[OC] Personal opinion on Jackson Pollock's drip art
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Counter offer: that's all expectation bias.
You read
War is hell. War in the deep of Russian winters is worse than hell. It is blind, cold, desperate chaos and you're supposed to fight in this inferno while being able to tell friend from foe, but they all look the same, their blood looks the same in the snow and dirt beneath them.
then you conjure up the feeling with some art museum self-gaslighting. Maybe the art is the prompt?
Modern dance and modern art (including free form poetry etc) that try to leave rules/form/structure behind are, to me, rorschach content with accompanying flavor text that makes them smell faintly of the artists' farts. This is to other forms of art what whiteclaws are to flavor.
I quite strongly doubt that any abstract or contemporary art in isolation gives any specific, repeatable feeling to anybody outside of maybe "chaos". Its fine if you like it (I don't obviously) but I think adding specific feelings that you wouldn't get without the title is oversell and over-hype. It's like establishing the canon for a book or story using the fanfiction for that story or just the authors opinion: if you didn't actually write it in the main work, it doesn't count (I see you J.K. Rowling, Brandon Sanderson, etc). Put the story IN THE STORY.
But then, this is all just one man's polemic.
That's a fair point of view, but that is literally the point of art. Not just abstract and contemporary art. The more context you have with a piece of art, the more it will make you feel and think about what it is trying to communicate.
Try and look up the painting Stańczyk by Jan Matejko.
In isolation, you'd look at that painting and see a sad jester in a chair. You may feel something, but it won't be very deep.
When the context is added for that painting, it starts taking on a completely and much more complex meaning. The most basic takeaway with context is "while the politicians, kings and nobelmen are partying, only the jester is understanding the severity of the country's predicament."
But if you take the time and start diving into the meaning of the comet outside the window, the cultural and historical significance of the court jester Stańczyk to Poland's history and culture, the letter on the table, the fact that Matejko used his own face as a reference for the jester, dive into Matejko's own life and his views, interests and concerns you will get a much greater and much more nuanced interpretation of what you're looking at. It will basically educate you on something you most likely know nothing about.
That is what art does.
Asger Jorn's Stalingrad is the same for me.
It is so miss the point of art to think that you should be able to just glance at it briefly and get anything out of it.
Art is also not supposed to be pleasant or pretty. It is supposed to move people. There is tons of art out there that bores me to tears or that I think is bullshit, but others may connect with it where I couldn't and that is worth something.
Are there bulshitters and bulshit art out there? Absolutely. One of my favourite horror satirea Velvet Buzzsaw very much takes the piss out of the art scene and the silly snobs in it.
But I think it is a mistake to think that having context for an art piece is somehow cheating when all art ever made has a title and an intent and context by default.
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I upvoted the OP message. And I upvoted yours too, because both of you are so right.
The OP message you responded is a person in the middle of the curve bell that things they are at the end of the curve, while they are in the middle.
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Counter offer: that's all expectation bias.
You read
War is hell. War in the deep of Russian winters is worse than hell. It is blind, cold, desperate chaos and you're supposed to fight in this inferno while being able to tell friend from foe, but they all look the same, their blood looks the same in the snow and dirt beneath them.
then you conjure up the feeling with some art museum self-gaslighting. Maybe the art is the prompt?
Modern dance and modern art (including free form poetry etc) that try to leave rules/form/structure behind are, to me, rorschach content with accompanying flavor text that makes them smell faintly of the artists' farts. This is to other forms of art what whiteclaws are to flavor.
I quite strongly doubt that any abstract or contemporary art in isolation gives any specific, repeatable feeling to anybody outside of maybe "chaos". Its fine if you like it (I don't obviously) but I think adding specific feelings that you wouldn't get without the title is oversell and over-hype. It's like establishing the canon for a book or story using the fanfiction for that story or just the authors opinion: if you didn't actually write it in the main work, it doesn't count (I see you J.K. Rowling, Brandon Sanderson, etc). Put the story IN THE STORY.
But then, this is all just one man's polemic.
Also forgot to mention that one of my all time favourite contemporary art pieces was a long table in a small room with let's say 50 identical white vases lined up on either side. Next to the vases, on the table lay a bunch of cheap permanent markers. Out of the 50 identical white vases stood maybe 10 white vases with gold leaf patterns on them.
All the vases were scribbled over with drawings and words except the vases with the gold leafs on them.
I picked up a marker myself and drew on some of the plain vases, but it took me a bit of courage to start drawing on one of the gold leaf vases. At least one other person had drawn on one of the gold leaf vases but only on the white parts. I found myself instinctively doing the same.
It made me think about a lot of things. What we put value to, why, even when we are given the go-ahead, most of us still hesitate to destroy something that we perceive to be valuable even if the only difference between it and the other pieces is cheap gold patterns on the side.
Furthermore, nowhere did it say that you weren't allowed to smash the vases, but nobody had done it. You could probably do whatever you wanted to do to these vases, ans yet people only allowed themselves to do the safest form of vandalism.
I thought about the other people who had written and drawn on the vases. I felt their presence and the thoughts they had gone through when interacting with this piece. I thought about the artist and their intentions with it. The fact that I interacted with their piece made it very clear that all the thoughts they had put into their piece was realized in me as part of the installation.
I have no idea what the made of that piece was. Not a clue. But it still affected me because of how well it was executed and I understood the message(s) the artist intented. Maybe not all of them, but the main point, I got.
Contemporary art can be so amazing if one opens themselves up to it.
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You know when everybody on both Lemny and Reddit are up in arms that American mainstream culture celebrate anti-intellectualism?
This here is a prime example.
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Some people at this time said the "process" was art not the painting hanging in the museum.
I would assume that most people who criticize modern forms of art are criticizing the painting hanging in the museum. The more someone likes modern art, the more likely they are to learn about the artist and the process. The less someone likes modern art, the less they're going to learn about that, so the more the focus will just be on the painting itself.
By making a meme about it you have in fact thought about what art is and aesthetics you prefer. A Pollock painting made you do that.
That's "Pollock the influencer". Influencing has always been part of art, I'm sure. Would Dali's paintings have been as influential if Dali hadn't also been a moustache artist? Probably not. However, I think you invite chaos if you consider things other than the painting hanging in the museum.
Why? Because if "you thought about their art" is a major criterion, then Hitler is an important artist. Look how often people have made memes about Hitler and his art. If you go by how often the artist's art is posted, Hitler's probably a more important artist than Picasso.
Hitler didn't kill millions of people to make you think about his art. Pollock intentionally wanted to create art that makes people think about what counts as art. His methods certainly worked.
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Also forgot to mention that one of my all time favourite contemporary art pieces was a long table in a small room with let's say 50 identical white vases lined up on either side. Next to the vases, on the table lay a bunch of cheap permanent markers. Out of the 50 identical white vases stood maybe 10 white vases with gold leaf patterns on them.
All the vases were scribbled over with drawings and words except the vases with the gold leafs on them.
I picked up a marker myself and drew on some of the plain vases, but it took me a bit of courage to start drawing on one of the gold leaf vases. At least one other person had drawn on one of the gold leaf vases but only on the white parts. I found myself instinctively doing the same.
It made me think about a lot of things. What we put value to, why, even when we are given the go-ahead, most of us still hesitate to destroy something that we perceive to be valuable even if the only difference between it and the other pieces is cheap gold patterns on the side.
Furthermore, nowhere did it say that you weren't allowed to smash the vases, but nobody had done it. You could probably do whatever you wanted to do to these vases, ans yet people only allowed themselves to do the safest form of vandalism.
I thought about the other people who had written and drawn on the vases. I felt their presence and the thoughts they had gone through when interacting with this piece. I thought about the artist and their intentions with it. The fact that I interacted with their piece made it very clear that all the thoughts they had put into their piece was realized in me as part of the installation.
I have no idea what the made of that piece was. Not a clue. But it still affected me because of how well it was executed and I understood the message(s) the artist intented. Maybe not all of them, but the main point, I got.
Contemporary art can be so amazing if one opens themselves up to it.
That sounds like a different kind of art altogether. The experiential kind of art where the point is the unspoken discussion between the artist and the audience, or just a commentary on the audience, is pretty cool. Marina Abramović is an icon of art in that category I would say.
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That's a fair point of view, but that is literally the point of art. Not just abstract and contemporary art. The more context you have with a piece of art, the more it will make you feel and think about what it is trying to communicate.
Try and look up the painting Stańczyk by Jan Matejko.
In isolation, you'd look at that painting and see a sad jester in a chair. You may feel something, but it won't be very deep.
When the context is added for that painting, it starts taking on a completely and much more complex meaning. The most basic takeaway with context is "while the politicians, kings and nobelmen are partying, only the jester is understanding the severity of the country's predicament."
But if you take the time and start diving into the meaning of the comet outside the window, the cultural and historical significance of the court jester Stańczyk to Poland's history and culture, the letter on the table, the fact that Matejko used his own face as a reference for the jester, dive into Matejko's own life and his views, interests and concerns you will get a much greater and much more nuanced interpretation of what you're looking at. It will basically educate you on something you most likely know nothing about.
That is what art does.
Asger Jorn's Stalingrad is the same for me.
It is so miss the point of art to think that you should be able to just glance at it briefly and get anything out of it.
Art is also not supposed to be pleasant or pretty. It is supposed to move people. There is tons of art out there that bores me to tears or that I think is bullshit, but others may connect with it where I couldn't and that is worth something.
Are there bulshitters and bulshit art out there? Absolutely. One of my favourite horror satirea Velvet Buzzsaw very much takes the piss out of the art scene and the silly snobs in it.
But I think it is a mistake to think that having context for an art piece is somehow cheating when all art ever made has a title and an intent and context by default.
Very succinctly so I don't end up writing another wall, I generally agree with you on these points. Where we differ I think is that I feel context can add depth and richness (as in the Jester painting) but that the work itself should contain some INTRINSIC depth and richness.
The analog discussion I think we are having is "are placebos good medicine?". Do you feel better after taking them? Sure. I suppose that makes it hard to say they are not medicine. At the same time, it's the act of consuming them that gives them the effect, not anything to do with the content.
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My favorite thing about art is that if you look at it and you hate it, that's still a completely valid take
Art museums became way more fun once I realized that
This is very true for me. Same for a lot of history museums, which are full of historic arts and crafts.
Like, some native art is just old craft, not actually good art to me, but some ancient cultures had a wild perspective and the art matches.
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Some people at this time said the "process" was art not the painting hanging in the museum.
I would assume that most people who criticize modern forms of art are criticizing the painting hanging in the museum. The more someone likes modern art, the more likely they are to learn about the artist and the process. The less someone likes modern art, the less they're going to learn about that, so the more the focus will just be on the painting itself.
By making a meme about it you have in fact thought about what art is and aesthetics you prefer. A Pollock painting made you do that.
That's "Pollock the influencer". Influencing has always been part of art, I'm sure. Would Dali's paintings have been as influential if Dali hadn't also been a moustache artist? Probably not. However, I think you invite chaos if you consider things other than the painting hanging in the museum.
Why? Because if "you thought about their art" is a major criterion, then Hitler is an important artist. Look how often people have made memes about Hitler and his art. If you go by how often the artist's art is posted, Hitler's probably a more important artist than Picasso.
wrote last edited by [email protected]First thanks to everyone engaging! Having a great time with some real cool people here.
|"However, I think you invite chaos if you consider things other than the painting hanging in the museum."
Not true. A huge amount of art is the preservation of an artifact from something previous and not about the "thing" hanging on the wall. Also "conceptual art" is just that the art is the "concept" not result. Ice, kinetic sculptures, happenings, change over time. You can see different art at different points in time. They invite you to consider what it was before and after. Sand mandalas are created in art spaces and then destroyed. When is it "art"? When they pore the sand into shapes or sweep it up? The answer can be "all" because it happened and "none" because it doesn't exist or even when I think it looks like art.
|"Why? Because if "you thought about their art" is a major criterion, then Hitler is an important artist. Look how often people have made memes about Hitler and his art. If you go by how often the artist's art is posted, Hitler's probably a more important artist than Picasso."
Maybe I'm not explaining well here. Have you ever seen a movie you sort of disliked but you couldn't stop thinking about it? It sort of continues to impact your thoughts, I'm talking a month later you are thinking about it and still debating if it was good or bad or keep remembering the way it made you feel. That is what I mean. Maybe that was the point of the movie/art. Haneke is my favorite filmaker who creates almost movies that "haunt" you. I would say Hilters paintings didn't engaged us. They didn't expand our understanding of art through his paintings. He is famous for being the fascist Nazi leader but his paintings are a result of his fame as a figure. Jim Carrey's art will likely never be in famous museums, most likely never push or be part of an important art movement, etc. but It gets lots of press because a famous person is making paintings. I'm speaking more of the impact of the art not awareness it exists.
Dali would absolutely be famous as an artist. His brush work is comparable to that to the old masters. His ideas , compositions, colors are incredible. He was a figurehead in the surrealist movement. Maybe not the pop icon without the branding of the mustache and "look". but that came later.
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Counter offer: that's all expectation bias.
You read
War is hell. War in the deep of Russian winters is worse than hell. It is blind, cold, desperate chaos and you're supposed to fight in this inferno while being able to tell friend from foe, but they all look the same, their blood looks the same in the snow and dirt beneath them.
then you conjure up the feeling with some art museum self-gaslighting. Maybe the art is the prompt?
Modern dance and modern art (including free form poetry etc) that try to leave rules/form/structure behind are, to me, rorschach content with accompanying flavor text that makes them smell faintly of the artists' farts. This is to other forms of art what whiteclaws are to flavor.
I quite strongly doubt that any abstract or contemporary art in isolation gives any specific, repeatable feeling to anybody outside of maybe "chaos". Its fine if you like it (I don't obviously) but I think adding specific feelings that you wouldn't get without the title is oversell and over-hype. It's like establishing the canon for a book or story using the fanfiction for that story or just the authors opinion: if you didn't actually write it in the main work, it doesn't count (I see you J.K. Rowling, Brandon Sanderson, etc). Put the story IN THE STORY.
But then, this is all just one man's polemic.
Speaking here as an art noob who generally knows nothing of what the pieces are supposed to mean or what their societal context was when they were made and what forces they were pushing against etc:
When my arty partner drags me into art museums with huge abstract modern art pieces with just big splotches of heavily textured color (I’m thinking in particular of one giant piece filling a wall with jagged black heaps of paint) they do in fact make me feel feelings.
In my case, as in OP’s case, they were really bad feelings. I would prefer not to feel really bad and I don’t like that art. But I certainly couldn’t call it ineffective fart-huffing!
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Yeah, yeah op. You have no idea of the what's and why's or any context for why plenty of modern art looks like it does and why it is important in art history. You know what you like. And you like what you understand. And if you don't understand it, you feel intellectually lesser and have a knee jerk reaction to protect yourself - by taking a meme format that says you have all the smarts and people that understand it are below yourself.
You can keep doing that, or you can get curious and ask the what's and the why's and see if you can appreciate things from it that aren't immediately obvious. That is how people grow.
You're equating an appreciation of significance with an appreciation of aesthetics.
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Yeah, yeah op. You have no idea of the what's and why's or any context for why plenty of modern art looks like it does and why it is important in art history. You know what you like. And you like what you understand. And if you don't understand it, you feel intellectually lesser and have a knee jerk reaction to protect yourself - by taking a meme format that says you have all the smarts and people that understand it are below yourself.
You can keep doing that, or you can get curious and ask the what's and the why's and see if you can appreciate things from it that aren't immediately obvious. That is how people grow.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Tbf lots of stuff in that style, including some of his, is trash.
Edit: and if context is beauty: a lot of people making it didn't understand, and it was overpromoted by the fucking cia to contrast the literal style pushed by the ussr. So it's literally an anti-communist plot by yhe cia. Show me some other 'anti communist' things.
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I'm sorry, where are you getting your data for your assertion that "the vast majority of people dislike [Pollock's art]"? Your own meme indicates that people with that opinion are in the minority and that half the people with that opinion wouldn't even know what they're talking about. Obviously the meme isn't a real bell curve, but still.
I'll be honest, it sounds like you made that up based on not much at all. If that were the case, I'm sure I'd have heard many others express a dislike for Pollock, which I don't think I ever have, besides you.
If we're sharing unpopular art opinions, though, I hate Zawadzki and Beksinski (really just dystopian surrealism in general, it tries a little too hard to be spooky/dark/edgy imo and usually has that overly polished digital art look to it). Reminds me of something I'd see on Deviantart or something.
Whoa! I'm so sad that digital deviant art copying Zawadzki and Beksinski painting styles sort of ruined it for you. It's incredible that they are so good at painting it has a "digital art look". I hate when saturation of a style diluits the original but I can't blame them for wanting to make art like them. I remind myself that them being "spooky/dark" is the aftermath of war in Poland and time of unease.
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Still better than AI art.
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Sir, I laughed and upvoted. I am unable to share as my wife is a visual arts grad and I want to be able to get laid in the future.
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You know when everybody on both Lemny and Reddit are up in arms that American mainstream culture celebrate anti-intellectualism?
This here is a prime example.
Nothing intellectual about claiming something is more than it actually is and being pretentious about it.
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Some people at this time said the "process" was art not the painting hanging in the museum
To expand a bit on the idea that the process itself is as important, or more important, than the resulting work standing in isolation, there are a bunch of examples of people really enjoying the "behind the scenes" or "how it's made" aspects of art.
I happen to love OK Go's single-take music videos in large part because they are absurdly complex projects requiring precise planning and tight execution. And you can see that the resulting work (a music video) is aesthetically pleasing, and can simultaneously be impressed at the methods used in actually filming that one take, from their early low budget stuff like Here We Go Again, or stuff like the zero gravity Upside Down and Inside Out, or even this year's releases with technological assistance from programmed phone screens or robot arms holding mirrors.
Another example I like is James Cook making paintings out of typed pages in a typewriter.
There's a lot of stuff with sculpture and painting that have these aspects where the methods used to make it are inherently interesting, and explain some of the features in the art itself.
To expand a bit on the idea that the process itself is as important, or more important, than the resulting work standing in isolation
This leads to my take on photorealistic art: basically photography has made fully realistic drawn and painted art obsolete. Even "unreal" things that look real but aren't based on actual places or things can be achieved by photoshopping pictures together in a fraction of the time it takes, to make something look even close to a photographic accuracy drawing or painting by hand. If you see a picture of photorealistic art somewhere you'll just think it's a photograph or photoshopped, unless someone explicitly tells you it's painted. The visual representation of photorealistic art has stopped being meaningful as it used to be, and the works need the context of the hard labour to be appreciated as what they are.
As a disclaimer though, photography and digital editing can be art in themselves, I'm not making point about that. It's just fascinating how the value of hand drawn photorealistic stuff has almost fully shifted from the visual representation of reality to the actual process of producing it
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Very succinctly so I don't end up writing another wall, I generally agree with you on these points. Where we differ I think is that I feel context can add depth and richness (as in the Jester painting) but that the work itself should contain some INTRINSIC depth and richness.
The analog discussion I think we are having is "are placebos good medicine?". Do you feel better after taking them? Sure. I suppose that makes it hard to say they are not medicine. At the same time, it's the act of consuming them that gives them the effect, not anything to do with the content.
I genuinely disagree with you on the placebo argument, but that is okay.
Sometimes I like an abstract painting or sculpture because of shape, color, composition and so on. I don't think abstract art would be popular with many people is the works didn't stir something in them just by how they looked.
Again, I completely respect that this type of art doesn't do anything for you, but I think you are entirely wrong in claiming that there is nothing to abstract art unless there is a title for context. That isn't true. Abstract art can evoke all kinds of emotions in people without any context. Disgust, euphoria, sadness, happiness, fear, anger, calmness etc. It is not a trick that an abstract art piece can evoke emotions. It is simply a matter of the art piece being created by someone who has an eye for composition, color theory and is in tune with the emotion he or she intents to transfer onto the canvas.
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That sounds like a different kind of art altogether. The experiential kind of art where the point is the unspoken discussion between the artist and the audience, or just a commentary on the audience, is pretty cool. Marina Abramović is an icon of art in that category I would say.
That is contemporary art.
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My favorite thing about art is that if you look at it and you hate it, that's still a completely valid take
Art museums became way more fun once I realized that
wrote last edited by [email protected]I am going to MOMAs all over to laugh at the stupid shit some artists pull off. Laughed my ass off at the taped banana. I am not even interested in what the artist thinks or means. I am entertained, that is what I expect of art.
Like in London, there was this big-ass room dedicated to a giant chair and a giant table, you could walk under. Heated, in the middle of a freezing winter. Like, the homeless were freezing out on the streets, and here we are as a society, heating a room for a chair and a table nobody could use. Just take in the absurdity, and you have to laugh at this shit to compensate and stay sane.
