BS: Define 'art'

Subject: BS: Define 'art'
From: frogprince
Date: 15 Dec 08 - 07:45 PM

From the Betty Page obit thread, speaking of pinup pictures such as Betty was famous for: "The need to keep the pretence up that these things were art really did give them a kind of innocence..."

Where do you draw the boundaries of "art"? I wouldn't consider those pinups to be "great art"; actually, I had never given a moments thought as to whether to define them as art or not. Now I begin to think this is just about as loaded as "what is folk". The time was when most "artists" insisted that no photography could be considered to be art.

If one could say for a fact that no pinup photographer has ever felt any motivation whatever apart from producing something marketable, that might remove them totally from the definition of art in my mind. But, let him once say "there, that's beautiful" sincerely when working with a model...

I've been referred to a "one artist with a taste for the bizzare" in a local paper, and introduced once as "a wildly creative artist". I do some things which I give myself credit for as decent quality art, and some things which I just do for a little fun .

How do you distinguish art from non-art?
                     Dean

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: artbrooks
Date: 15 Dec 08 - 07:54 PM

I am Art. Anyone else is non-Art, with the possible exception of Art Thieme and Art Garfunkle.

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: katlaughing
Date: 15 Dec 08 - 07:58 PM

I have a friend who makes a good living selling the old classic pinups and glam shots of the stars. Those, to me, are a kind of pop art...a classic example of a certain era and to be valued as such.

One photographer whose work is always ART, to me, is Joyce Tenneson. I learned of her from Mudcatter "Homeless" himself a photographer/artist. I've always really liked your stuff, too, Dean!

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Bobert
Date: 15 Dec 08 - 07:58 PM

"Art is shit"...(Duchamp)...

Well, yeah, it is...

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Joe_F
Date: 15 Dec 08 - 08:02 PM

1. Art is the part of the world that has been deliberately shaped by human effort. The exterior of art is called nature.

2. Art is what artists make. Artists are people who believe they have to make something.

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Bill D
Date: 15 Dec 08 - 08:03 PM

an "artist" is someone who produces a supply, whether or not there is any 'demand'. This leaves open definitions of good art and bad art.

If you create something not naturally occuring, in order to achieve an aesthetic, rather than simply practical item, it has an element of art.
I have my reservations when it is done randomly, as by throwing paint at a canvas, but even adorning a pretty girl with ... ummm... 'interesting' items of clothing and other accouterments is a 'sort' of art. I prefer art that is permanent and more publicly accepted, but *shrug*

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Bill D
Date: 15 Dec 08 - 08:06 PM

and yes, photography can be real art....even sensual/erotic photography. Opinions differ about 'beauty', but it can be art without being beautiful.

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Bobert
Date: 15 Dec 08 - 08:11 PM

As a painter, illustrator and a printmaker, I'll just stick with Duchamp...

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: frogprince
Date: 15 Dec 08 - 08:14 PM

Thanks for the link to Tenneso, Kat; I'd never really discovered her, and she's terrific.

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: olddude
Date: 15 Dec 08 - 08:45 PM

Picasso once said it took him a lifetime to paint like a child
Art to me is visual emotion no matter what form it takes. A great photographer can press my buttons as well as any master painter.

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Rapparee
Date: 15 Dec 08 - 09:13 PM

Everything I like is art. Everything you like is art with a capital "F".

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Bee-dubya-ell
Date: 15 Dec 08 - 09:46 PM

Art is the translation of a person's reaction to a stimulus into something other people perceive to be of value.

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: catspaw49
Date: 15 Dec 08 - 10:11 PM

We have several "Arts" around here and every damn one of them defies definition......

Spaw

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: GUEST,punkfolkrocker
Date: 15 Dec 08 - 10:18 PM

'Art'

is anything an Art Dealer can persuade a rich sucker
or gullible f@kwit Gallery Curator to buy £££$$$$!!!

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: katlaughing
Date: 15 Dec 08 - 11:52 PM

You're most welcome, frogprince. She's really good, isn't she?

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: GUEST,Guest from Sanity
Date: 16 Dec 08 - 01:14 AM

Art- Old English for 'is' or 'am' or 'are'. Present tense of state of being.

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 16 Dec 08 - 04:27 AM

It's a tricky one, isn't it. I favour the more classical idea of art. I struggle with unmade beds and piles of bricks that have fetched a fortune. It's the Emperor's New Clothes to me.

I once went to The Tate Gallery is St. Ives, in Cornwall and went into a room where there was just a black canvas, or rather, a white canvas that had been painted black, all over. This painting had its own security guard, as it was worth so much. ??? People came in to stare and marvel at it, and I found myself looking at them, not the painting, as there er..was NO painting, just black paint. They got up close to it, walked far back from it, stared at it, turned their heads this way and that...Oohed and Aahed at it.

The kids had to take me out of the room in the end, because I got the giggles watching people being daft. I thought how unfair it was that 'artists' who do things like that get paid a fortune, and yet others who have the most amazing talent, are completely overlooked.

I think much art today has lost the plot completely. Dead sheep don't do it for me, nor casts of heads made from the blood of the artist himself, which had to be kept in a freezer and got awful messy when the workmen were working in Charles Saatchi's house and turned the freezer off by mistake. Ha! The money that changes hands for total rubbish is staggering and to me, incomprehensible, as well as immoral, but then I'm kinda weird like that.

Last Saturday I went round the National Portrait Gallery with my daughter, who loves art. She talked about the history inside each painting, the way the painting was painted and the reasons behind that, the messages that were so subtley conveyed by the artists of those times, etc etc etc..It was fascinating. I didn't get that staring at a small black canvas. Maybe that artist's idea was to get people to watch other people looking at his canvas, who knows, or cares...

Give me the old fashioned guys, any day.


My daughter's definition of art is something that causes a reaction, but I'm not sure I'd agree with her on that.

My definition of art is Beauty, in some form or another.

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Sleepy Rosie
Date: 16 Dec 08 - 05:23 AM

bit of a tangent here, because I'm never going to attempt to define what art is. But as a fan of a lot of what may be generally derided in the popular press, it's a shame to me that for some reason 'modern art' can seem so alienating to so many. It isn't really of course, it's simply that there appears IMO very little encouragement for (the working classes in particular) to learn to explore and experience all the various forms of expression out there. One of the interesting things is that children from whatever background, are so ready to be open to experiencing and responding to new and interesting stimulus. And yet as we grow older and learn to place ourselves in the boxes preformed for us, that willingness to be open so swiftly ceases. There needs to be more five year olds running around in art galleries. The atmosphere in some art galleries can be a big put-off, and all the assumptions that go with it. Sterile and frigid. I love it when some loud-voiced unabashed Amercian tourist stands next to me and fills the holy echoing halls with a honest good humoured "Do you get that? What's it supposed to be? I don't get that!" They are probably thinking exactly what I'm thinking, and what the black polo-neck jumpered young man with a brown corduroy jacket beside us is thinking, but dare never voice!!

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: GUEST,Guest from Sanity
Date: 16 Dec 08 - 05:26 AM

Depending on the situation(and the 'artist')..Art for therapy might be great therapy, but it might not be great art!

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: fat B****rd
Date: 16 Dec 08 - 05:59 AM

ASSUMING that most people here consider Tracey Emin's "Bed" to be a huge con, would it be more 'ART' and/or acceptable if it were a painting of a bed?
Just a thought.

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: diesel
Date: 16 Dec 08 - 06:33 AM

My tupence worth:

Art is an expression of a moment captured, real or imagined. For others to enjoy, yes, but also for the the artist. It is a product of something the artist just 'had' to do. Its a feeling or emotion expressed. When the viewer 'gets' it - they get that feeling also.

As for a reward for their work - is low down priority, reward so as to live to produce more is the aim.

A slightly cheaper quote, not always accurate though, is to paraphrase Andy Warhol (I think);

'Art is whatever you can get away with'

rgds

Diesel

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 16 Dec 08 - 07:03 AM

Back in 1987 I made the biggest stone circle in Britain, assuming the points of any triangle can exist on the circumference of a circle. I took three stones from a beach in Northumbria, deposited one at Lands End, one at Margate, and one at Cape Wrath. This was a deeply personal sculptural project defined by the limits of my personal Vagabondia at the time and I would imagine most art operates on a similar level in terms of a creative interface between self & other on whatever level of ceremonial experience. Now I realise I could make a bigger one by placing three such stones on my coffee table, but it seemed important at the time.

Some ten years earlier, I was interviewed by a young journalist who enquired why I did the sort of music I did (which back then was free improvised noise making where anything was admissible as music) to which I answered to express my emotions (I was only 17 at the time). However, when the piece came out she'd misread her own journalistic shorthand and wrote to experience my emotions. After a period of righteous outrage at being misquoted, I realised that this was closer to the truth - that I played music to experience rather than to express. This still holds true today; from traditional ballad singing, to free improvisation, to field-recorded environmental sound-scapes, to whatever else I might do in the name of music.

As Camus said (as quoted on the back of Scott 4): A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

Define 'art'? I'd rather say art defines us.

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Ed T
Date: 16 Dec 08 - 07:26 AM

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. Aristotle

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Stu
Date: 16 Dec 08 - 08:51 AM

Art is the representation of the human condition. As someone once said, all art aspires to the condition of music, but of course music is art. In all senses, art is truly about the journey of the artist, and the final product can offer tremendous insight into our own personal journeys too.

IB - love the stone circle. Did you take any pictures?

I too create art for the landscape which I leave there although my own art is about the genius loci of various places in the countryside surrounding the village where we live. This too involves a degree of ritual in the placing of the artwork, and is partly intended as an attempt to reconnect with the ancestors and the land itself. This is something I intend to do much more of next year.

As for the Emin's and Hurst's of this world they have more to do with marketing than art. I find them spectacularly bereft of integrity; they are derivative, dull and designed to service a market (some would argue that is the point though). As a graphic designer I too do the same with my own work - but then I wouldn't call that 'art'.

At the end of the day, art may be the one thing that makes us different from everything else on the planet, but I hope not. What transient works of beauty do dolphins for example, create in their watery world?

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Rapparee
Date: 16 Dec 08 - 09:18 AM

I'm really into the use of explosives to create Post-Modern Deconstructionism, and I'll be happy to create something for anyone who pays me enough.

For example, I could Deconstruct your house, car, or back yard as soon as you give me the money and sign the necessary papers.

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: M.Ted
Date: 16 Dec 08 - 09:30 AM

Art should always surprise us, because it gives us a chance to see what someone else sees.

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Sleepy Rosie
Date: 16 Dec 08 - 09:33 AM

"IB - love the stone circle. Did you take any pictures?"

I enjoyed the idea behind the piece too. But can't imagine that working somehow, at least for me. Wouldn't it rather undermine the err conceptual integrity of the piece, by breaking it down into three separate stones? Not trying to be argumentative here, merely interested. My own feeling would be that captured images could *potentially* reduce such a piece to a commodity. Which is I think one of the most unfortunate pitfalls that has plagued so much 'Brit-Art'.
Having said that, if artists like Andy Goldsworthy never photographed their pieces then there would be precious little evidence of land art available to be discussed! So I'm quite content to be corrected....

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Amos
Date: 16 Dec 08 - 12:03 PM

It seems almost presumptuous to take a question that has challenged the best minds of the generations from Plato to Walter Pater and run up a Mudcat thread on it. But, hell, why not?

The only measure of art is communication. That means the intent to communicate carried across time and space, arriving at a receiving viewpoint (usually a human) and creating their some degree of duplication, perfect or not, of that which first emanated from the origin point.

One area this has not been taken to as far as I know is anyone seriously trying to develop art intended to communicate with other species--cows, aardvarks, or extra-terrestrials.

But the core definition remains, when that does happen. That which succeeds in fulfilling the meaning of communication is named Art; everything else is technique or technology or logistics or drab economics.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Amos
Date: 16 Dec 08 - 12:09 PM

Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass - Walter Pater

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 16 Dec 08 - 02:55 PM

Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which
to shape it - Bertolt Brecht (or Vladimir Mayakovsky, or John Grierson...)

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: gnu
Date: 16 Dec 08 - 03:01 PM

Art is essentially a nice guy, except when he keeps on talking about how nice the weather is in New Mexico... nearly as bad as Amos with his fucking Calleeforneeahh sunshine all the time.

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: GUEST,beardedbruce
Date: 16 Dec 08 - 03:37 PM

"an "artist" is someone who produces a supply, whether or not there is any 'demand'."


Thanks, BillD!!!



beardedbruce, artist

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Ebbie
Date: 16 Dec 08 - 04:22 PM

"My daughter's definition of art is something that causes a reaction, but I'm not sure I'd agree with her on that." Lizzie Cornish

If your daughter is correct, then my averse reaction to a current exhibition in Juneau means that it is art, after all. I had been labo(u)ring under the delusion that pasting together chicken wire, rusty nails and coarse felt was an exercise in elemental (as in Neanderthalic) futility.

"...why I did the sort of music I did (which back then was free improvised noise making where anything was admissible as music)..."Insane Beard

*g* Reminds me of a conversation I came upon a couple of years ago at a folk festival.

A man I knew was making hard work of playing his banjo with a young man on mandolin. Man stops. He says, What key are you playing in?

Youth: Um. Not any, really.

Man: I mean, what chords are you playing?

Youth: Um. Just kind of regular.

Grinning, I walked on.

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: frogprince
Date: 16 Dec 08 - 06:51 PM

"Reaction" may carry connotations for a bunch of us that throw us off the best meaning of the young lady's statement. Reaction could be picking up in any way on emotional communication from the artist. On the other hand, if she is going with the ijit theory that it's not worth calling art unless it's ugly and it ticks you off, I hope she gets over that. I consider art that conveys anger or pain to be as legitimate as that done to communicate beauty or joy, but I wouldn't want a steady diet of it.
And of course it's "presumptous" to try to ask or answer my initial question, but I'm enjoying the thoughts we're getting here by messing with it : )
                                  Dean

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: M.Ted
Date: 16 Dec 08 - 10:00 PM

Art is always better than anything anyone says about it.

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: M.Ted
Date: 16 Dec 08 - 10:01 PM

And anyway, artists define art by creating it.

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 17 Dec 08 - 10:28 AM

For background of what I'm about to say, I'll say that I was an art major, with particular interest in painting and printmaking. I had some small successes, second prizes at this or that show, but I came to the conclusion that I was never going to be "a great name", and didn't have the internal pressure to create, create, create come hell or high water. So I got into something else.

But in the process I did a lot of thought about what art is. Not "great art" or even "good art", but what art itself is. I'm not talking about crafts, or utilitarian design here, and I'm not limiting myself to the visual arts.

My line of thought (you can call it a definition if you like) goes as follows:
1. Art is a conscious arrangement, a display of thought (thus excluding the results of an accident that the "creator" thinks is usable)
2. By a human being (thus excluding a sunset or a mountain landscape, for example, no matter how gorgeous or awe-inspiring)
3A. Intended as communication with other human beings
3B. With the intention of creating a basically emotional reaction in the human observer.

Under 1., the medium may be paint on canvas, a carving in stone, a one-time "performance art" piece, a play, a symphony. . . "any medium"

The comment under 2. is self-explanatory, I think. God does not make art, nor does nature, nor elephants, nor chimpanzees. It's a uniquely human endeavor.

Under 3A, the little dance you do in private when you learn that your rich uncle died and left you a million is not art, because it's for yourself, not intended as communication to others

And 3B, the intention is not merely to communicate ordinary facts or the like; it's to raise some (perhaps small) degree of emotional reaction in the human beholder.

If a production passes those four tests, it's art (according to yours truly). Notice that I didn't say "good art" or "effective art" or "great art". Notice that I didn't mention beauty, because many pieces of art, or even of great art, are consciously ugly, or horrifying. Or perhaps merely humorous. Such as "Guernica" or "The Scream", which can hardly be called "beautiful".

Notice, too, that I didn't refer to how successful the communication to another human being might be. An artistic creation, by this "definition", may be art but completely fail to raise any reaction in the beholder.   It's still art because of the human intention, even though not very "artful".

Looking at the other side, a piece may be valuable to a beholder without being art. That landscape I referred to, though not art by this line of thought, may be tremendously affecting and lifelong-rememberable to the viewer, but still not art.

I could go on ad nauseam about this (and may, if the thread suggests it later), but I've pontificated enough for now.

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: GUEST,S Dedalus
Date: 17 Dec 08 - 11:05 AM

Uncle DaveO, what you write comes very close to what a certain Irish author wrote nearly a century ago (but your first point, in his formulation, was expanded; the conscious arrangement "of the materials of this world", I think, thus encompassing painting, poetry, music &c &c).

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Amos
Date: 17 Dec 08 - 11:15 AM

Oddly enough, Dave, your pontification parallels my own, and will probably receive the same silent treatment. But it is an insightful analysis. Art is "effective communication", of course, onl;y when it receives attention. A landscape might be wicked powerful in the way it presents an ordinary moment, causing an attentive observer to go into an altered state of wonder or insight, while an obtuse observer dismisses it as "just a landscape".

This brings up another question. One of the ways in which art sometimes jogs the reader into a new moment of thought is by contrast with the expected. "Ceci n'est pas un pipe" is a top-drawer modernist example. So are Picasso's blue women and a lot of others.

I wonder hopw much we lose looking at a Vermeer or an eighteenth-century landscape because we do not have the framework of the expected anymore from which to see contrast. In an age when nobody sees full-rigged sailing vessels anymore, how do you understand the contrats created by an artist in an age when there was nothing else in the harbors? How can a suburbanite grok an agrarian landscape when he wouldn't know a cow from a kangaroo?

A

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Rapparee
Date: 17 Dec 08 - 01:26 PM

There are those who would say that true art would define the cow and differentiate it from the kangaroo.

"Performance Art", if only done once, isn't art. It's ego on display. "Hamlet" is art because it allows actors and directors to work within a the discipline of the play to create their own vision of what is going on. A single piece, done once and then tossed aside, doesn't communicate.

And as much as I hate to agree with Amos, art IS AND HAS to be communication: with the present and with the future within the context of the past. (I might agree with Amos, but I thought of it first.)

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: GUEST,Guest from Sanity
Date: 17 Dec 08 - 02:13 PM

Used to avoid lame discussions on how 'artists' define 'art'. Sounds like the inept selling excuses for selling cheap crap! All I know is, I know it when I see or listen to it.... the rest is just pompous self aggrandizement.

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 17 Dec 08 - 03:17 PM

G from S, I think you are talking about the value a piece of sculpture, writing, music has for you, which is valid for you but a different matter from what the concept of art is.   Or you may be talking about "good art".

An object (painting, poem, novel, performance) may have great value for you, and not be art. And an object may be art and have no value for you. Or a work of art may be a complete failure, and yet cause an emotional response in you and have a high value for you.

I can almost hear you say, "Huh? What was that last? How can that be?"

Suppose I'm a composer and I compose an orchestral piece, and my intention is to communicate to a listener a sense of horror at war. I manage to get it played in public, and the orchestra plays it just as I wanted it done. It's last on the program, and there's a rousing ovation. I feel puffed up about what I've done, and I go to stand in the lobby as the audience files out, hoping to hear more of their reaction while the emotional impact is still fresh.

As I stand there, I overhear comments that puzzle me, until a little old lady who has a reputation as a knowledgeable music lover comes up to me and says, "Oh, Mr. Composer! I'm so thrilled by your piece! You really communicated to me! I want to hear it again and again!"   (As you can imagine, I'm really puffing up now.) But then she goes on: "It's so beautiful! I felt as if I were right there at that garden party!"

Then I realize that my piece is an abject failure, even though it is of value to the hearers (assuming the old lady is representative of listeners' reactions, the ones that puzzled me).

My piece was "an arrangement in any medium" addressed to people, with the intention of communicating an essentially emotional message. Oh, it's art, all right. From the tenor of the old lady's reaction, it's even presumably of value to the listeners. But it's a failure just the same, because the intended communication did not occur! So it's art, and valuable to the hearer, but it's not effective, not "good art".

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: VirginiaTam
Date: 17 Dec 08 - 04:45 PM

A _unny sound and/or smell

One _iece of a whole

wheeled mode for _arrying stuff

maybe a _aste or pas_ry or harlo_

Crom_ell had 'em

Ammunition for Cupi_

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: John Hardly
Date: 17 Dec 08 - 04:53 PM

There's a field of thought out there that claims that art goes back to man's earliest need to communicate concepts. Most language (espcially written language) scholars have long ago dismissed pictograms as being very meaningful in the development of the written word. They (pictograms) just weren't.

But, on the other hand, the development of the written word has done much to alter the usefulness of art as a communication. We can convey many concepts more easily and more accurately with words.

But art is still capable of conveying what often words cannot. The trouble with much of modern, avant garde-and-beyond art is that it does NOT communicate without written explanation. So if art is not capable of communicating on its own (without verbal/written explanation or description), it has lost complete touch with its very raison d'être.

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: GUEST,Guest from Sanity
Date: 17 Dec 08 - 05:32 PM

Dave, liked your post! John's response also was cool, however, the ability to communicate the emotions accurately, as per your post, brings virtuosity into play. I would think of it as, virtuoso at his art, is like saying, 'He really communicates from his soul to mine, at his given 'craft'(read:art).
Also, with that, anyone who has a God given talent, should respect both the giver of that gift, and the gift itself, and show that respect for developing that talent, respectfully. That includes lots of homework! Then again, if one has all sorts of pent up emotions, with nothing much to say, and no developed talent either, well, they could always stick to blogs and politics!.....(wink)

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 17 Dec 08 - 06:47 PM

Virginia Tam:

I'll bite. What's that all about?

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Amos
Date: 17 Dec 08 - 08:57 PM

Rapaire:

I came to terms with this issue in 1964 in a term paaper I wrote pn PAton's metaphysics.

John Hardly:

I must disagree with your assessment of modern movements in art. While they do not embody concrete situations they very much do communicate. After all, hearing someone go "Woof" is just as evocative as hearing someone say "Dog", if not moreso.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Art Thieme
Date: 17 Dec 08 - 09:45 PM

Art is a lie that lets you see the truth!---Pablo Picasso

Art Thieme

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: John Hardly
Date: 17 Dec 08 - 09:46 PM

"While they do not embody concrete situations they very much do communicate"

But, then, that begs the question: Why, more than any art in history, has the more contemporary art required explanation? If it communicates, why does it stand less on its own than any art in the history of man? It requires academia. It requires the middle man of gallery (Christies, Sotheby's) because, on its own it does not communicate.

Or, it communicates -- not about concepts that required art for communication (art's founding raison d'être) -- rather, it communicates class -- that I am better (richer, more educated, of a higher caste) because I culturally "claim" this art.

Of course contemporary art communicates. But it also does not. And it usually does not match the explanations that positively MUST accompany it. You can find the exception. But you just KNOW the rule.

Subject: RE: BS: Define 'art'
From: Rapparee
Date: 17 Dec 08 - 10:32 PM

I came to terms with it in 1963 in a bull session at a friend's house. (Really. We used to talk about things like "What is Art?" and "How does Pope's use of iambic pentameter compare to that of Swift?" and "Where in the hell did you get that fifth ace??"

We also came to the conclusion that discipline was essential to Art, that even Jackson Pollack's stuff demonstrated discipline, as did that of John Cage and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Henry Moore and it was part of the viewer/listener/reader's enjoyment to determine the discipline and how it affected and effected the artist.

These discussions were usually accompanied by a certain amount of Fine Olde Scotche Whiskye, even though at the time we were all under age.