Is it art?

[trex]

Let me start by saying I'm sorry if this is posted in the wrong forum, but there's no 'art' forum, and art is a kind of philosophy.

THe question here is: Do modern works of art really count as art at all?
Take into account the 2000 show at the Brooklyn art Museum, 'sensation'. Included in it was a 6 foot by 6 foot red-painted canvas entitled "strawberry", a picture of a child-killer made out of children's hand prints, a dissected pig floating in formaldehyde, a crucifix dipped in urine, and a picture of the Virgin Mary splattered in elephant dung. Do these things really qualify as art?

This is Darwinism gone backwards...Michelangelo>Van Gogh>Picasso>Andy Warhol>some British guy splattering paint on a cavas>some British guy creating homoerotic images out of newspaper clippings and shreds of a bible.

http://www.freedomforum.org/graphics/illos/sensation.jpg

[ComradeRed]

It's the antithesis to art.

[Wenty]

i don't think its the antithesis of art at all, its just a different interpretation of what art can mean to different people.

[trex]

Originally posted by [email protected] 6 2005, 11:12 PM
i don't think its the antithesis of art at all, its just a different interpretation of what art can mean to different people.
A boar's head being consumed by maggots? Serious thinking outside the box and in the mud puddle.

[Trissy]

A boar's head being consumed by maggots? Serious thinking outside the box and in the mud puddle.
If it provokes a reaction in someone and gets them to think about life then why can't it be art? The works of Van Gogh may not provoke that much reaction from the majority of people today. Whether you like modern art or hate it, you must admit that it at least provokes a reaction in many people today. In an age where many of us are no longer shocked by the sight of people dying on our TV screens the fact that some things stir us into action cannot be totally useless. As much as I loathe Tracy Emin's 'Bed' I must admit that it at least makes me loathe it. The Kantian definition of art 9as I understand it) is an object that serves no purposes and yet produces a responce from us...

[Zingu]

I personally think there has been a decline in the art community currently today; but thats just my opinion.

[Trissy]

I personally think there has been a decline in the art community currently today; but thats just my opinion.
Yes but it would help us if we understood what you mean by 'art' if we are to understand what you mean by 'decline in the art community'. I could take a guess but I wouldn't want to be as bold as to assume I know what you meant...

[SonofRage]

I work for an art-related company, so I see all kinds of weird art. Different things can be art to different people, it's pretty relative. Everyone reacts to different things. Here is something I scanned at work today which I found bot interesting and amusing:

[Palmares]

Art is not a philosophy.

Aesthetics is.

I think it is pure ignorance to say art is declining. By what standard would one judge that by? Art has (usually) has basic forms and structures, but deviation or stretching from that does not equate to some sort of artistic degradation.

Art is simply a form of expression.

You cannot easily dismiss such abstractality (is that a word?) given true art is based on an open mind.

You can dislike art, but saying it is bad is a different, and much more difficult thing to ajudge logically.

[ComradeRed]

Art is the attempt to place an a priori notion in an a postereori realm ;)

[trex]

my definition of art: something I couldn't make myself.

Yes, there are many good ways of defining art, such as the one about it having no purpose but drawing a reaction, but this is my little opinion.

[Dyst]

Do you know that the more complex something is, the more uncomplex it seems. Like for example, the more black dots you draw on a white paper, eventually it get's totally black. Modern art is not history gone backwards, it is history gone forwards.

[che's long lost daughter]

Art comes in different forms, not just what is pleasing to the eyes. And different people have different perception of what art is to them, what others may consider as trash may be works of a genius to some.

[Free Spirit]

It can simply be said that art is not everything but can be found in anything.

[CommoditiesAretheOpiumofPeople]

Aesthetics doesn't cover all of art its only a miniscule part of it, many works of art have relied on something rather than visual "quality". Art is absolutely everything depending on how it's looked at. Art has a lot to do with everything that life is about, I'm not saying that all art is the same or equally "good", but whatever someone decides to call art is art. I don't agree that it has declined because ideas conveyed in art are currently very relevant to the world we live in, just like van gogh's canvases were very representative of the impressionist movement and turn of the century Europe at the time. There are always deeper and deeper levels of thought invovlved in everything, and it has to be said that absolutely everything sparks thought, therefore everything can be called art. An incredible sketch of a landscape may look better than an upside-down toilet (it's been done) but that doesn't neccessarily mean that it's more of a work of art or not, because the ideas and feelings instilled by art are present in everything.

[Err]

Of course those works are, and for the most part should be, considered art.

The works of art that you are talking about are meant to create the reaction that sponsored your post to this forum, they are intended to disturb or upset you and make you think about them. Modern art is attempting to be a part of the Avante Garde and move art in a different direction by disturbing and upsetting the audience into reconsidering the peice.

Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, See it Here (http://www.abcgallery.com/D/duchamp/duchamp26.html), (the peice CommoditiesAretheOpiumofPeople was talking about) is nothing more than a urinal, but when put in an art musem it forces people to reconsider how they view an object such as a urinal when the context is changed, challenging the pre-existing culture of art. That's what surrealism did, thats what Dada-ism did, that's what modern art does, and what most artists still trying to do. It's all about changing the persepctive.

The reason this art is upsetting, is because our modern definition of art depends upon a mass production and popularization of that art. We recognize DaVinci or VanGough because they have been popularized, integrated into culture, making the weird peices that you described more necessary because it changes the direction of art (though i'm not ready to defend some of the peices of modern art I've seen. Too weird for me.)

Clement Greenberg makes an interesting point of art, as it relates to capitalism and socialism in his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch

Capitalism in decline finds that whatever of quality it is still capable of producing becomes almost invariably a threat to its own existence. Advances in culture, no less than advances in science and industry, corrode the very society under whose aegis they are made possible. Here, as in every other question today, it becomes necessary to quote Marx word for word. Today we no longer look toward socialism for a new culture -- as inevitably as one will appear, once we do have socialism. Today we look to socialism simply for the preservation of whatever living culture we have right now.