Paging Ivan Reid

If you tried to do an oil painted landscape and pass it off as art
you'd probably fail, and yet Picasso manages quite well.

Artistic ability and merit are not dictated by the medium used.

 

You've just changed the semantics - what's a definition of "good"? As
Darsy has pointed out, it's certainly not "nice", or "pleasing". I
have to look at Francis Bacon paintings through the gaps in my
fingers, they're so scary, but it's still "art worth considering"

 

"looks good". like music "sounds good". As I said, "good" is
inherently subjective, but the intention to sound good to somebody
must surely be there for something to be considered music. OK, maybe
my definition should have referred to the _intention_ to look good.

I don't believe that the stuff like the unmade bed in question was
ever intended to look good, although I'd accept that pictures made
from Elephant Dung could be, and hance consider the former as 'shite'
and the latter as 'art I may or may not like'.

<fx: googles>

Well, having never looked at any before, the first few I can find

http://www.af-moma.no/english/kunstnere/bacon_large.jpg
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_lg_10_1_2_3.html
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_lg_10_4.html

certainly seem a bit wierd (not sure about scary, though - maybe you
need to try and 'understand' them for that), but in I could easily
accept that they were intended to look good.

The point is that whatever they may or may not 'mean' they all attempt
to create a visual effect for its own sake, rather than simply as a
psyche-jogging mechanism like the unmade bed.

Whether one likes them or not depends on one's own personal definition
of "good", of course, and personally I wouldn't give them wall space,
but that's another matter entirely.

 

I'm surprised you bothered to comment, given the trip Geoff's posted
throughout this thread.

 

I've stopped now - I've no interest in arguing this particular point.

 

Oh, I dunno. An elephant shit *is* a movement, and quite a substantial one.

 

Yes, it sounds a little familiar. Maybe someone made a comment earlier about
subjectivity and the way it makes judgements about good and bad art
irrelevant .

 

Utterly pointless. Like most critical vocations.

 

So what I define as art doesn't necessarily have to agree with your,
or ideed anyone else's , definition of art?

 

is there a point?

 

I don't really see the difference between looking at a 'picture' be it
photo-realistic, semi-reprensentative, or completely abstract, which
is designed to illict an emotional and intellectual response, and
looking at the unmade bed, which is designed to do the same.

 

What do you mean "have to"? All that happens without a common frame of
reference is that communication becomes impossible. This thread however is
dealing with "good art vs bad art".

 

Crikey, people are dropping out left right and centre.

C'mon, I'll take on the lot of yer.

 

Sorry, I didn't finish the sentence correctly. What I meant to say was
"I'll have to give up on you as a lost cause at this point", thereby
assuming some spurious moral high ground and looking to all the world
like I've won an argumant.

That's how it normally goes around here, anyway.

 

So Schoenberg's atonal stuff isn't music? He suddenly became a shit composer
because he didn't compose to sound good?

As soon as you say something is subjective you have to concede that the
parameters for what is good and what isn't are subjective and therefore by
definition non existant, ie, simply saying something is shit doesn't make it
shit. How much of your appreciation of what looks good is not indoctrinated
and learned response from the barrage of media and peer pressure throughout
your life?

Some artists aspire to break through that conditioning and sometimes that
doesn't look "good". If what you want is pretty pictures then you'd be
better off in Athena than the Tate Modern.

 

Never heard it. Can't comment.

You're missing my point. I'm not trying to say that it can be fixed
that x is good and y is bad; rather, if it's not intended to be good
then it's not art, or music, in any sense that most people would
understand it.

If some folks, apparently including a couple of you guys, want to
define some sort of 'superart' whose aims are not to be visually
appealing then so be it, but don't confuse the issue by calling it art
when it plainly isn't.

Absolutely. Although I'm sure that most of the stuff in the TM would
conform to my definition, and some of it might even succedd in looking
good. Dunno really, as I've never been and have no desire ever to do
so.

 

That's ridiculous though: Because what's good and what isn't is plainly
subjective there can be no universal definition of what art is. Therefore
the only definition that makes any sense is that it's all art. Some of it
you personally find visually appealing.

 

Or to take it one step further, what I think we're agreeing on is
that, as we can't find a common definition, there's actually no such
thing as art at all, just some pictures and stuff.

There, that's got it all cleared up nicely

 

Yes, let's just agree that I won that and move on.

 

Sorry, I didn't realise that you were arguing from the start that
there was no such thing as art.