3 ms·

This equates the value of art with technical difficulty, which is not how most people actually evaluate art.

bigstrat2003 1y ago
I would not say that the value of art is strictly equivalent to technical difficulty. But I would say that there is a level of technical competence required for art to be good. Something that takes no skill to create (e.g. that absurd banana duct taped to a wall "piece") is not good art, if indeed it can be called art at all.
- Avicebron 1y ago
  The fact that people still talk about it and ridicule it 6 years after it was created, and it lives on in the cultural zeitgeist as that, makes it good art. It's literally called Comedian.
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    This guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_Duchamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_Duchamp killed off the argument that "X isn't art" for all X.
    - int_19h 1y ago
      I don't see any art in the linked article.
      - bccdee 1y ago
        "I don't think it's art, therefore it's not art." Congratulations, you're the type of person Marcel Duchamp was making fun of in 1917. 108 years later, the stance you're defending has been so comprehensively trashed by the art community that anything I could say about it has been said a thousand times already.
        int_19h 1y ago
        If by "art community" you mean people who make "art" like that, the only thing they have succeeded in is convincing most of the rest of us that their opinion on what is and isn't art is irrelevant. Which is to say, it's not that I don't think it's art. It's that most people would agree with me that it isn't art, and what the word means in colloquial speech is defined by popular consensus, not by what a bunch of snobs decide it means.
        bccdee 1y ago
        > If by "art community" you mean people who make "art" like that I didn't. > what the word means in colloquial speech is defined by popular consensus If I asked for the popular consensus on the definition of, say, "insouciant," and the majority of people answered, "I don't know," does that mean the word has no meaning? Which is to say, no, meaning is not a democracy. It's contextual, and I don't care what art means in a context exclusive to people who don't really give a shit about art (which is the context you're appealing to when you say, "most people would agree with me that it isn't art").
    - bryanrasmussen 1y ago
      killed off the argument that X isn't art for some Y, where Y is people trying to decide if X is art or not.
  - bccdee 1y ago
    It had to be removed from the fair early because it was drawing dangerously large crowds. [1] If art moves people, Comedian was an undeniably literal success. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/arts/design/banana-removed-art-basel.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/arts/design/banana-remove...
- 65 1y ago
  I would argue art is not about how "good" it is, but rather how it makes you feel. And the duct tape banana, just by referencing it, is successful in making you feel something.
PaulHoule 1y ago
A friend of the family gave my son a guitar a while back and more recently tried to get him to play Sugar Mountain by Neil Young. He worked at it pretty hard and struggled with it because even though it is simple it has to be played with great precision to sound good. Then he discovered grunge and bar chords and had a breakthrough with The Day I Tried to Live by Soundgarden and Rooster by Alice in Chains. Now he's looking for good songs he can play and that's gotten him into David Bowie songs from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. For a long time I thought of David Bowie as one of those classically trained musicians like Frank Zappa who played rock because it had commercial potential, but he found many songs on that album to be great songs that were within his reach. Now when we have houseguests who say they like Rush he will be able to play the chorus of a few songs in 24 hours and he's building instruments like a Guitar-harp-ukulele (fretless guitar with two bridges, one of which has a harp section) and he's asking me about the physics to build a bass guitar tuned an octave or two below a regular bass guitar.
- EdwardDiego 1y ago
  When trying to learn the guitar I fell in love with Santa Monica by Everclear, and Go With The Flow by Queens Of The Stone Age.
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  > he's asking me about the physics to build a bass guitar tuned an octave or two below a regular bass guitar. I barely know anything about music, and probably less about guitars, but if he can do barre chords, then you can try to build a simple capo with him, since he might readily grasp the utility of having a clamp that essentially gives you another hand on that side of the guitar.
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    He's been experimenting with clamps, he has one for the fretless guitar section of the guitar-ukulele. As for the electric quadro- or octo-bass the variables you can tweak are: * length * mass/length * tension There's some limit to how long you make the strings or you can't play it or otherwise you need something to extend your reach like the levers on the octobass. The other two are inside a square root which is not in your favor. Probably the easy thing to do is find some really heavy strings for a normal bass and see how low you can get the tension. But really he's the one to build things. Back when I was in physics they kept trying to get me to do experiment rather than theory, if I have any regret it is that if I had studied experiment I'd be able to build all the things that my son wanted to build but, hey, he can build those things now.

bigstrat2003 1y ago

I would not say that the value of art is strictly equivalent to technical difficulty. But I would say that there is a level of technical competence required for art to be good. Something that takes no skill to create (e.g. that absurd banana duct taped to a wall "piece") is not good art, if indeed it can be called art at all.

Avicebron 1y ago
The fact that people still talk about it and ridicule it 6 years after it was created, and it lives on in the cultural zeitgeist as that, makes it good art. It's literally called Comedian.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  This guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_Duchamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_Duchamp killed off the argument that "X isn't art" for all X.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    I don't see any art in the linked article.
    - bccdee 1y ago
      "I don't think it's art, therefore it's not art." Congratulations, you're the type of person Marcel Duchamp was making fun of in 1917. 108 years later, the stance you're defending has been so comprehensively trashed by the art community that anything I could say about it has been said a thousand times already.
      - int_19h 1y ago
        If by "art community" you mean people who make "art" like that, the only thing they have succeeded in is convincing most of the rest of us that their opinion on what is and isn't art is irrelevant. Which is to say, it's not that I don't think it's art. It's that most people would agree with me that it isn't art, and what the word means in colloquial speech is defined by popular consensus, not by what a bunch of snobs decide it means.
        bccdee 1y ago
        > If by "art community" you mean people who make "art" like that I didn't. > what the word means in colloquial speech is defined by popular consensus If I asked for the popular consensus on the definition of, say, "insouciant," and the majority of people answered, "I don't know," does that mean the word has no meaning? Which is to say, no, meaning is not a democracy. It's contextual, and I don't care what art means in a context exclusive to people who don't really give a shit about art (which is the context you're appealing to when you say, "most people would agree with me that it isn't art").
  - bryanrasmussen 1y ago
    killed off the argument that X isn't art for some Y, where Y is people trying to decide if X is art or not.
- bccdee 1y ago
  It had to be removed from the fair early because it was drawing dangerously large crowds. [1] If art moves people, Comedian was an undeniably literal success. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/arts/design/banana-removed-art-basel.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/arts/design/banana-remove...
65 1y ago
I would argue art is not about how "good" it is, but rather how it makes you feel. And the duct tape banana, just by referencing it, is successful in making you feel something.

PaulHoule 1y ago

A friend of the family gave my son a guitar a while back and more recently tried to get him to play Sugar Mountain by Neil Young. He worked at it pretty hard and struggled with it because even though it is simple it has to be played with great precision to sound good. Then he discovered grunge and bar chords and had a breakthrough with The Day I Tried to Live by Soundgarden and Rooster by Alice in Chains. Now he's looking for good songs he can play and that's gotten him into David Bowie songs from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. For a long time I thought of David Bowie as one of those classically trained musicians like Frank Zappa who played rock because it had commercial potential, but he found many songs on that album to be great songs that were within his reach. Now when we have houseguests who say they like Rush he will be able to play the chorus of a few songs in 24 hours and he's building instruments like a Guitar-harp-ukulele (fretless guitar with two bridges, one of which has a harp section) and he's asking me about the physics to build a bass guitar tuned an octave or two below a regular bass guitar.

EdwardDiego 1y ago
When trying to learn the guitar I fell in love with Santa Monica by Everclear, and Go With The Flow by Queens Of The Stone Age.
aspenmayer 1y ago
> he's asking me about the physics to build a bass guitar tuned an octave or two below a regular bass guitar. I barely know anything about music, and probably less about guitars, but if he can do barre chords, then you can try to build a simple capo with him, since he might readily grasp the utility of having a clamp that essentially gives you another hand on that side of the guitar.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  He's been experimenting with clamps, he has one for the fretless guitar section of the guitar-ukulele. As for the electric quadro- or octo-bass the variables you can tweak are: * length * mass/length * tension There's some limit to how long you make the strings or you can't play it or otherwise you need something to extend your reach like the levers on the octobass. The other two are inside a square root which is not in your favor. Probably the easy thing to do is find some really heavy strings for a normal bass and see how low you can get the tension. But really he's the one to build things. Back when I was in physics they kept trying to get me to do experiment rather than theory, if I have any regret it is that if I had studied experiment I'd be able to build all the things that my son wanted to build but, hey, he can build those things now.