[Tweeder]

There was the Midievil .. a style composted basically of it's lack of logic. A person in the background cuold be bigger than a castle in the foreground and so on, but the paintings all looked similar enough so that you could tell they were from the same era.

Then there was the Renaissance, which basically showed the beginigs of logic in art. Linear perspective and realistic people were used in order to "get closer to God." But art was used basically to re-create what was already there, not to create anything new.

Next was the Baroque, which was the first real usage of emotion, and new techniques such as light and dark (currioscurro). Things like these showed up in all types of art .. look at Bernin's statue of David as compared to Michaelangelo's from the renaissance .. Bernini's is full of action and emotion, while the older one is just a naked guy standing there.

There were several other big ones after that .. Enlightment, Rococo etc etc. My point is, every era has a style that reflects the state the people and the country/countries are in at that time. Renaissance they believed very highly in god and the afterlife, and through art they could be saved. Later in the 1800s, new techniques began that showed arists saying basically, screw god, I'm painting for ME.

What style would you say art is today? We have no real religious wars, only disputes with other countries. I can't say it's a majority of people, but there are a lot of people around who do not believe in god .. something that in the renaissance was almost unheard of. Art has always been on the edge of technology as well, something our culture seems to focus on.

What would our themes be, our values? I'm writing a research paper on this for english comp 2, this will be my thesis. I want to know what people think about this .. please reply? Thanks.

[waylon]

Well, as widespread visual communication has become more and more accessible, art has been becoming more and more diverse. At least, that's how I see it. Way long ago, if people wanted to see art, they went to galleries. There was no mass reproduction of art to speak of, unless you count etchings (though by today's standards, the number of copies you can make from an etching is pretty insignificant.) So people saw paintings, and the most prolific painters were seen the most, and so a handfull of people at any given time were in a position to break out of the norm and still be successful.

More recently (100-150 years ago?) more methods were developed to mass-reproduce art. Magazines and newspapers were everywhere, and certain styles of art could catch the public's eye through new media. Previously, significant changes in artistic styles happened over centuries. Now, they were happening every few decades, or even every few years. Don't get me wrong, mass-reproduction of art wasn't the sole reason for this, but I firmly believe it played a big role.

Anyway, onwards to today's art (so maybe going back 10 years). As far as I can tell, there are no rules. Anyone can make anything they want, because they'll always be able to find an audience. There are enough people around, and enough ways to get your message out, that even if only one in every thousand people can appreciate what you call art, that one person will still probably stumble across your web page, or see you on public access TV, or pick up your flyer on a college campus. Back in the rennaisance and before, if you weren't good enough to get into a gallery, you weren't noticed. And to be considered "good enough", you had to conform (more or less). Less diversification, hands down.

So nowadays, as far as I'm concerned, the artistic style is "proliferation". There are so many ways to get your message out, no matter what you do you'll find an audience somewhere.

-----
Ack, I didn't mean to write your whole paper for you.

[Sumaleth]

I think Waylon is on the right track there. Art in the older periods was performed by small groups who all tended to follow the themes of the time, whereas now art is litterally -everything-.

This applies to many fields, such at furniture, toys, architecture etc. Historians can look at an old example of work from their fields (and art) and tell you where it was done, what period, and what it's influences are. But the historians of the future won't so easily be able to sucessfully generalize the same items being made today because the details are rarely consistant any more. It's all a big mish-mash, everyone doing their own style.

Row.

[Tweeder]

I do agree .. but mass production isn't also just a bad thing. Like you said, if you wanted to see art 100s of years ago, you went to a gallery. Or to a church, which usually ended up being a big relegious experience for people, that was half the point of going. Nowadays, you just get online and you can check most art out. But that's good for the people in Bumfuck, MI or middle of Africa. Places that don't have a working Bus have the Internet. Maybe that's a bit of an exxageration, but you get my point. Books, movies, magazines .. one way or another, these people who we only hear about in 30 second blurbs by Dan Rather can and do see our art, and create their own.

But then again, paintings (and the like) are not the only form of art we have. Architechture, movies, plays, and books. Books weren't really even around until about 200-250 years ago. Well, they were there .. but any books that came out were more like fables. It was a clear cut story of good and evil, with a strong hero and a valued moral in teh end. They were stories that had been told for generations, wih nothing new. And they were read as a group.

In the 1700s came the novel. Even the word means new thing. It's a story, a world, that's completely created by the author. Don Quixote was one of the first, and best, examples. For the first 100 years or so the books were huge, because the authors believed in order for the book to be believed, they had to create an entire world, down to every detail. The genealogies of all the horses, dental records (name that movie.) And for the first time, books were things you experienced by yourself, which is why Hitler burned them. It took away from the group idea he needed to rule. If he gave one of his speaches to 5 guys at a table, they'd laugh at him. But get 50,000 angry men in a courtyard and give that speech, and it resulted in exactly what he wanted. Burning books was just one way to keep the group thing going.

Okay, Im rambling Ok, here's my final question. We look back at art now, and we can just say "renaissance" "baroque" .. we can just tell by looking at it. What, if anything, do we have that would tip people off that it's from our age? What techniques or themes are common. I'm using simply paintings/drawings for this .. forget theater and books for now. I can't really think of anything, it sounds like Waylon couldn't either .. I'm just seeing if anybody else has any ideas on this.

[Vgta]

Kitch art, realize that we are a society of mass production and comsuption. Where one can go into Wallmart and either buy a print of "The School of Athens" and right next to it will be the Five dogs playing poker.

As much as art is available to people only those who seek it will find it. This is going off on a different subject, but my point is we are still less educated about art as we were a few years ago (society as a whole I mean)
Can you name any truly ground breaking Fine Art piece that has come out recently? No because it's being made. Ten years from now you will see some of this art in display. Not now. Why? Because ussually things become famous after the artist has passed away.
You will also see digital art media as the new wave, it will come to pass where you will see a painting next to a monitor that is displaying a digital painting (that monitor would be a plasma screen or an HD screen of course)
Hope you see where I am going.
So for now we have Kitch art invading our sences, in a few years I have no doubts that we will see some of the work from people on this forums on display.

[waylon]

Hiya. You know, I don't think there are too many individual pieces of art you could point at and say "That's art from 1980-2020". Err, well, that's not quite right. There are plenty of pieces of art that no one would have accepted earlier in our history, but as far as I can tell, there's nothing that unifies them all besides their diversity.

Though you could, probably, look at a collection of art - say, a college painting class's final projects, or a small gallery - and pinpoint the whole set of works as being from our time period. I'm sticking with my earlier statements. There's no one unifying trait of all art from our period, beyond the fact that it's so varied.

Oh, and I didn't mean to sound like the variedness of our culture is a bad thing. Yes, a lot of untalented hacks get to be well known, but that's insignificant compared to the number of great artists who wouldn't have had a chance before.

And as far as what Vgta said... I agree, to some extent, but not completely. I don't know if we'll ever really see digital pieces in galleries the way we see paintings. It's a radically different medium, with a radically different audience in mind. Paintings are made to be hung on walls. Digital art is made to be seen in video games, in movies, on web pages, and as peoples' wallpapers. That's not to say it won't ever happen (I've already seen some digital stuff in the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art), just that you're much more likely to see a forum member's art somewhere else.

---------------

Accept my heartwarming gift of tree scratchies!!! I absolve thee!!

[baerb]

I agree with all of you on principle: The 20th century is (or had been ) a turning point in art history, because the expressiveness of the individual stands high above masses' way (most time...). But there are some facts, that won't harmonize with my own experience:
I dislike calling medieval art 'illogical' or 'emotionless' - it's not primitive. Surely they didn't know about linear perspective and much of the classical knowledge was burried for long time, but thats not the main cause for the 'flat' painting style. As you told, Tweeder, it was goal-directed: Imparting the main facts of their own belief to the (mostly illiterated) 'Christianity'. And thats the matter, why artist chose (or had to chose) to work simple (= to prevent surfeit of the common people). So it's a kind of abstraction, very special, ornamentive (Irland! *sigh*), but not illogical. The mediveal artists were able to draw naturalistic (a few sketches survived centuries), but it didn't support the aims, they pursued. Today we do the same thing, only using different methods...
[URL=http://sf.exit.mytoday.de/meroe/meddy.jpg ]Here[/URL] are some (quite poor) examples, couldn't get better ones that fast...

Art is always goal-directed. Your own aims, if you are lucky, but noone who's ever been to art buisness can tell me, he/she can do whatever he/she wants to do. As long as there is a boss/customer, you have to subordinate your talent. Yesterday pope/church - today firms. Things have not changed so much

Concerning your last question: A mass of individuality (mostly in the western world) ... thats our dilemma . You probably can connect single pieces/artists to a certain group stilistically (Vgta is right ... Kitch/imitation rules at the moment ), but on the whole? I think, it's individuality itself. Maybe this changes within the next decades, but now history of art is a history of individuals.
Think, Kandinsky found perfect words: "Art is allways the child of it's period (but also mother of the future)."


edit: Added a link

P.S.: I'm sorry because of my horrible english ... grammar = my enemy

[ June 12, 2001: Message edited by: baerb ]

[Tweeder]

I don't mean to put down the medieval era .. i like the art from that time quite a bit actually. I'm just saying, as compared to the things that would come later, it's the most illogical. There were still goals, ideas and stories they were trying to convey, and they succeeded in doing so, but just in a very odd way. And it's only odd when you look back at it now, at the time obviously it was the modern, cutting edge style.

I see people kind of agree with the idea though that we have no real definite style like there has been in the past. Either that, or the sheer lack of style is our style, heh. Everyone does what they want to do now for themselves, not for God or because their King told them to. People can paint green monkeys eating coconuts instead of the virgin mary and everything is fine .. nobody objects. People like it, they pay for it.

I've simplified most of what I've said .. I could go into further detail about the eras, including our own, but there wouldn't be much of a purpose. I just wanted to gather a few ideas and opinions .. thank you for your input. I'm going to look more into the things you suggested, and hopefully use that in my paper.

[baerb]

So it was a misunderstanding.
But it sounded quite disparaging to me.

[edible snowman]

art today seems to be moving towards profit. people do what makes money. obviously, this isn't the case for everything, but a lot of the best artists are professionals, and professionals have to get paid. one example could be that picture merekat just showed. it didnt seem like something she wanted to do, but she did it because its what the client wanted. a lot of the art i see is commercial. maybe its just me.

[waylon]

Art has always been commercial. Back in the day, 99% of all art was commisioned by the church, since they were the ones who had the money. Later, governments started commisioning portraits of nobility (as well as historical paintings.) Eventually, there was enough money floating around that the middle class could afford to buy or commision paintings as well, and then you started seeing more diversity. But the artists still painted what they could sell. Look at Sargent, for instance. He's most well know for his portraits, though he hated doing them. But they were what sold.

Ok. No more novels from me.

[Pat]

Wow. No one blabbing about post-modernism? The view from my seat looks like this:

Postmodernism peaked and then from the ashes came deconstructionism. Deconstructionism has about petered out, but not before spawning a mindbending number of rule-bending iterations like "Site-Specific" Installation art, Art by the Uneducated (read: untainted by education) and all the neo/revisionist movements mish-mashing whichever style seemed popular that week. This grand groping period I term the "Movementist" movement. Artists have become so aware of "art movements" that the apparent absence of one has become a movement in and of itself --both defining those who participate and those who do not wish to. When you become aware of the mechanism behind the function your paradigm shifts. You can't exactly look at the all-powerful Oz the same way once you looked behind the curtain. Same thing with art movements. Psychologists call this specific brand of awareness Meta-Cognition. I suspect we're in the middle of the "classification" stage, identifying and familiarizing ourselves with the new view. Once we've internalized this we'll be conquering new ground in no time. In short, this is the awkward Prince Valiant haircut stage of art.

-Pat

[waylon]

Pat, you don't by any chance teach art history classes, do you?

[Ken McCracken]

All art is basically a postscript for Marcel Duchamp. He deemed, that with his magical artist's touch, that a urinal becomes art. The definitional wall between 'art' and 'life' fell down, forever. Garbage, the ugly, and the shameful could now all be art. The style now, is honesty, because artists no longer avert their eyes from the ugly nature of life.

[Pat]

[Pat, you don't by any chance teach art history classes, do you?]

Waylon, you make me laugh! Me teach? I just copied my answer from the smart girl sitting in front of me.


------------------


[The style now, is honesty, because artists no longer avert their eyes from the ugly nature of life.]

Hey Ken, you had me up till that point. Artists have alwasy been facinated by, if not preoccupied by, the "ugly nature of life". Look at Bosch's paintings of hell. What about Goya and his facination with war? Da Vinci's "Teste Grottesche" (grotesque heads) sketches also come to mind. I think artists now, more than ever, have divorced themselves from "honesty" and have instead invested heavily in being philosophical, progressive or political.


-Pat

[NukleoN]

Snoooooorrreeeee

[Ken McCracken]

I think Bosch is the exception that rather proves the rule. And I don't see what is not 'honest' about being philosophical, political or progressive . . . these, to me, represent attempts by artists to throw the problems of the world back in the faces of the powers-that-be, instead of being the lapdogs of the elite that artists typically were during the renaissance, for example.

[gekitsu]

scott mccloud, tha author of a really great book about comics (dunno its name in english, just read it in german), where he says:

art is everything produced by a human being, not done because of self-preservation and/or propagation. he showed this with a short comic strip where a cave-man runs after a cave-girl. he's doing this because he wants sex and propagate. but then, the cave-girl dissappears and a tiger is jumping out of nowhere. of course, the cave-man runs away. he's doing that for self-preservation. he jumps quickly onto a tree, so that the tiger runs into a gorge. after that, the cave-man begins to pull faces, stick his tongue out etc.. what's he doing now? -art.

i don't agree in every point of it, but it contains a very essential idea. in my opinion, art also can not be done because of commercialism, but because the one who created it, wanted to create it just for the fun creating it or afterwards, having created it.

there seems not to be some stilistic rules, that are characteristic for today, just because the picture for the individual became more important. the individual isn't "bound" to some era-related points of view which end up in some specific styles.
today's art may later be identified by the kind of how to put a message in there or the kind of content.

i can find only one form of art, that is really genuine to the last years: the comics. but comics aren't drawings or paintings. comics (and manga) are a form of art between literature and painting/drawing, but they aren't just a mixing, comics are a form for itself, not comparable to something other.
surely, a part of todays characteristic art is comic-related art. but it is not the one "defining" style of today.

today, the art creating individuals are not concerned to fulfill a specific style or philosophy, most of us (at meast me) just paint for fun or paint for painting. maybe this will be the identifying details, later generations will acknowledge our art.

[Pat]

Ken, the honesty I was refering to was not the honesty of the artist's intent which, as you mentioned, can be purely motivated. Rather, if an artist is attempting to effect a change in society via his art, his agenda has become a poltical one, not an artistic one. From a philosopical standpoint this is a classic aesthetics question --one we can debate till the cows come home. From a practical standpoint it's a division of the artist's focus and energies. If the artist has prioritized his political agenda over his art, by definition it has become propeganda. This was the honesty (or lack thereof) which I was refering to.

It's a fine hair to split, but an important one in our field because artistic intent is, as you pointed out, the essential difference between a toilet and a piece of art.

-Pat

[Ken McCracken]

The 'honesty' I was actually referring to was the artist's own internal honesty with his or her situation, or thought. Time was that, no matter how the artist felt about what he or she wanted to portray, there was a limited canon of things to portray - figures from history, characters from the bible or literature . . . it would have been quite scandalous for an artist to portray the inner demons that tormented him (and Bosch does not count really - Bosch is the exception that rather proves the rule here). Now, artists are free to depict any aspect of their life, from the disturbed to the sexual, without being castigated. The entire mental life of the artist is open for examination, and not just a narrow portion of it.