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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Those art pieces are literally poison to a young aspiring artist's mind. It condemns them to a life in poverty, chasing dreams of becoming high profile abstract-postmodernist-whatever artist selling shits in jars, instead of focusing on making what the world really needs the most:
spoiler
gay furry porn
You either die dignified and impoverished, unrecognized in your own lifetime, or you live long enough to afford a custom alpaca fursuit.
Well, I'll let you know that big dragon mommy milkers are superior
My favorite thing about art is that if you look at it and you hate it, that's still a completely valid take
Art museums became way more fun once I realized that
I am going to MOMAs all over to laugh at the stupid shit some artists pull off. Laughed my ass off at the taped banana. I am not even interested in what the artist thinks or means. I am entertained, that is what I expect of art.
Like in London, there was this big-ass room dedicated to a giant chair and a giant table, you could walk under. Heated, in the middle of a freezing winter. Like, the homeless were freezing out on the streets, and here we are as a society, heating a room for a chair and a table nobody could use. Just take in the absurdity, and you have to laugh at this shit to compensate and stay sane.
I just like the way it looks.
That's cool. Don't let any douche like me talk you out of that. 🙂
The bell curve is in fact 3 dimensional and you took the upper 0.1% of the orthogonal axis to the one depicted.
Sir, I laughed and upvoted. I am unable to share as my wife is a visual arts grad and I want to be able to get laid in the future.
I understand.
It's money laundering
I like it. Generally, when abstract and contemporary art is well executed, I find it to be thought provoking and exciting to experience. One of my personal favourite paintings is Asger Jorn's "Stalingrad".
It is entirely useless to look at that painting on a tiny screen on a search engine because it looks like shit online.
However, in real life, you enter the room where it is hanging and it is HUGE. Whites and blacks and blues ans yellows and reds in a turbulent mix on the canvas and if you sit down on the bench and soak it in, you start to feel the emotions Jorn was trying to evoke in the viewer. War is hell. War in the deep of Russian winters is worse than hell. It is blind, cold, desperate chaos and you're supposed to fight in this inferno while being able to tell friend from foe, but they all look the same, their blood looks the same in the snow and dirt beneath them.
I'm always exhausted when I look at that painting, but I do it every single time I'm at the Asger Jorn museum.
There definitely is shitty abstract and contemporary art out there. I have seen my fair share of bullshit pieces, but it is sad to me how some people entirely close themselves off to this aspect of art just because it is different. But, at the end of the day it is a taste thing, and that is okay.
Counter offer: that's all expectation bias.
You read
War is hell. War in the deep of Russian winters is worse than hell. It is blind, cold, desperate chaos and you're supposed to fight in this inferno while being able to tell friend from foe, but they all look the same, their blood looks the same in the snow and dirt beneath them.
then you conjure up the feeling with some art museum self-gaslighting. Maybe the art is the prompt?
Modern dance and modern art (including free form poetry etc) that try to leave rules/form/structure behind are, to me, rorschach content with accompanying flavor text that makes them smell faintly of the artists' farts. This is to other forms of art what whiteclaws are to flavor.
I quite strongly doubt that any abstract or contemporary art in isolation gives any specific, repeatable feeling to anybody outside of maybe "chaos". Its fine if you like it (I don't obviously) but I think adding specific feelings that you wouldn't get without the title is oversell and over-hype. It's like establishing the canon for a book or story using the fanfiction for that story or just the authors opinion: if you didn't actually write it in the main work, it doesn't count (I see you J.K. Rowling, Brandon Sanderson, etc). Put the story IN THE STORY.
But then, this is all just one man's polemic.
That's a fair point of view, but that is literally the point of art. Not just abstract and contemporary art. The more context you have with a piece of art, the more it will make you feel and think about what it is trying to communicate.
Try and look up the painting Stańczyk by Jan Matejko.
In isolation, you'd look at that painting and see a sad jester in a chair. You may feel something, but it won't be very deep.
When the context is added for that painting, it starts taking on a completely and much more complex meaning. The most basic takeaway with context is "while the politicians, kings and nobelmen are partying, only the jester is understanding the severity of the country's predicament."
But if you take the time and start diving into the meaning of the comet outside the window, the cultural and historical significance of the court jester Stańczyk to Poland's history and culture, the letter on the table, the fact that Matejko used his own face as a reference for the jester, dive into Matejko's own life and his views, interests and concerns you will get a much greater and much more nuanced interpretation of what you're looking at. It will basically educate you on something you most likely know nothing about.
That is what art does.
Asger Jorn's Stalingrad is the same for me.
It is so miss the point of art to think that you should be able to just glance at it briefly and get anything out of it.
Art is also not supposed to be pleasant or pretty. It is supposed to move people. There is tons of art out there that bores me to tears or that I think is bullshit, but others may connect with it where I couldn't and that is worth something.
Are there bulshitters and bulshit art out there? Absolutely. One of my favourite horror satirea Velvet Buzzsaw very much takes the piss out of the art scene and the silly snobs in it.
But I think it is a mistake to think that having context for an art piece is somehow cheating when all art ever made has a title and an intent and context by default.
Also forgot to mention that one of my all time favourite contemporary art pieces was a long table in a small room with let's say 50 identical white vases lined up on either side. Next to the vases, on the table lay a bunch of cheap permanent markers. Out of the 50 identical white vases stood maybe 10 white vases with gold leaf patterns on them.
All the vases were scribbled over with drawings and words except the vases with the gold leafs on them.
I picked up a marker myself and drew on some of the plain vases, but it took me a bit of courage to start drawing on one of the gold leaf vases. At least one other person had drawn on one of the gold leaf vases but only on the white parts. I found myself instinctively doing the same.
It made me think about a lot of things. What we put value to, why, even when we are given the go-ahead, most of us still hesitate to destroy something that we perceive to be valuable even if the only difference between it and the other pieces is cheap gold patterns on the side.
Furthermore, nowhere did it say that you weren't allowed to smash the vases, but nobody had done it. You could probably do whatever you wanted to do to these vases, ans yet people only allowed themselves to do the safest form of vandalism.
I thought about the other people who had written and drawn on the vases. I felt their presence and the thoughts they had gone through when interacting with this piece. I thought about the artist and their intentions with it. The fact that I interacted with their piece made it very clear that all the thoughts they had put into their piece was realized in me as part of the installation.
I have no idea what the made of that piece was. Not a clue. But it still affected me because of how well it was executed and I understood the message(s) the artist intented. Maybe not all of them, but the main point, I got.
Contemporary art can be so amazing if one opens themselves up to it.
Counter offer: that's all expectation bias.
Counter counter offer: The title and description (and sometimes a biography of the production of the piece) are an integral part of the art.
If you can find it, Kurt Vonnegut wrote an essay for Esquire called “Jack the Dripper” which was reprinted in his essay collection Fates Worse than Death. He argues that Pollock was a) absolutely able to produce quality traditional art and b) accessing his sub- and unconscious mind when making drip paintings in a way that anyone interested in the human mind should be fascinated by.
Give Pollock crap all you want, but the guy popularized one of the most fun painting techniques ever, regardless of how you feel about his stuff.
Seriously, splatter painting is really fun to do even if there's no real reason to it, and if anything, who says art has to have a reason behind it? Just straight-up having a play around throwing paint on something (in fact, there are entire places dedicated to that exact thing cropping up over the last few years) is as valid as drawing a scene out with an actual story behind it.
Also that scene from The Big Lebowski, which yeah, looks like a ton of fun!
Pollock hits harder in person tbh.
Prints and photos don't really work; it ends up looking flat and empty. But in person, there's more "depth" in both a literal and figurative sense. You can see more of the intent put into the methodology.
Mind you, I agree with the idea that he's over hyped. He wasn't exactly breaking new ground, and there's plenty of other artists that explored abstract painting with more satisfying and effective results.
But I don't think it's accurate to call it shit either. As much as people love to say it, no a kindergartener couldn't do it. Even high schoolers have trouble making something that looks similar enough to carry the same visual effect. Some art students at a collegiate level can't.
Turns out you do have to have some degree of development in your techniques at the very least to get the same results, no matter how much raw talent you have.
Now, don't ask me if I really like his stuff. I mean, I'm going to say it anyway, but still. My take on his body of work is that he fully explored the "drip" technique way before he quit doing it, and likely could have stopped after the first one because the only real differences between them amount to nothing more than the difference between most hotel and doctors' office wall hangings. You see one, you've seen them all.
Don't get me wrong, I don't doubt that he got something more than money out of the process. I make bland and basic art myself, and IDGAF about the results as much as the enjoyment of making. Every art student I've ever known gets super into the process of creating and that's a wonderful thing; dissecting what they're doing as they do it.
But that value isn't something that carries on beyond the process itself.
Can't tell which people hate more, the art, the artist, or the admirers of the work.
Regardless of how people feel about Pollock's work, there was art before expressionism and art after. He and others undeniably changed the conversation about art forever.
Say what you want about this meme, but it sure as shit sparked a debate.
At least it's not made by AI.
I'd much rather the CIA spent their money on this.
I am going to sleep now. I'll be back tommorow if there still is a discussion. Good night everyone. 😪🐑🐑🐑
Yeah, yeah op. You have no idea of the what's and why's or any context for why plenty of modern art looks like it does and why it is important in art history. You know what you like. And you like what you understand. And if you don't understand it, you feel intellectually lesser and have a knee jerk reaction to protect yourself - by taking a meme format that says you have all the smarts and people that understand it are below yourself.
You can keep doing that, or you can get curious and ask the what's and the why's and see if you can appreciate things from it that aren't immediately obvious. That is how people grow.
I upvoted the OP message. And I upvoted yours too, because both of you are so right.
The OP message you responded is a person in the middle of the curve bell that things they are at the end of the curve, while they are in the middle.
Tbf lots of stuff in that style, including some of his, is trash.
Edit: and if context is beauty: a lot of people making it didn't understand, and it was overpromoted by the fucking cia to contrast the literal style pushed by the ussr. So it's literally an anti-communist plot by yhe cia. Show me some other 'anti communist' things.
Yep. If you look into history there are plenty of examples of political powers promoting arts of all tradition for their own purposes.
But you know who were on the fronts of practically banning modern art in the first place? Check out Entartete Kunst, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_art. So does that make all traditional and figurative art problematic now?
And you know what other art was "not understood" by it's creators until later? Oh, boy. Fucking most of it, because a lot of art is expression and exploration, and theory is the understanding after, despite academics and theorists in fine arts have been trying to center the entire scene around themselves rather than the artists for the better part of the 1900s until today.
You're equating an appreciation of significance with an appreciation of aesthetics.