Why is "fancy" art almost always bizzare looking?(an honest question)

[Scowling Dragon]

I have no problem with everything being art. I just really dislike the idea of art critics, and the idea of paying huge sums of money for it.

[Jayngfet]

I have no problem with everything being art. I just really dislike the idea of art critics, and the idea of paying huge sums of money for it.

Art is absolutely overpriced. I like a whole lot of pieces but I've never bought any. Manly because a two minute gesture sketch done on generic charcoal on newsprint framed in 8.5 x 11 can go for almost one hundred dollars depending on the artist. Actual big paintings are often sold for ten times anything a reasonable person would pay, and thereby tend to go unsold pretty much forever.

I can appreciate artistic skill. A lot of these things are genuinely quite good and inspiring on crazy levels. That's why it's sad to see them put up as being so expensive they're basically failures that never go anywhere permanently and wind up in storage at best, thrown out at worst.

[Avilan the Grey]

I have no problem with everything being art. I just really dislike the idea of art critics, and the idea of paying huge sums of money for it.

Me neither: My problem is the people who both claim to subscribe to this definition and yet look down on people who don't "get" what they "get".

[Scowling Dragon]

OH, that COMPLETELY pushes my buttons.

Its like the time a hipster said I just wasn't "smart enough" to understand NGE

[Tiki Snakes]

Just want to chime in on Duchamp;

I quite like his pre-war stuff, actually.

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As for the readymades, however, eh.
As I recall, he basically came back from the war broken. I'm willing to concede that "Fountain" is a work of art. It's just that simply tagging something with your name doesn't make it your art and I find that idea a little bit arrogant. At best, Fountain is a collaborative piece with the lions share of the work done by whatever thankless schlub designed the urinal in question originally.


As for the Mona Lisa being a woman sitting in a field in grey black and brown, that's not entirely fair or accurate.

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First off, for comparison, see this;

Left - Copy of the original, possibly painted alongside Leonardo in his studio by one of his students.
Middle - Restored version of the Copy.
Right - Un-restored original.

See also,



Image on the right is a digital restoration of the original (too fragile and expensive to be cleaned) done using complex scanning technology.

Look at any painting of any real age and it's vanishingly hard to be sure you're still looking at the same image crafted by the artist.

[Flickerdart]

Just want to chime in on Duchamp;

I quite like his pre-war stuff, actually.

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As for the readymades, however, eh.
As I recall, he basically came back from the war broken. I'm willing to concede that "Fountain" is a work of art. It's just that simply tagging something with your name doesn't make it your art and I find that idea a little bit arrogant. At best, Fountain is a collaborative piece with the lions share of the work done by whatever thankless schlub designed the urinal in question originally.


As for the Mona Lisa being a woman sitting in a field in grey black and brown, that's not entirely fair or accurate.

Spoiler

Show

First off, for comparison, see this;

Left - Copy of the original, possibly painted alongside Leonardo in his studio by one of his students.
Middle - Restored version of the Copy.
Right - Un-restored original.

See also,



Image on the right is a digital restoration of the original (too fragile and expensive to be cleaned) done using complex scanning technology.

Look at any painting of any real age and it's vanishingly hard to be sure you're still looking at the same image crafted by the artist.

See also:

Spoiler

Show

[Jayngfet]

OH, that COMPLETELY pushes my buttons.

Its like the time a hipster said I just wasn't "smart enough" to understand NGE

Eh. I think it varies a bit. A lot of the time critics and hipsters just love to blow smoke and act pretentious. But sometimes there IS something to get that a lot of people don't. In my experience though if it's something that hard to grasp it's more often than not kinda pretentious and not all that worth checking out.

[Scowling Dragon]

I understand that If I argued something LACKED any sort of depth, but that wasn't my argument with the guy. I was arguing that the depth was very shallow and worthless.

[Winter_Wolf]

Art is absolutely overpriced. I like a whole lot of pieces but I've never bought any. Manly because a two minute gesture sketch done on generic charcoal on newsprint framed in 8.5 x 11 can go for almost one hundred dollars depending on the artist. Actual big paintings are often sold for ten times anything a reasonable person would pay, and thereby tend to go unsold pretty much forever.

I can appreciate artistic skill. A lot of these things are genuinely quite good and inspiring on crazy levels. That's why it's sad to see them put up as being so expensive they're basically failures that never go anywhere permanently and wind up in storage at best, thrown out at worst.

Art is only overpriced if no one buys it. Otherwise, it has that level of value to the person or people who buy it. That being said, I don't value much of it enough to spend the kinds of money that it would take to possess those pieces. By the same token, if I had several thousand dollars to burn, I absolutely would buy an original Caldwell or Elmore and be happy for it. Sadly, I do not have that kind of disposable wealth.

I am using the generic "you" in the following text, not directing anything at any one person. Because invariably someone will think I'm talking about them specifically. I am not.

On the subject of art in general, it's quite handy to take at least one course in art history, if for no other reason that you can specifically say why you do or do not like certain kinds of work. I understand what Picasso was trying to do, but I don't necessarily like anything he did in his cubist phase. Fact is, I don't. But I understand what he was trying to do. Of course it's perfectly valid to say "I don't like it" and that's the whole of it, but to dismiss something as crap just because you don't get it, well hey whatever. I knew a guy in college who dismissed Picasso's works as complete crap, because he didn't like it, but he had NO idea what Picasso was about at any point in his artistic career. That guy was an ass on many levels, but I found that particular expression of it particularly annoying. Someone likes it, or at the very least does get it, otherwise these things would never be famous.

[Spuddles]

What's interesting about two dimensional art prior to the 19th century is that it was basically just lies. Realistic looking art is just a very clever lie. A picture of a pipe is not a pipe. A picture of a cube contains no right angles.

Something like 600 years of western art culminated in artists rejecting the conventions of their medium. Take any tryptech from the 16th century. They're impecabbly pained, masterful studies of depicting 3 dimensions in 2. The message in them are all conveyed in the inclusion of fascimile objects- a lapis lazuli blue to represent the virgin mother, a sphere and scepter for rulership, a skull for mortality, pubic hair for original sin.

After impressionism, artists discarded these conventions. Cubism was a study of viewing objects from every angle simultaneously. Dadiam parodied establishment culture. I saw a really great piece that mimicked a butterfly collection, but when you got closer, you realized it was all drug paraphenelia- syringes, burnt spoons, small colorful plastic bags, used butane lighters. It was disturbing in a way that a perfectly drawn picture of the subject would have just seemed academic.

"modern" art, or more accurately, contemporary art, is abot using the medium as a message and not just the subject. Much of it is commentary on art itself, or just a different form of opinion.

Acadmey art is all a bunch of masturbatory tripe. Maybe not all of it, but it's basically a more complicated version of, like, reddit-meme space. It's a giant ivory tower circlejerk over meaningless garbage and abundant jargon.

Art is absolutely overpriced. I like a whole lot of pieces but I've never bought any. Manly because a two minute gesture sketch done on generic charcoal on newsprint framed in 8.5 x 11 can go for almost one hundred dollars depending on the artist. Actual big paintings are often sold for ten times anything a reasonable person would pay, and thereby tend to go unsold pretty much forever.

I can appreciate artistic skill. A lot of these things are genuinely quite good and inspiring on crazy levels. That's why it's sad to see them put up as being so expensive they're basically failures that never go anywhere permanently and wind up in storage at best, thrown out at worst.

Art is time consuming and often deeply personal. The reason a single piece may cost so much is that it represents not just all the time an artist spent on it, but all the other pieces that didn't get sold.

Art is more like a hobby, in that it's something you do out of passion or head noise or the desire to capture reality or a way to share something in your head. In which case, it is either good and rightfully expensive (see what marketing firms and professional photographers get paid), or bad and doesn't get purchased.

I have mixed feelings about the price of art.

[Flickerdart]

"modern" art, or more accurately, contemporary art, is abot using the medium as a message and not just the subject.

Ugh, McLuhanesque tripe. The medium is no more the message than the reader is.

[Spuddles]

Ugh, McLuhanesque tripe. The medium is no more the message than the reader is.

Whatever. It's still wildly different than the centuries of art that preceeded it. Cest ne un pipe has virtually no analogue. It doesn't really matter how you want to use your art jargon- the narrative structure changed.

[Jayngfet]

Art is time consuming and often deeply personal. The reason a single piece may cost so much is that it represents not just all the time an artist spent on it, but all the other pieces that didn't get sold.

Uh, yeah, but that doesn't work. Say you sell one painting for about 800 dollars. Then say you sell five for 200 dollars. The second sale brings in more money.

I understand, having gone through the process, exactly how much effort can go into something that's quick and fired off with a pen. Considering how much I've spent doing this kind of thing in the last month alone, I also understand how much money you need to make back. I can also get that a lot of fees can be extreme. But at the end of the day, not every artist can or should be that kind of high price point painter or sculptor or what have you. It's something that hurts them and to a lesser extent other artists.

As well, the idea of art as this personal uniquely driven practice is highly overrated and kind of insulting, simply because it implies that every other practice is some kind of soul crushing drudgery. It's only in the last couple of centuries the artist has been considered any different from a craftsman or any other trade skill. It still really isn't, because pretty much every type of skilled job can be considered personal and requiring a lot of thinking on your feet, from medicine to accounting.

I'm sorry, but this kind of thing is kind of a huge deal to me and it's representative of a number of sentiments that are increasingly detached from reality.

[Miklus]

OOP: I know how you feel and I totally agree. I once saw a painting where the "artist" had obviously just poured/splattered the paint strait out of the bucket. He had not even bothered to mix dem, there where bright red, yellow, green and blue. It looked exactly like something a 7 year old would do I he was rally lazy. The price tag was 25.000Dkr ($5K). The title was, loosely translated, "color ****".

Public sculptures are not much better. As an extra insult, they also use tax payer money.

Here is what I'm talking about:

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This was so ugly, someone shot at it with a rifle:

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This is a statue to honor the famous children book writer Hans Christian Andersen:

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[Dave Halfbreed]

Sadly, this is a result of the 20th century. The trend of realism was changing thanks to the trends of French Impressionism and German Expressionism, outgrowths of the romantic movement's rejection of the Enlightenment's emphasis on positivism and scientific accuracy. Things went downhill-Die Bruke and Der Blaue Reiter groups, led by the likes of Kandinsky, took expressionism into more and more stylized forms. The impressionists also had an unfortunate progeny-geometric trends were taken to the extreme and created cubism. Gustave Moreau liked the colorful blurs of the Impressionist school, and while his own work was fairly realistic, he experimented with and promoted Fauvism, which took the expressionistic ideas of color and fluid lines to an extreme.

Then finally, there were the Futurists. They completely rejected realism and scientific thinking in art as reflections of the increasingly dismal industrial age. Their reaction was to throw everything out.


Things then got worse as artists reacted to the World Wars. Art Deco was more a return to form, but still stylized as it attempted to show the grace of modern times. The Russians took futurism to an extreme with Constructivism-colorful blocks and geometric patterns as a rejection of "Bourgeois" art of the last century. Art itself became an enemy-the Dada movement was an outright rejection of art, described by its own members as anti-art. These trends finally resulted in surrealism. They applied the ideas of Marx and Freud, joined forces with the Dada, and fought "art as perception of reality" with "art as expression of pure thought"

One put it as-"Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern."

And so this crap stuck and became a norm. Anti-art became art itself. Duchamp's "Fountain" suddenly stopped being a sarcastic comment on art standards and became a standard itself.

So yeah, that's why art's been awful since the 20th century.

[Pronounceable]

Man, **** them artsy public statues.

This was so ugly, someone shot at it with a rifle:

I'm pretty sure a simple block of cement that someone emtied a few clips into is more of art than that three legged blue dong monster thing. They're either works of some jackass who's secretly laughing at the stupidity of public (those I approve, like that awesome last one; there's no way that isn't intentional) or some pretentious clown who thinks art must be some weird blobby thing that no one will ever understand wtf it actually is.

The worst thing about art, like everything, is some of the people who do it.

I knew a guy in college who dismissed Picasso's works as complete crap, because he didn't like it, but he had NO idea what Picasso was about at any point in his artistic career.

That guy is right. Knowing what exactly Picasso was trying to convey has zero value because you only got whatever it is that you personally did from the piece. Any difference or similarity between those two things (or whatever opinion anyone else holds about it) is incidental and meaningless. And while he could theoretically spend time to learn more about this stuff he doesn't like, he could also probably find a more fulfilling use for his free time.

[Yora]

This isn't so much a rant as an honest question, I just don't understand why "art"(other then landscapes or portraits) has to be weird, and often sort of creepy to be fancy.

Because if the art is weird enough, you can say you like it and look smart. And because it's too weird, everyone will just nod and agree with your good taste, because they feel ashamed that they can't see the artistic value that apparently is in it.

That's how the entirely literature critic business works.

[Togath]

OOP: I know how you feel and I totally agree. I once saw a painting where the "artist" had obviously just poured/splattered the paint strait out of the bucket. He had not even bothered to mix dem, there where bright red, yellow, green and blue. It looked exactly like something a 7 year old would do I he was rally lazy. The price tag was 25.000Dkr ($5K). The title was, loosely translated, "color ****".

Public sculptures are not much better. As an extra insult, they also use tax payer money.

Here is what I'm talking about:

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This was so ugly, someone shot at it with a rifle:

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Show

This is a statue to honor the famous children book writer Hans Christian Andersen:

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Show

That reminds me of one I saw when I visited the town a grew up in earlier this year, they had destroyed a park to put a 1 foot thick hexagon(whatever a 11 sided shape is called) of metal there...it wasn't even solid metal as far as I can tell
Found a picture of the wretched chunk of metal;

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seriously, what the **** were they thinking!?

[Avilan the Grey]

My personal {Scrubbed} at the moment is still the crawling turds that supposedly honor Raul Wallenberg in Stockholm.

But yes,the original intentions of the artist means nothing, if it cannot be conveyed. At best, it means the artist failed in his work, at worst it means the artist is irrelevant. It is what the viewer takes from the piece that matters, nothing else.

Because if the art is weird enough, you can say you like it and look smart. And because it's too weird, everyone will just nod and agree with your good taste, because they feel ashamed that they can't see the artistic value that apparently is in it.

That's how the entirely literature critic business works.

To a point this is actually true. As long as you have a breakthru piece, you can do whatever you want and claim it is art after that. Not saying that all artists do this, but sometimes you do get the feeling that you are looking at something that the city or state paid $10 000 tax payer money on that the artist threw together in an afternoon and then spent 6 months in Tailand while "working"...

[Togath]

Another issue I have with the specific statue is that it doesn't even mark anything, and isn't a memorial of anything...it exists just to exist.
It also doesn't mesh with any of the existing statues in the town(can't remember all of them at the moment, but the main one that comes to mind is an elaborate fountain with a statue of a woman in it's center), which seems odd.

[Scowling Dragon]

You know, in my town if we want to honor anybody in specific we just stick a statue of them looking kind/brave in a park with a brass "In dedication too" underneath.

And if its to a specific concept then its usually done using people or/and mosaic.

Like the control of atomic energy had a mosaic of a bunch of people forging an atom.

[Avilan the Grey]

You know, in my town if we want to honor anybody in specific we just stick a statue of them looking kind/brave in a park with a brass "In dedication too" underneath.

But that's not art! And so... tacky.

[Cristo Meyers]

Another issue I have with the specific statue is that it doesn't even mark anything, and isn't a memorial of anything...it exists just to exist.
It also doesn't mesh with any of the existing statues in the town(can't remember all of them at the moment, but the main one that comes to mind is an elaborate fountain with a statue of a woman in it's center), which seems odd.

Should come to Chicago sometime, we've got a giant chrome kidney bean. Makes about as much sense as it sounds.

You know, in my town if we want to honor anybody in specific we just stick a statue of them looking kind/brave in a park with a brass "In dedication too" underneath.

And if its to a specific concept then its usually done using people or/and mosaic.

Like the control of atomic energy had a mosaic of a bunch of people forging an atom.

Aw, come on! You mean you don't think of what appears to be genetalia when you think of Hans Christen Anderson?

[Destro_Yersul]

a picture of a women sitting by a field, all in browns and greys and blacks[aka, the Mona Lisa])

When it was originally painted, it was actually quite colourful. The painting has become faded over time. Perhaps the reason it is so famous is the level of detail that was put into it, and that nobody is quite sure who it is supposed to depict.

[Bulldog Psion]

That guy is right. Knowing what exactly Picasso was trying to convey has zero value because you only got whatever it is that you personally did from the piece. Any difference or similarity between those two things (or whatever opinion anyone else holds about it) is incidental and meaningless. And while he could theoretically spend time to learn more about this stuff he doesn't like, he could also probably find a more fulfilling use for his free time.

Yeah, I agree. If something looks like a retarded scrawl to you, why are you obligated to spend time and effort researching what the artist was supposedly thinking (other than maybe "man, these people will pay good money for anything as long as my name's on it!"), and then you end up knowing that the artist was thinking about the postmodern eclecticism of hyena existentialists when they drew a retarded scrawl.

I personally have no use for those spatters of paint on canvas thingamajobbies. I don't care if someone else likes them, but they have so little meaning to me that I don't care, either, about knowing what the artist was thinking. It's still a spatter of spilled paint on a canvas to me.

[Winter_Wolf]

I probably didn't state the example properly. In fact I'm sure I left out a key piece of information: this was a person who thought that he was 1: infallible in every way, and 2: THE authority on what was and was not good about really everything.

Also, rereading my original post on the matter, I had just said either directly before or after that example, "I don't like it" is a perfectly valid reason not to like a piece of art. My bad! But I still stand by my assessment of that person's character and personality, and it would be highly amusing to see him and another person with the same personality but differing views on something go at it.

Oh, one last thing before I go back into lurk mode: I find the phrase "retarded scrawl" HIGHLY offensive, regardless of the context in which it was used.

[Flickerdart]

"I don't like it" is utterly irrelevant when determining whether or not something is good. You might not like, say, horror films, or British comedy, but that doesn't make them bad. Same goes for art.

[Scowling Dragon]

Well actually thats the ONLY thing that determines it. And your liking or dislike is determined by a bunch of other factors.

[Spuddles]

Uh, yeah, but that doesn't work. Say you sell one painting for about 800 dollars. Then say you sell five for 200 dollars. The second sale brings in more money.

I understand, having gone through the process, exactly how much effort can go into something that's quick and fired off with a pen. Considering how much I've spent doing this kind of thing in the last month alone, I also understand how much money you need to make back. I can also get that a lot of fees can be extreme. But at the end of the day, not every artist can or should be that kind of high price point painter or sculptor or what have you. It's something that hurts them and to a lesser extent other artists.

As well, the idea of art as this personal uniquely driven practice is highly overrated and kind of insulting, simply because it implies that every other practice is some kind of soul crushing drudgery. It's only in the last couple of centuries the artist has been considered any different from a craftsman or any other trade skill. It still really isn't, because pretty much every type of skilled job can be considered personal and requiring a lot of thinking on your feet, from medicine to accounting.

I'm sorry, but this kind of thing is kind of a huge deal to me and it's representative of a number of sentiments that are increasingly detached from reality.

I know quite a few artists in a small, ****ty, derivative, isolated art scene. They are of course all hobby artists because of course they cannot make money- market is saturated, and for some reason, they think amateur mess on canvas is worth $200.

But it's not academy art. It's sold to locals or tourists, and made for either. The touristy stuff is just bad, but it makes people money. The stuff for locals is equally bad, but in a different way, like about their feels as an artist.

Many of these artists have expressed to me that they like making stuff, but they don't like making stuff for other people.

I guess what I am saying is artists suck at business, and for the reasons I listed above but you told me I was wrong and that it upset you.

From what I see in non-academy, non-business art (so stuff that isn't going into museums and isn't being paid for by walmart), it's a combination of masturbatory shows where everyone pats each other on the back and I hit on scene chicks, and hucking Alaskana to tourists.

The academy art with everything being weird and a meta-meta-non-narrative is like... the equivalent of Hegel or something. Dave Halfbreed does a pretty good job, I think, of explaining why the art made for academics is so weird. It's basically an art history circlejerk.

But I don't reach the conclusion that art history in the 20th century. I've wandered the lourve for hours. Endless amounts of boring repetition. I
The best collection of modern art I have seen was the MONA in Hobart. It was the private collection of an ecenteic and reclusive billionaire. While I didn't get the point of madonna with elephant dung (other than to be provocative), Lustmorde (loosely murder-rape) was really upsetting. It still makes me
uncomfortable. The only thing that comes close, at least from what I've seen, of old art is the killing of holofernes painted by a classical artist who was raped.

[Gnoman]

When it was originally painted, it was actually quite colourful. The painting has become faded over time. Perhaps the reason it is so famous is the level of detail that was put into it, and that nobody is quite sure who it is supposed to depict.

Not quite true. There is an extremely high probability of the subject being the wife of an influential banker or businessman (forget the details, sorry). There is, of course, a %0 chance that it's a self-portrait in drag.

More on topic, "art" has almost ceased to exist in any traditional sense in the modern world because so many people have such a high degree of skill at drawing or music that it's less special. Bizzare distortions and such are among the only ways to really say anything with art besides "look at this neat thing I made".