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IMO it's a big mistake to feel that art should be above the viewer. Good art should be exactly at your level, speaking to you and enriching you. Given the choic
by cousin_it 11y ago
IMO it's a big mistake to feel that art should be above the viewer. Good art should be exactly at your level, speaking to you and enriching you. Given the choice between "guilty pleasure" and "conspicuous consumption", good art should aim for the former. For example, the video game Loom speaks to me, the webcomic Homestuck speaks to me, the drawings of M.C. Escher (derided by the artistic world at the time) speak to me. Modern art doesn't speak to me at all, I feel like it's talking to someone else who died a while ago.
- isolate 11y agoTo expand, good art should be exactly at the level of anyone who looks at it; accessible to newcomers and rewarding for insiders. Incidentally, this is really hard to pull off.
- veddox 11y agoArt should not be above the viewer in the sense that it seems to say "You're too dumb and too uneducated to understand me". It should totally be above the viewer in the sense that it should get him to broaden his horizons, to deepen his thinking and to cultivate an appreciation for the craftsmanship that goes into art. Art that is exactly at your level may give you some temporary pleasure, but little else. The German classical poets saw art as a means of educating peoples' personalities. If you always stick to what you can already understand without a problem, when are you ever going to grow?
- cousin_it 11y ago> It should totally be above the viewer in the sense that it should get him to broaden his horizons, to deepen his thinking and to cultivate an appreciation for the craftsmanship that goes into art. Right, that's exactly how I feel about Homestuck and how I don't feel about modern art.