We need a definition of "Art", here, I think.How 'bout this?
The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new. - Samuel Johnson("author" here being taken to mean "creator")
The "problem" with art and its definition, is that everyone, but EVERYONE, gets something different out of what they see.
I remember discussing Voice of Fire with an instructor I worked with. Can't remember the name of the artist at the moment but the work is HUGE - I don't remember the dimensions but it's nearly floor-to-ceiling in Canada's National Gallery in Ottawa. And what is it? A vertical blue stripe. A vertical orange stripe. Another vertical blue stripe. The National Gallery paid something like $1.2 million for it. (That's about fifty cents US these days.
) Great public outcry; someone painted the same thing on his barn door; just about every Regular Joe was incensed by it.
I asked this instructor, an artist some of whose work is also owned by the National Gallery (but they didn't pay him $1.2 mil. for it!), what he thought of Voice of Fire (Barnett Newman was the artist, I think). Not having seen it, he said he thought it was an important work in that artist's development and that it was fine that the Nat. Gal. spent that much on it.
I spoke with him again, when working for him on a subsequent occasion, when he'd seen Voice of Fire. He seemed to have changed his mind. I asked him about it and he said, unhappily, "Well, I always like to say that art is a mansion that has many rooms." (Crib from the Bible!)
Well, if art is a mansion that has many rooms, all I can say is, I've been in the toilet and the broom cupboard more often than I care to remember.
In the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, I saw a room with about a dozen long, narrow sticks in it. Each stick had a hinge at one end. Most of the time they lay on the floor, but every now and then, one or more of them would rise up from the hinge and then fall to the floor again. The piece was called "Slapstick." That's not art - that's a pun.
In Sydney's Modern Art Gallery (can't remember its official name, sorry), there was a room filled with smog/smoke/dry ice - not sure how they created the effect. On a wall near the room, and separate from it, was a cash register receipt taped to the wall. And there was a platform in another room, onto which you climbed. You lay flat on your back and a security guard strapped you down and rolled you out the window to look up the building. That was a point-of-view thing.
In Canberra, at Australia's National Gallery, I saw a large canvas with two types of paint on it: a band of matte black and a band of slighty glossy black. I got discussing it with a security guard, who told me that some people found it very powerful and absolutely loved it.
I've also looked through modern art books, and in one, there was a photograph of a room in a gallery and the floor sloped up at one end. The text accompanying the photo explained that the artist hid under the floor and he had a microphone there, the amplifier/speaker for which was above the floor in the room. The artist lay there and masturbated and told the visitors to the room about it. Sorry, that's not art - that's porn.
Now it irritates me that these are the things I remember, because I consider them foolish and stupid. To my mind, art is something that illuminates, reveals, makes new, and/or provokes thought -
and is also something that not just anyone could do. Granted, not just anyone WOULD lie under a floor and wank and tell people about it, but anyone COULD do that. Puns aren't art. Porn isn't art. Some things that are very clever are, nevertheless, not art.
And yet, I also remember taking a course called Modern Poetry at university. I complained to the prof one day about how silly some of it seemed to me. He got down from the shelf in his office a box of poems. One was a sheet with two alternating symbols on it; I asked him, "What the hell is that?" and he said, triumphantly, "It's what print looks like to someone who doesn't know how to read." He pointed out to me that the word "poetry" comes from the Greek "poeos" (I probably spelled that wrong) and that it means, quite simply, "to make." Anything made is a poem (someone has already made that point/poem here!). At lunch that day I was telling a friend who was also in the Modern Poetry course, what our prof had said. I had an exceptionally large potato chip and I took it and put it on my side plate, made a fist and crushed it with one blow, and said, "According to Gordon, that's a poem."
Similarly, I remember my mother complaining to someone about a piece of "art" that consisted of a few rows of coloured squares. She said, "I could've done that." And the friend said, "Yes, but you didn't."
I think art should be way more than just that which we could have done, but didn't. But partly I think that because I'm pissed off at all these artists who get grant money and win substantial prizes for doing things any of us could have done. How do I get on that gravy train?!
But seriously - I can't agree with this:
"Art" is the arrangement or re-arrangement of articles, natural or made, into a form that has no intrinsic use or purpose other than as decoration.However we get to it, art MUST contain SOMETHING of meaning. Even "decoration" gives us pleasure (or, ideally it does, sez she, quickly qualifying).
Where the modern artists often fall down, is in creating "art" (or phart, which somehow seems a perfect term!) that is obscure and impenetrable to a vast proportion of their viewers. by's example of the tampon in a teacup is a perfect illustration of this. At this point, you start getting into that whole thorny issue of the artists' artist. I can't remember who said it, but someone once pointed out that self-referential art or art that only speaks to a very narrow segment of the population is pointless and might just as well not have been made (something to that effect), since it has no reference in most people's understanding and therefore is of no help to most people in terms of being an enlightening or even merely beautifying influence in their lives.
[/rant]
