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You are being emotionally manipulated to feel. That's all cinema, really. That doesn't, on its own, make it high or low-brow (and I'm not ascribing a good or ba
by emptysongglass 7y ago
You are being emotionally manipulated to feel. That's all cinema, really. That doesn't, on its own, make it high or low-brow (and I'm not ascribing a good or bad quality to this emotional manipulation). What makes art Art is conveying a profound aspect of the human condition. A recognition superseding the mundane.
"But I just want a good yarn, there's nothing wrong with that," you protest. OK, fine but at some point, preferably not right at the moment of your death, you ought to challenge the conditioned mind you've been born and raised into because otherwise we find ourselves living out the story that we've been living since the dawn of humanity. It's this story that rapes the earth and covets possession.
Art should challenge. That can happen at any age. These two dimensional superheroes duking it out with transparent villains don't do much more than the manipulating.
- OCASM 7y agoBy that logic portraits aren't art.
- dkonofalski 7y agoPortraits are meant to capture the essence of a person and the challenge is to think about who/what that person is rather than yourself.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoWhat is the Mona Lisa challenging? Michelangelo's David was never challenging, but it's very much art. You're moving the goalpost. Looking up art: "the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power." That right there is what they felt. Some art challenges, some art doesn't, but if it makes you feel or is beautiful it's art.
- emptysongglass 7y agoI fundamentally disagree with this definition of art, "consensus" as it may be. It's OK as an application to the field of "making art" but as an M.F.A. I see artists in this form of purely aesthetic/emotional production all over and it's not in service of what I see as its real weapon: the challenge to the viewer. I can't say I'm challenged in my corner of art by the Mona Lisa or David so I won't speak to it. How about Ad Reinhardt's "Black Square", an obsessive pursuit of the pure object, the Thingness of the Thing stripped of the heart? Or how about Detroit techno that Jeff Mills described as "architecture" (you mean music can be architecture, can this be real?) and makes immanent that other artist Wagner when Godfrey says to Parsifal, "here my son time turns into space"? That's the shit right there. That's the stuff that blows open your head and lets the good stuff come rolling in. That's worth fighting for.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoLike I said, just because some art challenges, but not all art does. Some of it is just beauty and emotion for beauty or emotions sake. Some it was just art for a paycheque. Just because it's not your cup of tea doesn't mean you should discount is as not being art. I find "Black Square" neither invoking of emotion, nor of beauty, it doesn't appeal to me nor does it challenge me in the slightest, it feels far more pretentious than artistic, it seems of an intensely low effort and it says nothing at all about the human condition, but I won't discount it just because I don't understand why it speaks to you.
- emptysongglass 7y agoAnd I disagree with the beauty or emotion product labeled as art. It's not art. That's what I'm saying.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoFair enough. If we can't agree that Michelangelo's David is art, there's really no room for agreement.