what is art? -

[CatParty]

i saw this discussion starting in the obama portrait thread and it seemed interesting. @AnOminous brought up many good points.
what is your definition of art? what is good art and what is bad art? should art evoke emotion or should it just be a literal representation of things? has photography or cinema or digital art surpassed traditional art? are other areas like vidya art?

 

[AnOminous]

Art is whatever does nothing other than whatever it is. I think if it's good, it should evoke emotion, but even if it's bad, it tends to express something otherwise inexpressible by the artist.

Most people are shit at it which is why they shouldn't do it. There are no participation trophies in art.

While there is nothing objective about it, separating it from actually useful stuff like science, it is objectively measurable when certain items of art are bought and sold.

I think an amazing work of art would be if someone bought up all the art currently existing in the world for billions of dollars and then just burned it all.

 

[RG 448]

I think art is too subjective and perceptions differ too much from person to person for us to ever have an accurate objective way to classify what is and isn’t art, so the case-by-case basis should be left up to the social elite, like every other aspect of our lives secretly is. And no video games aren’t art.

 

[Tranhuviya]

the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.

 

[RG 448]

the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.

What if the creation wasn’t conciously intended to be art but still speaks to people on that level?

 

[AnOminous]

I think art is too subjective and perceptions differ too much from person to person for us to ever have an accurate objective way to classify what is and isn’t art, so the case-by-case basis should be left up to the social elite, like every other aspect of our lives secretly is. And no video games aren’t art.

I'm not sure how subjective it is, though. There are some things that are nearly universally abhorred, like Uwe Boll films.

And then there are other works of art that are universally admired, like Uwe Boll beating the shit out of Lowtax.

 

[RG 448]

I'm not sure how subjective it is, though. There are some things that are nearly universally abhorred, like Uwe Boll films.

Ah, but there are some who enjoy his films ironically, not unlike The Room. Would that not still make them art? Does the classification hinge upon how we process these works or does it truly come down to authorial intent?

And then there are other works of art that are universally admired, like Uwe Boll beating the shit out of Lowtax.

lol ya that was fucking savage

 

[CatParty]

Ah, but there are some who enjoy his films ironically, not unlike The Room. Would that not still make them art?

you're talking about kitsch or outsider art
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-bad-art-good

Occasionally, bad art is easy to spot. Take the famously botched restorationof Elías García Martínez’s Ecco Homo, which transformed the work into the “Beast Jesus,” or the Ronaldo bust that is decidedly less handsome than its source material. Oftentimes, however, the designation is not so obvious.

Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Manet’s Olympia were both reviled upon first viewing. (One contemporary critic wrote that the latter resembled nothing so much as “a skeleton dressed in a tight-fitting tunic of plaster.”) These opinions have since been heavily revised, and today both works are considered modern masterpieces—as “good” as art can get.

Understandably, then, the genre of “bad painting” is a slippery one. Rather than a cohesive movement, the label has been applied to a wide-ranging group of artists throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. What they share, wrote curator Eva Badura-Triska in an essay for the 2008 show “Bad Painting: Good Art” at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna, is a refusal “to submit to artistic canons.”

She goes on to qualify this as a willingness to “oppose not only traditional academic concepts and rules, but also—and this is crucial here—the concepts and rules established by the avant-gardes and isms of the twentieth century, which ultimately threw old dogmas overboard only to replace them with new ones.”

French artist Francis Picabia, for example, could never adhere to one art movement for long. He ping-ponged between Impressionism, Surrealism, and Dadaism, before finally eschewing the art world establishment altogether in the 1920s. It was then, beginning with his “Monster” series, that his painting veered into the realm of the intentionally “bad.”

These bizarre, hallucinogenic works are painted with clumsy brushstrokes and garish colors that belie the artist’s true skill. Decades later, during the start of World War II, Picabia turned to female nudes, sourcing material from movie posters and soft-core porn. Gauche and distasteful, several of these paintings actually ended up in North African brothels serving Nazis and Italian Fascists during the occupation.

These phases of Picabia’s work can be seen as a precursor to later artists who dabbled in bad painting, including René Magritte and his 1948 période vache. Although the Belgian painter’s best-known works were always unbelievable—men in bowler hats hovering in the air, a daytime sky paired with a street at dusk—they were also crisp and illustrative. His roughly 37 période vache works, on the other hand, were looser and more spontaneous, in the manner of comics or caricature.

As the focus of Magritte’s first Paris solo show, the paintings were meant to offend the Surrealist establishment. (They had the secondary effect of offending buyers; the exhibition was a commercial flop.)

Decades later, Philip Guston began making work as a reaction against another dominant art movement—Abstract Expressionism. He himself had been a first-generation AbEx painter until the late 1960s, when abstraction began to seem too removed from the tumultuous global political climate. So Guston returned to figuration, populating his paintings with cartoonish hoods reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as bulbous, disembodied heads and tangled clumps of legs.

He first exhibited these works in 1970 at Marlborough Gallery, to the shock and dismay of the art world. Hilton Kramer of the New York Times called him “a mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum.”

As Guston began work on these new paintings, across the Atlantic, American artist Neil Jenney was beginning to feel similarly disillusioned with the Photorealist movement. Speaking over the phone, Jenney said that during a 1968 trip to Germany, “the whole scene was suddenly infected by it. And Photorealism was basically second generation pop. Pick an image of America, like a storefront or a pickup truck, and do it over and over again. It was a stale idea done pretty.”

Instead, Jenney thought, “you’d be better if you had a good idea and did it terrible.” So that’s what he did, beginning a series that would later become known as his “bad paintings.”

These works were quite literal, exploring what Jenney called the “narrative potential of imagery” with cause-and-effect titles like Sawn and Saw (1969) or Fisher and Fished (1969). Accident and Argument (1969) depicted the aftermath of a car crash in Jenney’s faux-naive style, the grass a sloppy series of green brushstrokes and the black paint for the asphalt dripping down the canvas.

Whitney curator Marcia Tucker “was the first one to really get it,” Jenney said, and she included one of these works in the 1969 Whitney Annual. A decade later, Tucker featured Jenney’s paintings in a New Museum group show provocatively titled “‘Bad’ Painting.” (It also featured artists such as William Wegman, Joan Brown, and William N. Copley.)

Although Tucker emphasized that “in no way can this work be said to constitute a school or movement,” in her catalogue essay she notes that it is linked “by its iconoclasm, its refusal to adhere to anyone else’s standards of taste or fashion, and its romantic and expressionistic flavor.”

These figurative works were a reaction against both Minimalism and Photorealism, but not in the way that Pop art was a reaction against Abstract Expressionism. Bad painting, according to Tucker, sidesteps artistic “development” in the traditional sense by using unfashionable mediums or styles. “The freedom with which these artists mix classical and popular art-historical sources, kitsch and traditional images, archetypal and personal fantasies, constitutes a rejection of the concept of progress per se,” she explained.

Eventually, Jenney left bad drawing and painting behind. But the term, coined by Tucker, continued to circulate. German artist Albert Oehlen first heard about the New Museum show when he was a student in the 1980s. “I liked the name, and then, after years, I realized that no one was using that anymore, but it had a big impression on me,” he recalled in a 2009 interview.

Oehlen—and his artistic accomplice at the time, Martin Kippenberger—was out to shock and appall the art world with works like Morning Light Falls onto the Führer’s Headquarters (1983) or Self-Portrait with Shitty Underpants and Blue Mauritius (1984). These vulgar, provocative subjects were shoddily rendered, and Oehlen’s 1983 Self-Portrait as a Dutch Womanearned Kippenberger’s highest praise: “It is not possible to paint worse than that!”

Bad painting collided with outsider art in 1991 at Metro Pictures. California artist Jim Shaw had spent decades collecting paintings from secondhand stores and flea markets, finally exhibiting them in a show called “Thrift Store Paintings.” From Man With No Crotch Sits Down With Girl to Psycho Lady(Shaw titles the works himself), these paintings are delightfully bungled in their execution.



Shaw has called them “unquantifiable,” a term that might resonate with the staff of Boston’s Museum of Bad Art. Founded in 1993, the institution avoids collecting the merely incompetent. Instead, said curator Michael Frank, they seek out “pieces that exhibit good technique used to create images of questionable taste.”

Unlike the artists behind many of Shaw’s thrift-store paintings, the “bad painters” of art history were often technically skilled. They made a conscious decision to ignore the standards of good taste and good style, which wasn’t always intuitive. Jenney, for example, said he used to get the itch to fix his bad paintings.

“In the beginning, I said, ‘Whatever happens, I accept it.’ But I did one that had a little boy, and a big glob of green grass landed right on his face.” The rules, he knew, dictated that it had to stay. But “the more I looked, I realized, ‘Wait a minute, that is out of line. That is too distracting, it’s like losing the mood here.’ And I went over and wiped it off while it was still wet.”

There is such a thing as too bad, after all.

 

[RG 448]

you're talking about kitsch or outsider art
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-bad-art-good

oh my bad

 

[AnOminous]

Ah, but there are some who enjoy his films ironically, not unlike The Room. Would that not still make them art? Does the classification hinge upon how we process these works or does it truly come down to authorial intent?

That's not an argument about whether it is art, though. It's an argument about its quality.

you're talking about kitsch or outsider art
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-bad-art-good

The very concept of "outsider" art is elitist. It implies that someone like Henry Darger somehow was doing some different kind of art than other people, just because he didn't suck some formalist dicks on his way to doing. . .whatever it is that he did.

Nobody understands it to this day.

 

[Desire Lines]

Art is honestly pretty much anything that was born out of a human mind and was given a physical manifestation. And yes, art can be shitty too (Lolcows' drawings, Twilight, Action 52, you name it), but it is still art.

 

[RG 448]

That's not an argument about whether it is art, though. It's an argument about its quality.

You’re right, I think I misunderstood the point you were making.

 

[Chi]

Art is something that transmits emotion or a message successfully and had lots of effort put into. You can call a simple pretty painting art but if it doesn't transmit something, for me it's not art, it's just a pretty painting.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

I think people are far too obsessed with what is or isn't art nowadays.

 

[RG 448]

I think people are far too obsessed with what is or isn't art nowadays.

I do think we let identity politics interfere with our enjoyment of art, and even its exposure and success, far too much. On the other hand, context does sometimes matter.

 

[AnOminous]

Art is something that transmits emotion or a message successfully and had lots of effort put into. You can call a simple pretty painting art but if it doesn't transmit something, for me it's not art, it's just a pretty painting.

This is why Thomas Kinkade shit is art, but really shitty art. It conveys something, but it's kitsch and makes me want to fucking puke.

 

[Positron]

should art evoke emotion or should it just be a literal representation of things? has photography or cinema or digital art surpassed traditional art? are other areas like vidya art?

A literal representation is never art; art is necessarily an act of abstraction. Even "representative" art like portraiture and landscapes are abstractions. The painter makes a choice about what to include and what to omit, striving to present what he considers the essential form of the subject. Even photography is an abstraction; the essential form is brought out through the choice of composition and lighting. And this is why facebook selfies and food photos are not art.

Of course "essential form" does not necessarily mean something "beautiful"; ugliness has its essential forms too. The twisted, mutilated, tumorous figures and slabs of meat painted by Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud are essentified ugliness, highly regarded and fetch high prices in auctions. Nor does "essential form" imply something visual or sensuous. Art can be about the essential forms in morality and even politics. The Pre-Raphaelites are nowadays mostly known as painters of mythological women, but at their onset they dealt with moral subjects. The best of their works, such as The Awakening Conscience by William Holman Hunt and The Blind Girl by John Everett Millais, encapsulate a social and moral situation in one scene, in which every single detail speaks. Contemporary commentators were so impressed that critics like Edmund Burke considered them the moral voice of society. Art can't get more political than DeLacroix's Liberty Leading the People, but why is it great art while truckloads of "Soviet social realism" paintings are now forgotten? It is because Liberty is an abstraction of a universal ideal, while the Soviets dwelled on a single particular: the supposed greatness of Communism and Stalin. Even lower in the totem pole are Ai Wei-wei's Perspective Studies. What more can you say about the idea behind it, except "I hate this government"? It is not even an abstraction.

With all these preambles we can now examine the works of Kehinde Wiley. I mentioned Klimt, and let us try to figure out why Klimt's portraits work as art while Wiley's don't. Klimt subsumes his subjects in a swirling, undulating, almost palpably motile field of abstract patterns. The subject peers back, as if from a mythological realm. Klimt offers us a glimpse of another, more alluring world beyond our senses, and by situating his subject inside that world, he dignify her while at the same time offer the viewer an aspiration: you too can picture yourself in this swirling river of lilac and gold. On the contrary, what can be said about Wiley's wallpaper patterns? Does Obama want to live in there? Do you want to live in there?

Klimt did a version of Judith too, and his and Wiley's versions can't be more different: Klimt's Judith, half-naked with eyes half-closed, is caught in the rapture of a sexual orgasm. We are reminded of the story that Judith sexually seduced Holofernes in order to kill him, and it looks like she is enjoying the killing a little too much. Klimt's Judith is femininity (or at least one facet of it) essentialized, as a self-serving, destructive force. Can anyone say anything about Wiley's Judith, except "black woman kills white woman and I approve?". Like Ai Wei-wei, this is not even an abstraction. This is not art.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Art's subjective, totally, but no matter the (sub)genre, there's art from all across the board from masterpiece to firewood. If an art piece is going to survive, it's supposed to make you want to discuss it, either with whatever first comes to mind (though some folks will say that's not "good enough"), with a critical eye, or through the eyes of society. You can't become a good artist without accepting this as gospel because otherwise you're not going to push yourself to grow and get better, let alone actually communicate with people. That's why you're very rarely going to see someone from someplace like DeviantArt actually make a name for themselves, or at least get their fifteen minutes of fame.

With that said, I'm gonna go ahead and autistically quote from a cartoon because there's truth to it.

"In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto, 'Anyone can cook.' But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist; but a great artist can come from anywhere."

 

[AnOminous]

It amuses me when people get exclusive about art, and by this, I mean they try to exclude things from being art that they consider to be shit, on the grounds that stuff that is shit can't be art.

I can't emphasize this enough, though. Almost all art is shit.

 

[BILLY MAYS]

So many different opinions about art, and I can only say this:

Art is art.