5 ms·

When you don't understand a piece of art, do you say that you don't understand that the artist was trying to say... or do you say "I look down upon the artist.

• philwelch 16y ago
  There's a difference between saying "I don't get it" and saying "after careful analysis and consideration, this artistic expression is either pointlessly obscure in its meaning or absolutely meaningless".
  • eavc 16y ago
    Right, the first one is usually more accurate when spoken by someone unfamiliar with the context of the art and the state of that art form.
    • philwelch 16y ago
      If a work of art is too much of an inside joke, the "uselessly obscure" criterion is satisfied.
      • eavc 16y ago
        I understand that not getting something is frustrating, but that doesn't make it useless. It means you don't get it. Some people do get it. The artist gets it. His or her peers get it. A certain group of aficionados get it. Some chunk of the general public gets it. Decades later, many many more people may get it. Believe it or not, some art is hard to understand. It requires an understanding of what came before it, it might require a lot of experience with similar work. It may require careful study or deep reflection. It may require changing your mental state or viewing it differently.
        • philwelch 16y ago
          It's not that I don't understand that, but it's easy to go too far into obscurism, and it's even easier to claim obscurism when all you've created is meaninglessness. Added to this is a bunch of social psychology that says observers can create meaning out of nonsense if they're prompted in the right way. As one artist put it: Calvin: People always make the mistake of thinking art is created for them. But really, art is a private language for sophisticates to congratulate themselves on their superiority to the rest of the world. As my artist's statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance. Hobbes: You misspelled Weltanschauung. Calvin: A good artist's statement says more than his art ever does.
          • mos1b 16y ago
            You see this all the time with professors. So many of them sit in their offices and for years at a time create essentially nothing of value for months or years at a time. They go down paths that seem doomed to fail in an attempt to learn something or create something. But most of what they make is minutia, interesting only to their colleagues and even then, it's not very interesting at all. Most of them would be thrilled if they did just one groundbreaking thing in their entire careers. Clearly their work is totally useless. Clearly they should be ignored. Clearly the process has no value. And worst of all, many of them will, when this is pointed out to them, tell you that their work is incredibly important even if it has only made a minor iterative change to some obscure corner of the world, recognizable only by fellow experts in their field.
            • eavc 16y ago
              I've got plenty of criticism for the academic world, but you seem to vastly undervalue the accomplishment of advancing the state of human knowledge, even by just a little bit. It's those little iterative advances that are the foundation of all major discoveries and all substantive technologies.
              • mos1b 16y ago
  • mos1b 16y ago
    But in either case, you're not saying "I look down on the artist."
    • philwelch 16y ago
      No, but if I painted a sloppy parody of his style and then painted runny droplets of brown and yellow paint over the top, I think that would say "I look down on the artist" much more poignantly.
      • mos1b 16y ago
        It would be a comment on your interpretation of his work. It would say nothing about your opinion of the artist as a person. It would in no way say 'i look down upon the artist' or 'i am superior to the artist'.
        • philwelch 16y ago
          You're right--maybe it is just difficult to interpret art :P
• deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
• dan00 16y ago
  I can understand why someone is looking down on modern art. Classic art doesn't need that much rationalization to be meaningful. I think that art isn't first of all a product of thought, but an expression of feelings. So the access to the art is by looking and feeling. Modern art isn't per se meaningful, you can't understand it by just looking at it. There has to be a rational superstructure which creates the meaning for it. And some artist push too hard the creation of this superstructure. So that the explanations seem arbitrary.