Comment by rcoveson

3 years ago

I think you're making some incorrect, bold claims about art in an effort to simultaneously defend all artists and insult all engineers.

You don't need to "go back to cave dweller's paintings to even have the first idea about what art is", you just need to look at some art. Lots of art can evoke emotion in people with no background in art history, just like lots of food and drink can please people with no background in culinary history. There's a narrow subset, though, that can more or less only be appreciated by people who know the history. I don't think that subset is uniquely important. In fact, I think it belongs at the periphery of art.

An artistic subculture where the majority of attention is on works that don't do anything except deconstruct their mediums--works whose appreciation depends wholly on a socio-political understanding of the artist--is not a subculture I'm very interested in. And I don't think that makes me a dismissive, overly-analytic engineer. Quite the opposite! I think it's those who obsess over history and context instead of content that have lost themselves to analytics. Pure content-appreciation is our primitive, natural instinct.