A member of the custodial staff in a Berlin art museum came across what looked like a water stain on the floor and after diligent efforts managed to scrub it away. Unfortunately, it turned out that the ‘stain’ was part of an exhibit by artist Martin Kippenberger titled When it Starts Dripping from the Ceiling, valued at $1.1 million.
Oops.
I’ll just cut to the meat of the argument about modern art.
Any art is that which provokes a reaction--music, paintings, poetry, dance--it doesn’t matter what the medium. Even if you hate it, that’s a reaction.
Good art, modern or otherwise, is capable of being appreciated by anyone, and should not need education for the viewer to be able to get something out of it. Personally, I also feel that the creation of the art, not simply the conception of it, should take some degree of skill, although there are very rare original exceptions to this. So while I don’t particularly like much of Kippenberger’s work, I can at least accept that some of it took some talent, unlike the infamous pile of bricks or the signed urinal. Having said all this, a lot of non-modern art is also bad.
you don’t need an artist to have a reaction provoked in you. if that’s all it takes for something to be art, then almost nothing could ever fail to be art. this would seem to dramatically devalue the word.
personally (and i don’t expect anybody to necessarily agree with me) i consider art to be a form of communication; a work of art should attempt to communicate some idea, concept, emotion, or state of mind, from artist to audience. then we can, among other things, reasonably debate whether it is “good art” in the sense of being clearly communicated, easily deciphered or understood, and so on. i rather like this definition, but that might be because it’s mine.
if a work of art is not distinguishable from a random building malfunction (roof leak), then clearly nothing of interest is communicated there, so by my standard that can’t be art. others may disagree.
i’m unsure if the famous urinal is art or not. i do know that urinating in it while on display, as one person equally famously did, can’t reasonably lower its artistic value or ruin it as an artwork. (come on, it was designed and built to tolerate such use, after all. rinse the thing off and wipe it down if it’s an issue)
“Good art, modern or otherwise, is capable of being appreciated by anyone, and should not need education for the viewer to be able to get something out of it.”
That may be the case but personally I’ve always felt that I’ve gotten more out of art by knowing something about the artists, historical periods and sometimes deliberate aesthetic philosophy behind the art that the artist is creating.
Nomen,
As an amateur artist myself, I would disagree with your definition because art is not communication. Art is process. There can be communication involved. But what I want when someone views my piece is not to simply get the message I was sending. If I wanted to communicate “it is nice to be in love” I would simply use language — the tool evolution gave us for efficient communication.
No, what I want is for someone to view my work and not receive communication. I want them to look, and look, and think and feel and then recieve a message, but not one which I put there. Rather, it is one which they, themselves, generated.
This is why someone like Kinkaid is so awful. I can glance at his painting for 2 seconds and receive his message of “the warmth and wonderfulness of inviting cottages and small-town living.” I can look at it for 2 hours and the message will be the same. I can stare at it for 2 years and the message will be the same. It will be that forever and ever. As communication, it is fine. As art, it is dead. Soul-less.
I look at Van Gogh or Picasso, for example, on the other hand, and I see that the more I look, and think, and WORK at it, the more wonderous the experience.
I don’t really agree with you there, either. Not about Kinkaid; screw that guy. However, art is a bit too complicated (or maybe vague) a concept to say “art is communication” or “art is process.” It can be one or the other or both or neither. There is even the potential for art that isn’t even made by a person, so long as it makes a viewer stop and go “huh.”
Sorry -- aesthetics aside, I am still trying to work out how this stain, which was scrubbed off of a floor, could be “on loan by its owner” -- how do you loan a floor stain???
On the other hand you could follow the link and find out.
The signed urinal by Duchamp was a statement about art curating/judging, probably meant to poke fun at the process. Here’s the Wiki article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)
pHred, “how do you loan a floor stain??” -- well, now you’re thinking about art, which is the purpose. Conceptual art is about philosophy, communication, psychology, etc. -- much more than simple aesthetics.
Chris
That urinal is one of my favourite works of art. I spent an afternoon in the Tate Modern in Liverpool being bored out of my mind until I came across a copy of the urinal. I got it immediately, I thought it was one of the most game changing pieces of art I’d ever come across. It was the only one that really made me think. The fact that it’s so obvious but had never been done before is the real genius to it, and it could have been a sink or a door handle or a light switch, it would have meant the same thing. I do think the urinal has a more effective mind jolt than any of my examples though.
I’m not an artist by the way, and I haven’t been educated in art to “get” that work. I just got it. I don’t really know why.
i love it when people disagree with me so eruditely, it forces me to think harder. 🙂
my main problem with the vaguer definitions you both proffer, Woody and Michael, is that they seem too broad for my liking. it’s definitely possible i just like my definitions too narrow, but still, i do. if art needs simply to make people think and provoke a (perhaps intellectually complex) response in them, regardless of the artist’s intention, then i still don’t think we need an artist. scientific problems do this part very effectively, but i’m not clear they’re art.
computer programs can be works of art — i speak here as a programmer — but they’re basically complex solutions to complex problems. the problems they solve can be mathematically challenging, intellectually provocative, and even beautiful — but are the problems themselves artistic? i would reserve that term for the deliberately crafted solutions to them. those solutions tell us something about their creators; the problems solved very often merely are.
and lots of things make me stop and go “huh”. again, i think including them all in the concept of “art” waters that concept down too much, you may be risking washing it away entirely.
fortunately, though, all i’m really doing here is stating my own mind. thank goodness i’m not the dictator of language to never be disagreed with!
I am skeptical about definitions of art. You’ll toss out one set of necessary and sufficient conditions, someone will have a different one, you’ll each have counter-examples, and you’re no more likely to change definitions in response as you are to reject the counter-examples.
We may each have our own definitions of it, and sometimes or eventually they may even match up with what we would in fact identify as art. But we’re not likely to come to an agreement of definitions. A better approach may be to recognize our definitions of art as parts of a related family of conceptions of it, with more or less resemblance to one another. In place of definitions, we’d aim to offer elements that tend to apply to art as people conceive it as opposed to non-art -- being deliberated crafted, or at least displayed; intended to arouse some sort of response on account of how it is crafted or displayed; likely intended to produce a _thoughtful_ response; evoking a response that isn’t all about its practical use, if at all (so a delightfully comfortable mouse won’t necessarily count), etc.
That’s the problem with art, though. By it’s very nature, it defies concise definitions. It’s many things to many people. In this, I agree with jeffengel @ #5s statement:
I understand your communication angle, but it simply doesn’t mesh well with what people, in reality, call art. Look at “nonwestern” art, for instance. Much of it is things like pottery, jewelry, and ritual masks. None of it was made with the idea of communicating anything, but for practical purposes; however, we modern day people still manage to see it as art even when the craftsmen didn’t. The communication is entirely imagined by the recipient. In the same way, you could come across a very interesting rock that provokes you in some way, take it to a gallery and display it without doing anything and it could get the same response.
I think when it comes down to it, art is all about the viewer and not the person who makes it. Art is what stimulates you, and an artist is a person who recognizes what stimulates people and finds or manufactures it for her/himself. The artist isn’t necessarily the sole source from which all art flows, but the revealer of things that cause the reaction in others of “art.” I know it’s vague, but it seems to me the best description I’ve come up with so far to account for all the things we can and do call art in our various cultures.
What I got out of the wikipedia article was Duchamp was not only commenting on art exhibitions but also being a Dadaist. I consider Dada to be a precursor to post-modernism and I really dislike postmodernism, particularly post-modernist philosophy.
So I’m not sympathetic to “The Fountain.” I wouldn’t even bother to piss into it.
Ohhh -- I never thought of that.
Now that you have displayed your cunning intelligence…
I did follow the link, thus the ability to quote from it. I want to know more about the instillation. If someone actually knows something I would be interested. The way they describe the installation it sounds like it should be a permanent one (thus the instructions to the cleaning staff to stay 8 inches away). But they specifically say it is on loan, which implies that the installation is not permanent, in which case it should not have depreciated in value by the loss of the patina, unless they planned to pull out the floor a some point.
The article that I got this story from said that the stain was on the floor but this longer article says that the stain was painted on the floor of the trough at the base of the structure. Hence the trough was also a movable part of the exhibit.