Deskilling is a fucking disease. In cultural production today (Art, Design, Music etc...

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.

Don't go to art school.

I find upper right appealing

This is honest to god degenerate.

That's because its style mimicks great works of the past with some accuracy.

Maybe, but it is head and shoulders above the rest there.

thanks capitalism

More like fucking thanks Duchamp

Yes. And the color scheme in the bottom left could be interesting, I think.

My feminist sister got a master's in film and now she only likes foreign black and white movies.

Duchamp provided a scathing critique of capitalism through his works. He was a genius

Yes, the barter system slightly altered to allow paper money to serve as a proxy for goods and services is to blame for mediocre art.

Definitely not all those participation trophy Marxist academics.

Duchamp was great, you just didn't look at the work enough to find out. Truth is even artists don't understand what he did and banked on appearances, making the public even more confused.

Don't confuse hard-to-master techniques with skill. Some art is hard to do but not compelling. Some art is relatively "easy" to create but is compelling. It takes skill to make any art - technically difficult or not - that is compelling and evokes feeling.

I say this as someone who is not an artist and enjoys art that is outside of the box that didn't necessarily take a lot of technical skill. Maybe I'd feel differently if I dedicated my life to learning specific techniques and then other people were getting attention for doing something that seems pretty easy.

I feel like the modern world is kind of absurd sometimes, or at least seems that way. Sometimes throwing some shit together in a way that is weird but kind of interesting feels like the best response.

What do you like?

Stop viewing art through your political views. Through his work he disrupted centuries of thinking about what the artist's role and about what the nature of art is. That was his genius, and gave 100 years of the conceptual in art.
However, we are living in 2017. Duchamp's influence was a bitter harvest - he made the deskilled not only acceptable but prevalent. People painting like shit and shamelessly making terrible objects. It's not all his fault but it's time the pendulum swung back.

I'm not claiming Duchamp's work was worthless, I'm only saying that deskilling and focus only on the conceptual has greatly damaged art.

I bet you have never painted with oil in your life and couldn't replicate upper right.
I also bet you only praise classical works based on your subjective perception of ther technique and other spooks like "expressiveness" and "emotion" while completely disregarding the actual criteria these works were built upon.
The deskilling of the artist is much more forgivable (interesting even) than the deskilling of the spectator, the true ruin of contemporary art, both the reader who hates and the one who loves the text do it for reasons completely separated from any actual worth in critiquing the work.

A+

I'm not exactly an excellent source of knowledge regarding visual art, but wouldn't Cézanne's The Bathers technically be considered an earlier (and fairly inspirational) attempt at deskilling? I don't know why the indictment falls solely on Duchamp here, is all.

What you don't realize is that Duchamp (like Kossuth, like Nouveau Realisme, like the Situationists) want to situate art in a conceptual frame, they make cosa mentalle, not optical art. To dismiss him as a mere denier of technique is assuming art is a purely mechanical action, devoid of any mental skill whatsoever. What a work like The Fountain (or LHOOQ, or his chess problems and most of all, Etant Donnes and the Bride, not sculptures or installations, but enigmas, built like Finnegans Wake, to have so much internal games that deciphering the work itself has become an actual game) is to be a poor viewer, a children fascinated by smoke and mirrors, by illusions (both Pollock and Delacroix are just pigments on a screen, after all). You'd rather go to a Chriss Angel show or Guardians of the Galaxy, the illusion in these works far surpasses DaVinci.
I'm not saying every conceptual artist or every artist which works with found objects, anti-art, expressionism or that sort of thing is necessarily good, bad art has always been a problem. All i'm saying is that if you refuse to enter the game these artists are playing, you can't possibly expect to find any wonder in them.

OP, search for Icy Calm's art essay and read enough to get the gist of it.

Do you want to impress others with your drawings? Go back in time 2500 years.

Do you want to impress others, right now in 2017, with art? Learn programming and make a video game. Or be one person out of 200 who works on a big budget movie or big name game.

Oh, that doesn't fit in to cliched and romantic notions of art? Too bad

I understand what you are saying, yes, deskilling used to be a palliative, a tonic, a medicine to cure what ills art. My problem is with the schism between the "conceptual" and material/formal, and I think the deskilled object especially exemplifies this. The fact is that so many artists and designers hide their lack of discipline, dedication to their craft, and their lack of ability, behind the canard that those issues are passe. I'm more than ready to admit in 1912 that characterization may have fit. In 1970 that may have fit. We live in a unique cultural condition. It's become the default position ("skill, craft, mastery discipline... I don't need that..."). This is a problem.

Duchamp was a genius with a deep understanding of art, but his influence might have been negative. Every piece of contemporary art seems so kitschy to me, and I sometimes get the felling that we're not capable of producing anything more right now.

>Cézanne's The Bathers
>deskilling

might as well say van Gogh was deskilling

>being this much of a pleb

Why would a Delacroix painting be just optical art?You think you dont need a conceptual frame to understand his works?That everything he made is self evident and requires 0 brainpower to process?

I wouldn't mind conceptual art if the concepts themselves weren't always so banal and predictable:

>muh capitalism is wicked
>the public are all consumerist drones
>consider the poor and the blacks yeah?

Every exhibition is the same shit, like a visual Guardian editorial.
I remember reading the Chapman Bros. book 'Bad art for Bad people' and realising it boiled down to:

>we use cliched Nazi imagery
>if you find it banal, or cliched, it's because you are too blase, not that we lack imagination
>maybe you are the real Nazi for finding Nazi imagery cliched instead of brilliant

The thing is: I've been part of a research project in studying modernism in my city (Belo Horizonte, landmark of the 7x1, the best of the second class capitals in Brazil, which amounts to shit in the end). It's a pretty insignificant town, most of the writers and artists from my state who have any influence only do so because they moved to São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro, and even then, our research gathered something like 200 modernist groups acting here between 1922 and 1949. These people would get awards, even national ones, would publish their manifestos that would make the public go mad and so on, but in the end, we couldn't even find works beyond catalog reproductions and similar stuff from most artists.
You want contemporary art to solve itself for you, but you don't realize that the only reason why older art did is because time has passed. You'd rather go to every showing, performance, audiction and exhibition you have in the hopes of finding great art that's worth following (and I did, living in a shit city, as I've said) than sitting home and complaining about muh skill (just another way of saying muh beauty, the most pathetic thing a man can do in two thousand and seventen anno domini).
Here, have my favourite living artist, a true retrograde who refuses to change but still manageds to produce fresh and vibrant stuff or the past 40 years while also intentionally avoiding every shred of success he could. His poetry is also probably the only thing I pay any attention in the medium.

That is precisely my point: If you remove intellectual skill for art you're left with nothing but pretty pictures. Intellectually speaking, a lot of conceptual artists are giants. You willfully neglect that because it wouldn't fit into how you choose to see (and frame) a tiny parcel of art as the main reason for the problems of the whole.

what a glib facsimile

Spoken like someone who only gets his contemporary art news from his facebook timeline.

>I'll just call anything that disagrees with me insincere
Calm down, DFW, we don't want you to get all hung up again.

>Intellectually speaking, a lot of conceptual artists are giants.

Intellectually speaking, MOST of conceptual artists are midgets. The environment where they aren't even expected to produce pretty pictures fosters this much more, the interest of the general public (as a place where artists originate from) is minimal.
You can't say these are positive things, I'm not saying all is shit, I'm saying it's not healthy.

>Spoken like someone who only gets his contemporary art news from his facebook timeline.

Have you read 'Bad art for bad people'?
Have you ever even been to a Chapman Bros. installation?

But most artists are midgets. That's what you don't get. You only think they don't because only the masters survive, but vor every Rembrandt there was a million Netherfuck Von Autistborg who might have even been a rising star in his days but fell completely out of the radar for whatever reason. There are already works from artists from the 60s that are completely unaccessible and unimportant despite the polemics we can see they caused in newspapers and magazines from the era.

No but you're proving my point. You wanna take people who work with shocking material and imagine the whole of contemporary art is that, because that's what non-specialized media focus on. Francis Alÿs for example has beautiful works dealing with political themes and beautiful works who don't, Thomas Hirschenhorn uses gore in his works and I also consider him good, Polly Morgan does extremely baroque and detached works and she's probably the artists I've been thinking and seeing the most in the last months, I'm starting to study digital art now and there are great things going on which talk more about what means to be human than capitalism or whatever, blah blah blah

I also forgot to mention that if you abhor politics in art so much, I must recommend you people like the above mentioned Billy Childish, Antonin Artaud, Genesis P-Orridge or even Duchamp himself, the kind of guy that is just at pure war, you can't possibly situate anything they do aesthetically or politically because they're in a constant ressituation of themselves, even if they never change places at a first glance.

Also, remember that one of the biggest conclusions of contemporary art is that the body itself is political, so, if every art seems like politically charged is because the way things are seen by artists and academics is that there really is no way to escape politics.

>tfw nobody here has mentioned the highest form of art there is

>But most artists are midgets.

This is your response? That it was always shit therefore it's okay?
You are wholly indoctrinated, see art exactly as OP was criticizing it. Pathetic.

Nice counterpoint. Really enjoyed this one!

...

You still don't get my point, do you. For every old master that you know of, there are hundreds of artists whose work simply didn't last. Are you seriously denying this? Think of all the texts no one cared to preserve in literature history, since we're in Veeky Forums.
My point is the OPPOSITE of "it was always shit". I'm telling you to go and engage yourself with most contemporary art you can consume, because there is a lot of shit out there, always has, always will, but every now and then you will come across great artists, and getting in contact with good art is always great. Open yourself to the possibility of good art and you will find it, keep sitting around letting other people form your view of such an abrangent topic and you will never get it.

Of course I understand this rather obvious point you presented. Instead of engaging in a discussion you treat everyone as if they were complete dilettantes. Assume people in this thread have at least a basic understanding of art (which your posts never go beyond), and reread the thread. Further discussion with you is pointless.

What, I'm addressing your points, while also posting a bunch of artists still producing which I find interesting while all you do is ignore a lot of what I said to focus on vague nothings instead of at least providing examples as to what you consider good, you fucking dolt. If I'm not going above basic understanding is because you haven't sent any question my way which can't be easily explained.
For example, explain to me why that painting I posted is bad and I'll tell you why it's not.

You aren't very good at understanding what other people are saying.
The contemporary London art scene is the ideologically conformist to a ridiculous extent. You always know exactly what you will see and exactly what the artists will be saying before you enter the exhibition. And that goes even for Childish and the rest of the stuckists as it does for the others. It's boring.
Can I name drop too? Tacita Dean! Sophie Hoyle!

>Spoken like someone who only gets his contemporary art news from his facebook timeline.
not the user you are replying to but I'm genuinely interested to know good online places to hear about contemporary art

Go to other cities then. I've done this, you can do it too. I mean, it's not like we have a way to check catalogues, exhibits and magazines from literally anywhere in the world without leaving our anime-doll infested dens.

Art magazines, facebook groups, I barely read any magazines anymore so I don't know which ones are trendy, but there's always Art Forum which is like the mainstream, from there start to see who's having a exhibit with who and that sort of thing. It's a lot like searching for music, really.

Here's the issue with this argument: a mediocre or even bad painting by an artist who is aiming for traditional achievement through craft still has plenty to offer us. Whatever level of craft it offers is enjoyable to that level. Traditional art is accessible.

Contemporary, deskilled art, is much more binary. Either it's clever or affecting it is a pile of random objects or a splatter of paint. OF course there is work that is successful in this mode, but the mode being the DOMINANT mode means that we are drowning in shit that literally offers no value to anybody but people who are making it, the people highly educated in abstract intellectual/ideological games that use these artworks as points of departure.

The big mistake is the shift in focus, not the creation of a new artistic vocabulary. I'm all for specialist artworks that are studies in texture or color or are pure concept, but the problem is that this art is presented as non-specialist, as art-in-general.

cezanne is brilliant

t. philadelphian with free access to the barnes

>Art magazines, facebook groups
>Art Forum

All places completely devoid of critique, it's like joining a reddit circle-jerk group

>Art magazines, facebook groups, I barely read any magazines anymore so I don't know which ones are trendy, but there's always Art Forum which is like the mainstream, from there start to see who's having a exhibit with who and that sort of thing. It's a lot like searching for music, really
What if I don't relate to art as a consumer product?

you get shot in the chest

You're accessing value to craft, and not only to craft, but to what your perception of what's craft. You pretend there isn't a flood of ridiculously bad traditional art being made but a quick trip to your local community college night painting class will show you piles and piles of 60 year old ladies' awful portraits of their husbands or a little house in a idillic prairie, and these things get exhibitions too, a shitload of them, I don't know how it is where you live but there's a whole circuit with people becoming actual millionaires in dealing these waterfall and fruit basket paintings, not to mention odontology clinic abstractions, mental ward expressionism and etc.

By an artist, I presume?

far from it

I'm literally saying I'd rather have the fruit baskets than girls putting spaghetti on a canvas because there is actually some minor value in the fruit baskets because of the craft.

Contemporary art is either great or shit, that's my point.

I live in Los Angeles. I've been to all the big museums and to many of the local colleges.

How is Solanas not an artist? How did I become Warhol? This is getting pretty interesting.

But there's nothing that separates fruit baskets and spaghetti in vagina, both are absolute shit as far as I care. You liking one more than the other has much more to do with your personal opinions than to any values the works themselves might have, if accessibility is important to a work, Kevin Feige is the biggest living artist just for the sheer amount of accessibility in the Marvel movies.

I just went with the first name that came to mind in the realm of "Artists who challenged thoughts on consumerism" that I might be able to make a joke out of.

I don't agree with your dismissal of art that is not based on the mastery of one's craft, but at the same time the academization of these kind of avant-gards truly disgust me.

I get what Stockhausen was doing, and I know that he was honest in his pursuit: at the same time I'm 100% sure that there are maybe 10 people every 1 million who could wctually do this type of art sincerely.
Since this kind of free spirit is, after all, very rare, the academization of these notions end up training thousands of people in being downright bad in what they're doing. Very few people are profound, deep and truly creative, and even fewer people can adopt these criterias without corrupting their entire artistic sense.
It's heartbreaking, really, to know that these people won't believe me when I'll tell them that their art is worthless because they have already memorized a string of arguments made by actual avantgardist geniuses in defence of the lack of craft. No, you fucking retard, Xenakis died 16 years ago and your art would have been considered stale 50 years ago: your rebellion is meaningless.

I'm specifically talking about Western conservatories (the only kind of artistic institution I'm truly familiar with), by the way. Sorry for the rant, but I think it's reasonable to get so mad at the systematic corruption of 10 generations of composer through composition (compose this kind of music or we won't ever consider you) contests and tenured positions requirements.

The problem with a lot of modern art is that the conceptual aspect takes preference over the aesthetical

Its not the skill thats lacking but concentration and conviction.

I did not mean a complete dismissal of deskilled art, only a proposition that it has a negative influence on art.

Not really, its that the concept is not very interesting or challenging.
Most conceptual artists still take loads of aesthetic decisions.

>those artists
Cringe

It's an ok joke, I guess, but I was hoping for an actual answer and did not expect any life-threatening scenario.
Could you name more artists who challenged thoughts on consumerism, I'd be very interested.

Skill is also lacking

nah

You can apply skill afterwards if necessary.

The difference is, old masters lived in a world that encouraged tried and tested classical values that resulted in good art. No one was allowed to question Raphael or Michalangelo, and for good reason, because rejection of standards is anarchy.

In any case, modernist and post-modernist visual art (with the exception of Cubism) is mainly descended from Romanticism. Romantic preoccupations with the individuality of the artist, the beauty of strangeness, and untaught spontaneity find it's most extreme expression in modern and post-modern art. To return to good art, we need to debunk artistic and political Romanticism wherever we find it, which necessitates anti-liberalism among other things.

Well I'll be straightforward with ya and say:
I don't know shit about art. I only know that Warhol was clowning ideas on consumerism.

no skill available afterwards, no mastery to draw from

boy can learn

there can never be a return to classical art

good boy

If artists can't return to classical art, the public will just turn to popular entertainment as a replacement, forms that are produced and sold by those with agendas to push and profits to make.

Enjoy.

let's talk again after the nuclear apocalypse

there can never be a return to art, even

why not

Are you the idiot who wrote that the overman can't be born because of a nuclear holocaust in the other thread?

what a glib facsimile

Never give a sucker an even break, libs love to pay to virtue signal.

Conning people is an art too.

no, but that sounds hilarious - can you link me to it?

is this some new epic mene?

>new
congratulations you got yourself caught!

>tfw still called a newfag after 10 years

tell me the significance of a urinal stood differently, you, who is a supposed knowledgeable spectator, that is able to critique "works" such as that

>tell me the significance of a urinal stood differently
what did he mean by this

>he discovered Veeky Forums in 2007

newfag? Damn straight

That's because you are an idiot. It's shit.

What do you like?

there can be no return to classical art because one cannot return to the conditions of the classical age. what you seek would merely be kitsch replicas of classical art, and already exists in the form of neoclassical art, which is rightly derided by the art community

>the art community
Do you mean former classmates?

Yeah man, us moderns are just fundamentally different from people in the past. Like pass the bong dude

"Kitsch" is just a vague term for bad art and/or art that makes MFAs insecure about their own lack of technical talent. It's meaningless.

SeX

>us moderns are just fundamentally different from people in the past.
in terms of culture, yes, very much so

>It's meaningless
read adorno

And your sister, do you like her?

i only fuck virgins

then go fuck yourself

Capitalism goes much deeper than a barter system with monopoly money lol. If you think the Capital has nothing to do with the direction art has taken (and basically everything else) it just goes to show the genius of capitalism: people don't even realize their precious concepts have become commodities. And even Duchamp and the many trophy Marxists knew/know of this.

>in terms of culture, yes, very much so
Humans are fundamentally the same everywhere. That's why we can still understand and relate to the works of Shakespeare and Homer.

>read adorno
Post-WW2 cynicism is irrelevant now. This is a new century.

>Humans are fundamentally the same everywhere.
Think again, bloody postmodernist.

the irony is that the current state of art is the fault of Duchamp and those like him