[Impaler]

Define art.

Question at hand is, well, what really quantifies as art?

Jackson Pollock dribbled paint across a 9 foot canvas and was critically acclaimed. 4 year-olds do the exact same thing.

Even us gfx nerds are looked down upon in a lot of the art community, because our art is considered too easy and fake.

What about the goreific Shock Art trend? Right now there's a work by German artist Van Hogen. Basically it's actual corpses mutilated and put in bizarre situations. There's a runner, full stride. with his own skin draped over his arm like he was carrying a jacket.

And performance art? I recall an AID's victim cutting himself on stage, dripping it onto rags and hanging them over the audience with pulleys. Dangerous? Yes. Art? Your choice.

So, again. Define Art. I dare you.

(sorry about the hasty style. I had to write this quickly)

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My signature is slightly better than yours.

[Ian]

Art is working on something until you like it and then leaving it that way.

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Sit on my face, and tell me that you LOVE me!

[Bradford]

What Ian said. I don't like getting in the nitty and gritty about it. Art is what you make of it for yourself.

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[Dthind]

...have you ever heard of a person named G.G. Allen (sp). He was called a 'Performance Artist' (he later died of a heroin overdose, duh). He used to mutilate himself on stage (darts, needles, ropes, beatings, floggings, etc). Now there was art (NOT !).

IMHO - Art is what you enjoy that is creation, who cares if no one else likes it (unless you try to say you're cool or make money).

I am not saying digital art is easy, but you can undo bits and pieces, and you can create editable layers. If people say that is easy, tell them you agree and let them try to do what you do, then they shut up or are hypocrites.

A friend of mine ONLY does bronze scupture and there is not so much undo ability without a total meltdown (pardon the pun).

[Giant Hamster]

"Art is everything without definition"

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-JameZ the Giant Hamster-

The Hamster Alliance
AIM: Gianthmstr
Multimedia Producer/designer/all of the above.,overall guru :)...and music music music! weee!!

[[Shizo]]

Art is doing something that people will buy so you can have moneys and food! HEHEHE

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nothing really matters

[[Shizo]]

you can also spend those moneys on dirty women!

[Guy]

i like what Giant hamster said.. er or quoated. i think it's also pointless to debate what we think art is, because it keeps changing. we're always trying to find something new and unique.

[Impaler]

But in that quest for something new and unique, is there a line that we should not cross?

Right now, there's a molestation of true art going on, especially in countries with free expression. You can do grotesque, illegal things and have it be "freedom of speech", calling it art.

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My signature is slightly better than yours.

[-- Transcendent --]

I don't intend to make any smart or witty statments here ... (e.g "art is what you hang behind the couch") - just a serious take on a much avoided topic.

I think art is anything which conveys emotion. I'll leave the rest of the thinking to you.

[PandaX52]

Art doesn't exist outside of our minds, by trying to define it as something that exists independent of our conciousness it only becomes more elusive and confusing to define.

[Spitfire]

Art isn�t.


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Smash me to the ground, a thousand times as before.

[This message has been edited by Spitfire (edited March 15, 2001).]

[DrBof]

i like this

Art is here used from Croce's definition

'Works of art, such as paintings, in which artists order the stimuli they receive by creating expressive representations, are paradigm cases of products of a power we all posses to impose a form on the world by creating expressive representations from our sensory stimuli'

i.e. if something is art, it necessarily must be expression and visa versa.


and i would like to add

Why is there a problem with web art? The problem is to do with economics and ownership. If something exits only in virtual space how are you going to buy it? As soon as it is saved and stored it is no longer web art in the same way as a photo of a flower is not actually a flower, only an image or an impression. Furthermore there is no gallery or market for web art yet so the believability and official air that artefacts and collection agents give to art is lost. Web art in short is just a little ahead of its time and for that reason is not sufficiently documented.

<respond>

[travis travis]

quote:

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Originally posted by Impaler:
Define art.

What about the goreific Shock Art trend? Right now there's a work by German artist Van Hogen. Basically it's actual corpses mutilated and put in bizarre situations. There's a runner, full stride. with his own skin draped over his arm like he was carrying a jacket.

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wah? can't figure how he got around the legalities of that one.

my opinion is that art is in as much seriousness underlies it. really, even if people are doing completely frivolous things, if it still shows a message and gives a hint that they put something in it - I mean it might outwardly be a fine line, but I think within there is an immediate, HUGE difference between a cad who wants to get paid for hubris and nothing, and someone who cares. This is a pain in the ass to explain. But basically, sometimes technical skill might be appropriate, sometimes it might be worthless, but it's really in what you can take from the artist... which means there is a HELL OF A LOT of total crap out there... as far as real art goes, and I would consider craft and design seperate from that also

[Affected]

Well, I'm sort of torn between agreeing with Spit or saying it's communication.

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Affected

Democracy is a lie

http://affected.xs.mw

[Spitfire]

*schhhhhhhhh...shhhhhhhh*

Embrace the Dark Side, young Jedi!


*flaps with cape*



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Smash me to the ground, a thousand times as before.

[Count Zero]

Art, like beauty, is 100% in the eye of the beholder.
I have seen things created for pure funcionality being more beautiful than 99% of the shit they call "art".

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COUNT ZERO INTERRUPT-
On receiving an interrupt,
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[Speve-o-matic]

[This message has been edited by Speve-o-matic (edited March 15, 2001).]

[Speve-o-matic]

. . . hmmm.

[Lunatique]

I have heated debates about this with my friends all the time.

In my personal view: I'm tired of arguing what is art. The truth is, you can't please everyone, and what you like might be the opposite of someone else's taste. So, if some no talent hack with an exihibitionist bent wants to pass his/her "work" as art, then fine, let them do whatever the hell they want, just don't expect ME to accept it as art, or talk to the people who actually agree it's art. What they do should just be considered theater performances.

I'm still VERY angry at the injustices done to real painters ever since the beginning of "modern art." For the first half of the 20th century, art critics(mostly intellectual writers trying to make a name for themselves), who cannot paint or understand anything about art, started praising modern art as the only art that is relevent and meaningful, using ridiculous phrases like, "xxxx's work has an almost religious fervor and intellectual urgency...blah blah" while describing a piece of canvas with blotches of dirty paint. Man, I want to shoot those fuckers. Not just because they were putting words in the mouths of these modern artists, making them saints when they are not, they also severely crticized, ostracized, and banished talented painters with the ability to paint coherent, beautiful images into obscurity and poverty.

John William Godward, a talented 19th century neo-classical painter, committed suicide because of these pretentious, pseudo art intellectuals. They attacked his beautiful paintings with snide mockery, much in the same way they did with Bouguereau's work. In his suicide note, there was one line that said something to the extent of: "This world is not big enough for me and Picasso." William's family was so ashamed of him that they burned all of his letters and photographs after he died. Not ONE photograph of him survived.

Now, you want to talk about art? These fuckers who condemned talented painters with real skills and sense of beauty and managed to compeletely destroy the tradition of painting for almost a century, are the same ones that tried to dictate what is art and what isn't. From the early 1900's to the recent decades, all the art schools in this country stopped teaching students how to paint. It was all about "liberal art" and "modernism." No one who graduated from art school in those decades knew how to paint because they stopped teaching it. Not ONCE, was the discipline of classical painting ever taught in those schools in those decades. Only in the recent decades did it really change.

So, you want to debate what is art what what is meaningful? We JUST recovered from the greatest fraud of the 20th century: modern art.

So, if the debate of art is out of the way, I just have to say that I'm a believer in BEAUTY. I see lots of UGLY art, but I see many things that's not art, but far more BEAUTIFUL.

There. My 2 cents.

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www.arcanum.net/~lunachild

[PandaX52]

yeah, there is this one guy from Seattle, his name is James Martin...He's been painting since the sixties and he just now is being aknowledeged with his own gallery in a town called Laconner...

It's like the artist has no controll over how appreaciated they are untill someone decides to acknowledge their art as worthwhile...

[ceenda]

In Britain a few years ago, an artist set fire to �1,000,000 in what he wished to call an art 'statement'.

Had that money been donated to a good cause, that statement would have been far more profound and would have stood the test of time much longer.

[Lukias]

Its turd smeared and canvas.

[DrBof]

sold his case of burnt 50's for a pretty penny thou

ah damion, how i smiled