Who the hell decided that this was art?!

[Xanian]

I actually like Jim Dine. And before I get hated on he has done much more than just putting things on pedestals. And Duchamp was a Dadaist and Surrealist, and he did much more than just getting a urinal, and like some people have said this was kinda a joke on the art world at the time.

While I agree that a lot of post modern abstract pieces are silly, I'm not going to say "That's not art, I can do it". I can easily replicate better versions of a ton of folk art. But I don't, I also don't declassify folk art saying it's not art. And while performance/ exhibitionist art is a bit on the weirder side it still has merit. I've seen several comment on the Yellow Christ and say "lololol pee on a crucifix on government funding" but in actuallity that piece has a very heavy and thought out meaning.
Reading these comments it seems that not a lot of people have backgrounds in artistic knowledge or art.

Yes the art world is pretentious and silly sometimes, but discrediting something as not being art when all it is that you don't like it is silly and makes you just as pretentious as the art world.

As per "Knowledge of art," I'm gonna have to throw down the bullsh*t card on that. We are inundated with art all of the time,it is fundamental to our development in society. It takes a really pretentious person to give a person issues about their opinion of art. All "eye of the beholder" aside, if I don't feel it is art, then there is probably some major stretching involved, and if I need a background profile on the artist to understand his vision, then he isn't really trying to communicate his meaning well, is he? If the job of the artist is not to communicate his ideals to us, then what is he doing? Is it art, or a man's diary?

 

[Datalord]

I'm like Deidara, art is a bang

 

[aruseusx]

Art is usually the best when crazy people (When I speak crazy I mean those with Autisms and schitzophrenia[spelling]) are doing it as their minds are more abstract and have a better way of using symbolism. Kind of like how the good poets are manic depressants.

 

[ProfessorLayton]

Some "modern art" is just a pile of trash that they call art. I mean, I could take any random household object and make up a ridiculous backstory for it and call it art. Real art is this [http://images.tribe.net/tribe/upload/photo/59d/503/59d5033b-c574-40ad-a222-07b429918be5], not a lawnmower.

 

[Romblen]

Every now and then I hear about artists trying to sell the dumbest thing. I've heard about a artist who trying to sell a used pair of shoes for $6000, there was a artist who took an empty box, stripped the tape off of it, and trying to sell it for $30000, and finally there were some parents who tried selling their 9 year old daughter's painting for $10000. It was just a bunch of random paint all over a canvas.

I do remember my aunt telling me about when she entered an art contest. She painted a huge picture where it showed several scenes from the Bible. It took two weeks to make. She entered it in a contest and she didn't win. The winner, took one piece of white paper, painted one green line across it and called it "My painting"

 

[Darkadder246]

People have really weird tastes in art.

I could slap some sheep's dingleberry's covered with strawberry jam on a canvas and people would call it art.

 

[trelloskilos]

People have really weird tastes in art.

I could slap some sheep's dingleberry's covered with strawberry jam on a canvas and people would call it art.

I'd call it lunch.

 

[Acier]

As per "Knowledge of art," I'm gonna have to throw down the bullsh*t card on that. We are inundated with art all of the time,it is fundamental to our development in society.

this is true, just because it's fundamental to society doesn't mean everyone inherently understands it. And yes you can have varying degrees of knowledge and appreciation of art.
Politics and Government are fundamental to our development, yet not everyone understands those.

It takes a really pretentious person to give a person issues about their opinion of art.

I don't see how my saying that this is art (not *good* or even *okay* art) is any more pretentious than you saying it isn't.

All "eye of the beholder" aside, if I don't feel it is art, then there is probably some major stretching involved, and if I need a background profile on the artist to understand his vision, then he isn't really trying to communicate his meaning well, is he?

Oh right! Because an understanding of cultural/personal situations is totally irrelevant to fully understanding something? That idea is ridiculous. It's called context. Does a Shakespearean play fail because in order to fully understand whats going on you have to know background knowledge? Is Citizen Kane a bad movie because it doesn't spell it out "This is a representation of Welles and Hurst". Is To Kill a Mockingbird not literature because it employs elements from specific cultural climate and the personal life of the author that you would have to know beforehand to recognize? I'm not saying all art should be so clouded and obscure that you'd need a users guide to understand, but saying it's failed because of using subtleties and metaphors that you don't understand is just ignorant. You may not need to read an autobiography, but often times visual art, plays, films and literature make more sense if they are placed within a context.

If the job of the artist is not to communicate his ideals to us, then what is he doing? Is it art, or a man's diary?

This is awkwardly worded so if I don't address your point directly I'm sorry.
Since when did art have a "job"? Art doesn't *have* to communicate anything. They can communicate something if they want, however vague or obvious it's up to the artist to decide. Many people say the Mona Lisa is beautiful, but what "message" does it have? It doesn't. It's a portrait. Nothing more.
L.H.O.O.Q. isn't very ascetically pleasing, and took much less effort than Mona Lisa. but as being a readymade (one of the more extreme readymades has been mentioned, Duchamp's urinal) it is making a very specific statement quite clearly.
Art can be whatever the artist wants it to be, a statement or something beautiful

 

[Xanian]

I don't see how my saying that this is art (not *good* or even *okay* art) is
Oh right! Because an understanding of cultural/personal situations is totally irrelevant to fully understanding something? That idea is ridiculous. It's called context. Does a Shakespearean play fail because in order to fully understand whats going on you have to know background knowledge? Is Citizen Kane a bad movie because it doesn't spell it out "This is a representation of Welles and Hurst". Is To Kill a Mockingbird not literature because it employs elements from specific cultural climate and the personal life of the author that you would have to know beforehand to recognize? I'm not saying all art should be so clouded and obscure that you'd need a users guide to understand, but saying it's failed because of using subtleties and metaphors that you don't understand is just ignorant. You may not need to read an autobiography, but often times visual art, plays, films and literature make more sense if they are placed within a context.

This is awkwardly worded so if I don't address your point directly I'm sorry.
Since when did art have a "job"? Art doesn't *have* to communicate anything. They can communicate something if they want, however vague or obvious it's up to the artist to decide. Many people say the Mona Lisa is beautiful, but what "message" does it have? It doesn't. It's a portrait. Nothing more.
L.H.O.O.Q. isn't very ascetically pleasing, and took much less effort than Mona Lisa. but as being a readymade (one of the more extreme readymades has been mentioned, Duchamp's urinal) it is making a very specific statement quite clearly.
Art can be whatever the artist wants it to be, a statement or something beautiful

Alright then, let's change the direction of the debate, how do we define art? At this point if art is whatever we want it to be, then my diary tucked under my bed is art. A child's drawing is art...blah blah blah and so on. Art isn't just anything, so what is it. And I don't want to hear about the "levels" or art or defining "high art" and "low art" and such. What makes us regard it as art? When so we look at the Piss Christ and decide that its meaning transcends the original representation of a plastic cross in piss? The thing about Shakespeare, Duchamp [In which I would choose his Bicycle Wheel over his Fountain as a representation of the Dadaist movement], and Hieronymus Bosch is that, even without context, part of their message gets through. It transcends something. You can feel the bleak nature of society in the Bicycle Wheel. I can understand the tragedy as Hamlet stands over the praying body of Claudius and finds himself unable to act. I can discern the confusion, fear, and madness of the human condition displayed in Bosch's Temptation of Saint Anthony.

I argue that art should have, at least, a clear desire towards conveying a message. A door in and of itself is a door. A door carved with the story of the life and times of Buddha is art. While I don't LIKE the Piss Christ and I feel you need too much context to understand it, I understand that it's trying to convey our current respect and relationship with sacrifice, if not God. We shouldn't have to study and contextualize everything in our lives to understand and appreciate it.

While not all of us appreciate all aspects of art, that doesn't mean we shouldn't occasionally, as the "under educated class" stop and ask the art elite what the Hell they are doing. At some point it becomes a matter of "us" and "them" where "them" represents almost everyone and "us" represents a tiny minority who is supposed to tell us what to think. Why is it that an unconnected man is unable to be an artist and a person with social ties and connections is? Why is there more validity in Duchamp's Fountain than Texas Dan's whittled wood design?

I have a fairly broad base for which I accept art, I give Texas Dan equal merit with Michelangelo most of the time, because he is trying to show us the beauty and simplicity of his life in a hand-held curio. A Navajo lapidary is illustrating and communicating the organic nature of his life and the Earth, not just making a turquoise bracelet. And the Mona Lisa isn't simply a
"portrait." It's a fluid, moving painting that goes beyond the woman herself and to the figures and landscape in the background. The way it turns our focus by giving sharper definition in the face coupled blurred sfumato that increases as we move towards the periphery of the piece, convincing us that we are in the room with the woman. The painting is a careful study in beauty. It is not the most complicated of messages, but it is something that the artist can share with us, ALL of us.

It is not just his, it's ours. And that's what I think art should be. It should be something we all can share with a burdensome need to "understand" the individual. Harper Lee exquisitely displays her childlike innocence and wonder with the subtle wrongness of her era so we can understand her plight. That makes her a master of her work. We don't need to know her, we don't need to know the time, we don't need to have experienced racism and social oppression to get a good idea of the plight and injustice faced by both Tom and Boo Radley.

Blah, I'm ranting, I'll stop indulging myself.