, the confines of the canvas, composition, and the influence he had on subsequent artists