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Comment by piva00

7 days ago

Your view about art is just too constrained by an appeal to aesthetic beauty. Art's beauty can come in many obtuse ways, and doesn't even need to encompass aesthetic beauty.

The exploration of philosophy through art has its own beauty, it's not an easily digestible beauty but it's a kind of. What you show is just a complete lack of perception to other ways to appreciate art, and for that your soul is a bit more empty than it could be.

Instead of looking at art from this productivity view try to be more curious, challenge yourself on what is even the notion of art and what it can give to us that is ineffable in other forms... Right now you are just too miopic to even be able to appreciate art as a whole, you just want the product of art, not the process, meaning, and philosophical questions it can spark in you.

To understand art takes effort, it tells me a lot about people when they show how uncurious and set in their ways they are about art, they just simply aren't free people.

29 comments

piva00

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bigstrat2003  7 days ago

Yes, art needs to have both aesthetic beauty and technical skill behind it. Contemporary art has neither of those things, and thus it is an embarrassment to the label of "art".

airstrike  7 days ago

> Your view about art is just too constrained by an appeal to aesthetic beauty.

This gets repeated a lot, but the reality is to many people, including philosophers, artists and appreciators of both, aesthetic beauty is a fundamental property of art without which it cannot survive.

The fact that contemporary art circles handwave away that relevance while arrogantly mumbling "you're just miopic, ignorant and misguided, learn more" doesn't really change that fact.

From the outside, it just shows that you too have been co-opted into the cult. You're free to subscribe to that view, but you don't get to gatekeep the meaning of art, no matter how many members that cult may have.

  • piva00  7 days ago

    > The fact that contemporary art circles handwave away that relevance while arrogantly mumbling "you're just miopic, ignorant and misguided, learn more" doesn't really change that fact.

    > From the outside, it just shows that you too have been co-opted into the cult. You're free to subscribe to that view, but you don't get to gatekeep the meaning of art, no matter how many members that cult may have.

    Isn't beauty in the eyes of the beholder though? I do see beauty in a lot of art deemed "part of the cult", how do you even attempt to objectively judge aesthetic beauty in a vacuum? Beauty exists in contexts, there is stuff that without the context just looks weird, with context it becomes beautiful, how do you assess the objective aesthetic beauty of such without delving into philosophical discussions?

    You are all free to create an art movement that aspires to do what you believe art should be: aesthetically beautiful, devoid of philosophical meaning as pursuit of beauty, beauty for its own sake, etc., it will be included, admired, rejected, judged as misguided, so on and so forth, just like you are doing with contemporary art that you do not agree with.

    Isn't that all art anyway?

    • airstrike  7 days ago

      > Isn't beauty in the eyes of the beholder though?

      This is a truism, and I don't even think it's that accurate. There are some universal aspects to our perception of beauty such as symmetry, balance, tension-and-release, contrast, recursion... whatever it may be. We don't need to know what it is to tell that it's there.

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  • jcattle  7 days ago

    In this particular case for me I see a certain kind of artistic beauty in the recital. The fact, that we as a society try to keep something going for 639 years, just a sliver of a thread connecting all those different lives together. Not knowing if it will work, how it will end up, if it will fail spectacularly or just fizzle out into obscurity.

    I wouldn't say that people who do not see this as art are wrong, that's the beauty of art isn't it? It's in the eye of the beholder. To me this recital sparks some hope or in any case makes me stop for a second and wonder about greater things than just my day to day.

    • airstrike  7 days ago

      I don't even mind this particular piece, but I do mind most of what gets labeled as contemporary art. Or pretty much anything since Duchamp's Fountain or maybe Yoko Ono's Cut Piece before that.

wtcactus  7 days ago

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  • brookst  7 days ago

    Tell me more about these fake intellectuals who degrade discourse by telling everyone else they’re doing it wrong?

  • kevinmchugh  7 days ago

    If I could go back in time and shoot 2 painters, well the second one would be Monet, whose damn water lilies started us down this awful path.

  • piva00  7 days ago

    Sure, keep being uncurious and ignorant, it's all your choice, it's you who is missing out.

    "Fake intellectuals" is just... Sad, devaluing whole bodies of work simply because you cannot understand them, instead of attempting to curiously explore that you prefer to use a thought-terminating cliché and embrace your ignorance as supreme... All the while you live during a time where all information and knowledge in the world is there for you to access for free.

    It's just... Sad to live that way but ignorance is bliss since it's just so much easier to reject anything that challenges you.

    • wtcactus  7 days ago

      The fact that this modern "art" needs to be subsidized by the people that actually works with their taxes, is all the argument needed to tell you that indeed this is nothing more than fake intellectualism.

      I'm not missing on absolutely anything by not appreciating a banana glued to a wall. In fact, nobody really appreciates that, it's just a bunch of sycophants pretending they have some artistic knowledge the rest of us, the poor populace, lack, that go on pretending with the charade.

      The rest of the world, are just willing to tell you that the emperor has no clothes.

      7 replies →