[Shade01]

So I'm at this gallery with a friend of mine who is really admiring a bunch of abstract art. I'm thinking the color coordination is pretty good, but it's just a bunch of paint randomly thrown onto the canvas. This guy is charging $3,000 for the way I used to paint BEFORE I learned how to draw. I'm obviously missing something because abstract art fails to impress me because I feel anybody can do it; conversely I feel it takes far more talent to create a cohesive image that looks like something. So me and my friend began to debate the worthiness, skill and general apprecation of abstract art. I thought I'd ask you all: What do you see in abstract art? Do you think it takes a lot of/no talent? Are there any abstract artists on this board?

[RoadMaster]

depends how abstract we are talking, is this a human form with geometric shapes, or is it someone who got a few paint cans and threw them on a $5 canvas?

[waylon]

A $5 print can look nice hanging on an office wall sometimes....

I dunno. I can definitely tell good abstract art from bad abstract art. You need to have talent to make it, and the rules of color usage, composition, etc still apply. But for the most part, it seems to be a different skill set than traditional drawing.

[delo]

one of the advantages/disadvantages about abstract art is that it's a bit of an in-joke. . . if you're in on the joke, then it's great; otherwise, it can be just paint on canvas. most of the groundbreakers in modern art were obsessed with bending or breaking the idea of art to its most elementary theories (for instance, rothko and his color theory and color field, pollack and his 'line' and energy, et cetera), and were usually more about what they made the viewer think or feel than what they told you directly. but even at their most abstract, the majority fo the modern artists were actually classically trained and had 'devolved' thematically by choice. . . the notion that 'one's child could paint that' and whatnot is part of the point (unlike some of today's modern abstractionists, who never learned theory and technique and are splashing around because famous people did it before and it makes money). . . here's where it gets bad tho. . . as dogmatic as the fine art world can be, art schools et cetera began training up more in theory than technique in the seventies and ever since, so you have a lot of art where the theory is more and more convoluted and meaningless to the random observer (which, in my opinion is a critical failure of art. . . as a devisive, elitist tool) and yet has less technical merit. . .
just some ruminations, i know i didn't string the together very coherently. . . i actually wrote an odd little sf story about this sort of thing; if you'd like to read it, it's at http://www.delopolis.com/content/art.html
delo

[TekK]

hey delo, i read your short story, and i absolutely love it! it's great stuff, and an interesting and very smart little bit of social commentary... the ending was wicked... great in a really twisted way...

cheers,
teck