There are many places where prefixing the word “poetry” with the word “modern” signals that it can be dismissed off-hand, but I think that this is a bad way to categorize poetry. For one thing, it hides the way that new poems draw inspiration from older ones.
That’s common to every art, apart from perhaps cinema or literature. Modern art? Just a load of paint thrown at canvases and unmade beds. Modern music? Just a load of random notes strung together. Modern poetry? Doesn’t even rhyme.
That’s common to every art, apart from perhaps cinema or literature. Modern art? Just a load of paint thrown at canvases and unmade beds. Modern music? Just a load of random notes strung together. Modern poetry? Doesn’t even rhyme.
I’m not sure which is worse—liking all modern art because one is supposed to like it, or hating all modern art because one is supposed to hate it. Either way, the category lines are not being drawn usefully. As the original post notes, there ought to be more to this than just going along with social signals.
hating all modern art because one is supposed to hate it.
I don’t think this actually happens. In my experience most people who hate modern art hate it because it’s more-or-less uniformly absolutely awful. In my experience even the “good” pieces of modern art are only good compared to the absolute drek that is most modern art.
Edit: By modern art I mean “art belonging the the genre commonly called ‘modern art’ ”, not “any art produced since the mid 20th century”.
Another crucial issue is that art nowadays is financed to a large degree by the government (either overtly or via its formally “non-governmental” organs such as large tax-exempt foundations, academic institutions, etc.). This creates the same perverse incentives as government-financed science: the work is optimized for the bureaucratic process that determines who gets funding and official recognition, not for any direct measure of quality.
Even the money that enters the system from private buyers doesn’t change these incentives much, since these buyers want to buy high-status art, not low-status kitsch—and people in charge of sorting these out are nowadays, for all practical purposes, government bureaucrats just as much as those in charge of renewing your driver’s licence. (Which makes their attempts at a “rebellious” image only more farcical.)
Moldbug once wrote a hilarious (and yet highly insightful) article about how this system works in poetry.
I think the bureaucratic aspect is more important than the government aspect. After all most classical and renaissance art was also funded by governments.
Yes, that is certainly true. I didn’t mean this as a general denunciation of government patronage, but as a comment specifically about the modern bureaucratic organization and financing of art. Clearly, the patronage of arts by, say, Renaissance popes or classical Greek rulers was a very different story.
Patronage by a patron works—indeed, there is no other satisfactory way of funding art. Patronage by a bureaucracy, by a committee, does not work so well.
The big problem is regulatory capture. Being an official artist becomes disconnected from any artistic talent.
This depends on where you are and your government. In the US, there really is practically no government support for the arts. The NEA does give some money, but almost all of it is to state and local arts organizations, and that seems to work out pretty well. However, the vast majority of arts in the US is privately funded.
In other countries I don’t think this is true though. In a lot of European countries the government does the majority of arts funding.
In the US, there really is practically no government support for the arts. The NEA does give some money, but almost all of it is to state and local arts organizations, and that seems to work out pretty well. However, the vast majority of arts in the US is privately funded.
Maybe the money doesn’t look that big when you count only funds specifically earmarked for “art.” However, it’s not that small when you count the money given to all sorts of academic institutions and non-profits that provide the infrastructure for the whole art scene nowadays. Above all, this infrastructure has a monopoly on career tracks that enable one to achieve the status of an esteemed artist and art critic, as opposed to a peddler of vulgar kitsch.
Moreover, “government” probably wasn’t the best choice of word in my original comment. As I noted, I used it in a somewhat idiosyncratic way, which encompasses various formally “non-governmental” institutions whose organizational, financial, and decision-making structure is, for all practical purposes, inseparable from the de jure government organs. What I wanted to emphasize is the contrast between a true elite of artists, artistic connoisseurs, and rich patrons dispensing patronage based on their own taste versus patronage dispensed by vast, self-perpetuating, committee-run bureaucracies—even if the former were often rulers in the past, and the latter can exist in the form of theoretically “non-governmental” foundations, academia, etc.
Actually that post made me question the entire idea of poetry. How else could poetry possibly work? Does it take training? Do you ‘practice’ poetry? Is poetry skill-based at all? I really don’t understand.
The only way I could see it making sense is if there is no way to make a living as a poet and it’s just something that is attained after fame.
I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about. The amount of money given by ‘bureaucracies’ in the US is vastly inferior to the money given out by rich patrons. Almost all of our arts is funded by individual people. Some larger organizations have some corporate sponsors, but I don’t know if that counts as bureaucracies.
Look at any theater, gallery, or orchestra in the US. More than 90% of their money comes from individual donors.
Private people nowadays fund art, either directly or indirectly, for two main reasons: because it’s tax-deductible and/or to buy status. The tax-deductibility already implies significant government involvement—who gets to dispense money, patronage, and status from tax-deductible funds is by no means a simple and straightforward question.
But more importantly, there is the question of status. Note the immense status contrast between people shopping for home decorations in a big-box store and someone buying something generally recognized as a “work of art” for a hefty price. The former is about people indulging their honest aesthetic preferences in a way that’s likely to be low-status; the latter is as close to a pure money-for-status transaction as anything gets—even if the actual “work of art” contains no discernible marks of talent or aesthetic qualities at all. So who are these “artists” who get to have such high status that a whiff of it is readily paid for with piles of cash?
The key point is that nowadays the hierarchy of status in art is essentially a vast and sclerotic bureaucracy. Within this system, there are still some classic forms of art that have been traditionally high-status for many generations, such as classical music. However, these are rarely (if ever) tremendously profitable, and also require a lot of skill to practice. On the other hand, the modern art scene is almost purely about bureaucratic careerism. Those on the very top are laughing all the way to the bank, getting vast sums for random junk, sometimes made by hired low-wage labor and just signed upon completion. For those in the lower levels, it’s the standard dreary bureaucratic fight over small stakes but with no alternative life prospects.
Overall, the point is that artistic status itself has been monopolized by a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that has led to its almost complete disconnect with skill and aesthetic value (as measured by satisfying people’s honest aesthetic preferences). If you work outside of this system, even if you get rich, and even if your work is vastly above anything made by the top-ranking official artists by all objective measures, you will always be assigned to the low status of a kitsch peddler.
If you work outside of this system, even if you get rich, and even if your work is vastly above anything made by the top-ranking official artists by all objective measures, you will always be assigned to the low status of a kitsch peddler.
You’d think some of them would attempt to counter-signal by doing just that.
The former is about people indulging their honest aesthetic preferences in a way that’s likely to be low-status; the latter is as close to a pure money-for-status transaction as anything gets—even if the actual “work of art” contains no discernible marks of talent or aesthetic qualities at all.
I didn’t say anything about modern art or art that contains “no discernible marks of talent or aesthetic qualities at all” or whatever. I said bureaucracies do NOT fund the majority of art in the US. And it doesn’t.
Your claim is that basically it’s either art that’s low-status or art that people like. And that’s just blatantly false. Not all art today is modern you know. There are still ballets, operas, shakespeare theaters, orchestras, realism galleries, and independent film theaters. These are high-status but high-quality. You have a warped view on the art world today.
Within this system, there are still some classic forms of art that have been traditionally high-status for many generations, such as classical music. However, these are rarely (if ever) tremendously profitable, and also require a lot of skill to practice. On the other hand, the modern art scene is almost purely about bureaucratic careerism.
Yea, I think you overestimate the power of bureaucracy here. Maybe if you showed that modern art makes way more money than non-modern art you’d have a case.
Those high-status individuals are the ones supporting the art system because they want to. It isn’t because they’re part of some invisible bureaucracy. It’s because they have money and they see something they like and give their money to it. That is the way it works. Have you ever worked in art development? Everything is individuals.
Overall, the point is that artistic status itself has been monopolized by a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that has led to its almost complete disconnect with skill and aesthetic value (as measured by satisfying people’s honest aesthetic preferences).
And I call bullshit. There is nothing “bureaucratic” about what you’re talking about. Rich people like the art they support. It is not just about status. Or else it wouldn’t matter what kind of organization they donate to, but that’s not true (donors typically have very specific preferences). Many rich people care about status but don’t support the arts at all (they can always donate to churches and charities after all). Many donors are heavily involved in the organizations that they donate to.
If you work outside of this system, even if you get rich, and even if your work is vastly above anything made by the top-ranking official artists by all objective measures, you will always be assigned to the low status of a kitsch peddler.
Uhm. No? I mean there are artists that have became wildly famous and everything, but high-quality artistry is still around and still high-status. So I don’t understand where you get this idea from.
There is nothing “bureaucratic” about what you’re talking about. Rich people like the art they support. It is not just about status. Or else it wouldn’t matter what kind of organization they donate to, but that’s not true. Many rich people care about status but don’t support the arts at all.
It doesn’t follow that because not all rich people who care about status support the arts, support of the arts by rich people is not just about status. Not everyone takes every possible action in support of their goals, indeed, for something like status, with so many avenues of pursuit, it’s unlikely that anyone does. I’d be willing to bet that more rich people care about status than give to charity as well.
I don’t doubt that there are rich people who care strongly about the arts. There are certainly non-rich people who do, and I don’t think richness would filter very strongly for people who don’t care about the arts. But I think you underestimate the importance of status signalling; being seen to be heavily involved in a cause is a stronger status signal than being seen to merely donate.
I’m not saying that they aren’t status-signaling, but I would argue that it isn’t just status-signaling and tax-deductions.
After all, because there are so many avenues of pursuit, there must be some way for people to decide which to take. I mean if there’s a contemporary art gallery I’m bored of, and an impressionist art gallery I like, I wouldn’t donate to the contemporary art gallery because of status. I would donate to whichever I like the most. Both of them give me status.
Yea, I believe it’s per capita, but I wouldn’t be surprised in general as well.
It’s more about public vs private funding. Not discouraging or encouraging art. Though I have heard from my friends in art development that it is more difficult to find private donors in countries with more government funding due to it. Quick google search yielded this, but there’s probably more to the debate.
Most of it is bad art. But when members of SEAL Team Six, from concealed positions on a rocking boat, simultaneously fire at pirates, on a different, distant rocking boat, who are holding hostages, and achieve one kill per shot, and the hostages are unharmed, what else does one call that?
Whether or not a round semifurry purple object is really a blegg, I would be surprised if the aesthetic value of a special ops team would be large enough to justify its price relative to more conventional forms of art (which normally get larger audiences, too).
Once again, military planning at any level and/or execution of plans is short of aesthetic value to the average person (usually?), and requires various amounts of background to understand, but if all these other things are “really” bleggs despite also having that deficiency, let military spending be considered public spending on art, let a tenth of it be considered spending on art, and the USA spends more on art than any other country.
I don’t really know how the art could evolve besides just accurate shooting.
However, most composers and visual artists before Beethoven considered composition a craft, not an artform. So I don’t necessarily think it needs hard delineation. “What is art” discussions tend to go in circles though.
“Art” typically implies constructive, expressive creativity. There may be some measure of creativity involved in some instances, but it’s not expressive and it’s not constructive. It’s up to those using the word to decide whether this places it sufficiently far outside the typical “art” grouping to not deserve the label, for whatever purposes they wish to put it to.
Technically, anything done by humans (at the very least) can be art, and everything is—or so I’ve been told. However, I would argue that the vast majority of art, as diverse as it is, does share one property: its primary purpose is to be observed by other humans.
For example, consider a masterfully carved wooden chair that was commissioned by a millionaire, who intends to put it in his library so that he has something to sit on. According to the above-mentioned model, this chair is not art, because its primary purpose is purely utilitarian. If the same chair were created by an artist for the purpose of being exhibited at an art gallery, then the chair is art.
I think this is one way to interpret the term “constructive, expressive creativity”, though there may be others.
Google gives as sense 1, “effectively conveying thought or feeling,” and this is more or less what I meant.
constructive
Whereas money is the unit of caring, I’m not sure what difference in kind could apply.
I am not sure precisely what you are getting at. What I had meant was that art is typically the creation of something new, rather than the destruction of something existing. One could argue that they are creating new corpses, but broadly we perceive corpses as broken people, not people as aspiring corpses.
In any case, remember (as you earlier emphasized) that we are talking about clustering and relative degrees of similarity, not necessary and sufficient binary conditions. Can you stretch definitions to fit? Absolutely. But with each tug, we’re representing a point a little further from the center of the cluster.
I think this is present in military planning, and inferable from outcomes.
art is typically the creation of something new, rather than the destruction of something existing. One could argue that they are creating new corpses
That’s not at all how it seems to me. There is a good deal of inferential distance here.
Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.
In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good.
There is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare.
--Sun Tzu, translated
The art lies in reducing the number of corpses,etc.
we are talking about clustering and relative degrees of similarity
Excellent, yes! I agree that in English “art”, unmodified, does not refer to war and should not be used to refer to war or a broader category of art of which one thinks war is a member. However, this is significantly due to historical use, rather than being the simplest stroke circumscribing a concept in concept-space. Excluding the art of war from “art” is somewhat like considering dolphins “fish”.
I acknowledge there is some tugging involved, but what hasn’t been shown to my satisfaction is that less tugging is involved for modern art, or other things generally considered art.
Your stretching pulls the word over so large an area as to render it almost meaningless. I feel as though it exists to further some other goal.
The last time I heard art defined, it was as “something which has additional layers of meaning beyond the plain interpretation”, or something like that. I’m not sure even that’s accurate.
However, if you’re going to insist on calling a spec ops team in action “art”, then that level of stretching is such that so could designing a diesel locomotive, or any number of other purely practical exercises which are not performed for their aesthetic value.
A “found object”, or Jackson Pollock painting, or what-have-you, is created primarily for aesthetic value and/or communication of additional layers of meaning.
On the other hand, sometimes cursory knowledge of a subject is sufficient for forming an accurate opinion about it. For example, I think my opinion about healing crystals is completely accurate, even though my knowledge about this practice is extremely rudimentary. Similarly, I think a cursory glance at the output of modern art is entirely sufficient for making correct sweeping judgments about it—and it’s hard to imagine how anyone could live in the modern society without having at least some exposure to it.
You’ve probably got an argument from physics about healing crystals.
However, in the case of modern art, you might contemplate people who think they know enough about science fiction to condemn it even though they know almost nothing about it.
Bruce Pollack, a contemporary abstract artist I like a lot. A little discussion of his work—the first picture is presumably something more current from the gallery where he was displayed—I think it’s the sort of modern art neither of us like.
Some people really don’t react well to the experimental nature of modern art. This trait has been shown to increase in the face of thinking about death, and individuals described as having a high need for structure display an amplified response under these conditions.
A lot of people in the West also don’t seem to grok that the aesthetic movements surrounding our own artistic traditions are not deeply-underlying human universals (representational art is very common, but not universal, and our focus on it is certainly not), or that there are entirely different approaches to the creation and function of art. The Modern and Postmodern movements in Western art are largely defined by their break from a lot of traditions.
A lot of people seem to also think “Art” means “highly-involved production of images for the sake of creating scarce aesthetic value” and don’t like anything that fails to conform to those rules, or appears to be “cheating” (Andy Warhol comes to mind). Which makes it really deliciously funny when such people consider Shakespeare’s works literary classics, or who just fail to grasp how many artists were not critical successes within their own time.
To the best of my knowledge, until modern art, all art showed a high mastery of craft. It might not be realistic representation, it might not be representation, it might not be pretty by Western standards, but no one could reasonably look at it and say “My five year old could do that”. Any exceptions?
To the best of my knowledge, until modern art, all art showed a high mastery of craft.
Do you really think that prior to the 20th century, there was no neglected, unremarkable, in-style but sub-par art, or art that might succeed on its own merits but failed to impress for other reasons, or art that just failed to ever catch on with those who had control over funding/critiquing/displaying it? Do you think that there was no prettying-up of mundane items, creating aesthetically-pleasing but not-terribly-formalized objects and images, no creative commission of form and image to medium for the sheer hell of it, regardless of what high society was upvoting as “the in thing” this year?
What you’re calling “art” is a small subset of the actual collage of human creative endeavor of art generally, and is better termed “fine art” (and in the context of this thread, you seem to be confining yourself to visual arts). Most of art made by humans throughout history and prehistory has been decorative and utilitarian in its impulses rather than created by highly-trained individuals working within a well-defined tradition and its strictures for the sole purpose of aesthetic expression—this is still the case today.
Modern Art itself is largely within the “fine art” category, and it includes all kinds of things you may be familiar with as “good art.” Could your five-year old do a van Gogh? A minimalist or Futurist building? A photorealistic painting? Salvador Dali? Matisse? Picasso? Monet? The buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright? Those things are Modern Art too.
Yes, some things labelled Modern Art look like a box of crayons exploded, or they’re almost absurdly simplistic, or they break from tradition but fail to do anything interesting with it. Especially given it’s a movement strongly influenced by breaks from tradition, one oughtn’t be surprised—and it’s easier than ever for a given work to find space, or be sent around on tour, or to be created essentially because someone wanted a thing there and didn’t have a lot of specifics, felt like leaving it up to the artist they hired. There’s more art, period, than there was in previous eras—more people making it, more people comissioning it, more people interested in displaying it, more people trying to get into it with varying degrees of talent, more people finding something they like and going “here, this is pretty awesome.”
And because you’re living here and now, you have a much higher chance of seeing something made recently that flops, or just doesn’t do it for you personally, from within that timeframe. The flops and failures and embarrassments of centuries past are, by and large, not widely-circulated today—unless they found a niche later on.
How many execrable pieces of old and even ancient art are you not seeing because time has marched on? How many things you find to be the height of aesthetic refinement couldn’t get an audience in their maker’s lifetime? How many have gone on to be considered classics despite their reception at the time?
And how many things that entirely meet the general definition of art are you not even considering because they don’t at least pretend to emanate from one of those establishments?
IAWYC, but I think this thread is quite a bit past due for “art” to be tabooed. Since the discussion is partially about how modern connotations of “art” effect people’s usage its hard to say exactly when the line was crossed, but IMHO
“What you’re calling “art” is a small subset of the actual collage of human creative endeavor of art generally, and is better termed “fine art” (and in the context of this thread, you seem to be confining yourself to visual arts). Most of art made by humans throughout history and prehistory has been decorative and utilitarian in its impulses rather than created by highly-trained individuals working within a well-defined tradition and its strictures for the sole purpose of aesthetic expression—this is still the case today.
Modern Art itself is largely within the “fine art” category, and it includes all kinds of things you may be familiar with as “good art.” Could your five-year old do a van Gogh? A minimalist or Futurist building? A photorealistic painting? Salvador Dali? Matisse? Picasso? Monet? The buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright? Those things are Modern Art too”
Fair enough. I was aiming to answer NancyLebovitz’ question in a way that didn’t amount to just “your definitions are broken” without really explaining why I think that.
Do you really think that prior to the 20th century, there was no neglected, unremarkable, in-style but sub-par art, or art that might succeed on its own merits but failed to impress for other reasons, or art that just failed to ever catch on with those who had control over funding/critiquing/displaying it? Do you think that there was no prettying-up of mundane items, creating aesthetically-pleasing but not-terribly-formalized objects and images, no creative commission of form and image to medium for the sheer hell of it, regardless of what high society was upvoting as “the in thing” this year?
I am sure that there was all of that, but having seen some works that I know were simply “churned out” to meet the trends of the time, were done by artists considered mediocre in their time (these pictures may not circulate around high class galleries, but people still own them,) or did not achieve popularity in their own time, I have to say that I haven’t found any less appealing than I find nearly all Modern Art.
I know that there are people who appreciate it much more than I do, and I’m sure that many of them can argue coherently for their appreciation, but to me, and I believe for a number of other people here as well, Modern Art appears to be a genre that does not demand redeeming qualities in exchange for success.
The Modern and Postmodern movements in Western art are largely defined by their break from a lot of traditions.
And that is precisely the problem with them. They have nothing to them except rebellion for its own sake.
A lot of people seem to also think “Art” means “highly-involved production of images for the sake of creating scarce aesthetic value” and don’t like anything that fails to conform to those rules
If “art” doesn’t create aesthetic value, what’s the point of making it.
They have nothing to them except rebellion for its own sake.
In modern art, there hasn’t even been any real rebellion in a very long time. What we see is a pretense of rebellion by doing the same old tired épater la bourgeoisie act that has lost all its shock value many decades ago, or “creative” breaking of long-gone traditional norms. At the same time, these people would never dream of touching any real taboos of the present day, and are bending over backwards to signal their unreserved allegiance to every single respectable high-status belief—and their professional world is a dreary pyramid of bureaucratic patronage that makes the bureaucracy of a typical government department look free-spirited in comparison.
To take only one illustrative example, even in Catholic Church—an institution that is often considered as the very epitome of hidebound reaction—a preference for traditional church art and architecture is likely to mark one as a contrarian these days.
And that is precisely the problem with them. They have nothing to them except rebellion for its own sake.
If “art” doesn’t create aesthetic value, what’s the point of making it.
We do not agree on these things, and I do not highly rate either of our odds of being able to make headway in this argument in a rational sense. So instead I will aim for transparency of content:
Bruce Pollack, a contemporary abstract artist I like a lot.
He appears to be an example of what I called a “good” modern artist, which is to say, he’s still worse that just about all pre-20th century western art.
I’m pretty sure he wasn’t saying that; he’s saying that prior to the 20′th century and the advent of “Modern Art,” hardly anybody was making art that he considers as poor as the works of even those he considers to be the best participating in the genre of Modern Art, which is not the same thing as the works of all artists who produce art in the present day.
I don’t think this actually happens. In my experience most people who hate modern art hate it because it’s more-or-less uniformly absolutely awful.
In my experience, most people who hate it do so because it’s extremely unfamiliar to them, because they’ve only experienced a handful of examples of it (often the most difficult or “shocking”), and because they mentally associate it with snobbiness.
Also (at the risk of sounding snobby!), it’s generally referred to as “contemporary art.” “Modern art” refers to a period of art history that’s been over for several decades.
Zhuangzi and Huizi were strolling along the dam of the Hao Waterfall when Zhuangzi said, “See how the minnows come out and dart around where they please! That’s what fish really enjoy!”
Huizi said, “You’re not a fish; how do you know what fish enjoy?”
Zhuangzi said, “You’re not I, so how do you know I don’t know what fish enjoy?”
Isn’t the idea that modern art is “uniform” in any way just ridiculous?
In the early 20th century we had a huge mix of different ideas. The idea that it’s all just a big swath of ‘generic modern art’ is just silly. I’m better at music in terms of knowledge, but I find it odd to immediately denounce Stravinsky’s works simply because it’s ‘modern.’
I mean I don’t denounce John Cage because it’s ‘modern.’ I denounce it because it doesn’t sound and makes no aural sense and things like that.
I believe he was using ‘modern art’ in a nontechnical sense, but my point doesn’t really change. Just replace John Cage with a Total Serialist composer.
I mean modern art (that is, early 20th century art) was the time period where we had an explosion of different ideas in all the different artforms. Dismissing them as ‘uniform’ in any way is crazy. Many of Stravinsky’s works are perfectly accessible to non-music people. It’s not like Realist Artwork or Tonality just vanished or something. There is Modern Realism and Modern Tonality.
Edit: Besides, isn’t this aggression towards modern art a “curiosity stopper”?
I suspect the colloquial use of “modern art” in this thread is perhaps better described as some unholy conglomeration of abstract expressionism and minimalism. Think Pollock, Rothko, Mondrian and Malevich. (Yes, I know they seem quite distinct to you, but the common link for most people is “my five-year-old could do that.”)
And I can’t speak for others, obviously, but I actually quite like modern art. Sculpture and architecture more than paintings or music, though.
In my experience most people who hate modern art hate it because it’s more-or-less uniformly absolutely awful.
Ah no but you see, modern art is good. Your move.
Seriously though, would I be right in saying you come from a background where most people can be expected to have an educated opinion on art? Because that’s the only way I can imagine you’ve never met someone who claimed to hate modern art but folded completely after waiting to meet someone inside the Tate Modern, or catching a documentary one day. It’s just too common in my experience, and yet I’ve never seen or heard of anyone doing the same thing with modern academic music or painting. I’m left to assume that they are genuinely lacking in the qualities which make naive audiences enjoy them and their reputation is reliable for everyone.
That just won’t fly though for modern art, which was frequently very popular. Rather I think that what’s happened is that the Young British Artists were not even trying to be good, especially as the bubble went on, and their output was as much confirmation as people needed to assume that they are also part of the down to earth sensible people who only like “representative art”, when frequently they aren’t.
I’m not sure which is worse—liking all modern art because one is supposed to like it, or hating all modern art because one is supposed to hate it.
I think both are equally bad, to be honest, but that the latter is less common than the former. I think that people, given enough exposure to a diverse selection of some medium or some category, will eventually come to like at least a section of it. The widespread hatred of “modern X” is probably more often down to ignorance than signalling. Most of the signalling that goes on here is from people trying to demonstrate how hip they are; familiarity with current art is good for the image they are trying to promote. I think anti-modern signalling is largely from people who are trying to prove how conservative or old-fashioned they are, as a way of reinforcing other parts of their image.
That said, I move in circles that are more artistic than academic, so this is an obvious way in which my results could be skewed.
Why ought there be more to this than going along with social signals? Isn’t all of art just one great gameboard on which to play boundlessly complex social status games? When you think of people who are obnoxiously devoted to social status games, the “hipsters”, you think of two things, fashion and art. Both are essentially meaningless except to define the rules of the games we play with each other.
If somebody enjoys something that they read or experience alone, then they must get some utility from art that isn’t connected with the associated social signals. I suspect that there are many people who are capable of appreciating art without talking about it.
(This does not apply if they read something alone, brag about it, and try to signal super-high status and nonconformity by only liking obscure things. THAT is the status game that I associate with hipsters.)
I consider that sort of social signaling basically orthogonal to liking art for being pretty, funny, thought-provoking, or sublime. Art that is liked solely for social reasons is unlikely to survive a change in social environment.
That’s common to every art, apart from perhaps cinema or literature. Modern art? Just a load of paint thrown at canvases and unmade beds. Modern music? Just a load of random notes strung together. Modern poetry? Doesn’t even rhyme.
I’m not sure which is worse—liking all modern art because one is supposed to like it, or hating all modern art because one is supposed to hate it. Either way, the category lines are not being drawn usefully. As the original post notes, there ought to be more to this than just going along with social signals.
I don’t think this actually happens. In my experience most people who hate modern art hate it because it’s more-or-less uniformly absolutely awful. In my experience even the “good” pieces of modern art are only good compared to the absolute drek that is most modern art.
Edit: By modern art I mean “art belonging the the genre commonly called ‘modern art’ ”, not “any art produced since the mid 20th century”.
Another crucial issue is that art nowadays is financed to a large degree by the government (either overtly or via its formally “non-governmental” organs such as large tax-exempt foundations, academic institutions, etc.). This creates the same perverse incentives as government-financed science: the work is optimized for the bureaucratic process that determines who gets funding and official recognition, not for any direct measure of quality.
Even the money that enters the system from private buyers doesn’t change these incentives much, since these buyers want to buy high-status art, not low-status kitsch—and people in charge of sorting these out are nowadays, for all practical purposes, government bureaucrats just as much as those in charge of renewing your driver’s licence. (Which makes their attempts at a “rebellious” image only more farcical.)
Moldbug once wrote a hilarious (and yet highly insightful) article about how this system works in poetry.
I think the bureaucratic aspect is more important than the government aspect. After all most classical and renaissance art was also funded by governments.
Yes, that is certainly true. I didn’t mean this as a general denunciation of government patronage, but as a comment specifically about the modern bureaucratic organization and financing of art. Clearly, the patronage of arts by, say, Renaissance popes or classical Greek rulers was a very different story.
Patronage by a patron works—indeed, there is no other satisfactory way of funding art. Patronage by a bureaucracy, by a committee, does not work so well.
The big problem is regulatory capture. Being an official artist becomes disconnected from any artistic talent.
This depends on where you are and your government. In the US, there really is practically no government support for the arts. The NEA does give some money, but almost all of it is to state and local arts organizations, and that seems to work out pretty well. However, the vast majority of arts in the US is privately funded.
In other countries I don’t think this is true though. In a lot of European countries the government does the majority of arts funding.
Maybe the money doesn’t look that big when you count only funds specifically earmarked for “art.” However, it’s not that small when you count the money given to all sorts of academic institutions and non-profits that provide the infrastructure for the whole art scene nowadays. Above all, this infrastructure has a monopoly on career tracks that enable one to achieve the status of an esteemed artist and art critic, as opposed to a peddler of vulgar kitsch.
Moreover, “government” probably wasn’t the best choice of word in my original comment. As I noted, I used it in a somewhat idiosyncratic way, which encompasses various formally “non-governmental” institutions whose organizational, financial, and decision-making structure is, for all practical purposes, inseparable from the de jure government organs. What I wanted to emphasize is the contrast between a true elite of artists, artistic connoisseurs, and rich patrons dispensing patronage based on their own taste versus patronage dispensed by vast, self-perpetuating, committee-run bureaucracies—even if the former were often rulers in the past, and the latter can exist in the form of theoretically “non-governmental” foundations, academia, etc.
Mencius has issued a wonderful post on this topic, skewering a example of bureaucratically generated pseudo art.
Actually that post made me question the entire idea of poetry. How else could poetry possibly work? Does it take training? Do you ‘practice’ poetry? Is poetry skill-based at all? I really don’t understand.
The only way I could see it making sense is if there is no way to make a living as a poet and it’s just something that is attained after fame.
I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about. The amount of money given by ‘bureaucracies’ in the US is vastly inferior to the money given out by rich patrons. Almost all of our arts is funded by individual people. Some larger organizations have some corporate sponsors, but I don’t know if that counts as bureaucracies.
Look at any theater, gallery, or orchestra in the US. More than 90% of their money comes from individual donors.
We have a lot of rich people in the US.
Private people nowadays fund art, either directly or indirectly, for two main reasons: because it’s tax-deductible and/or to buy status. The tax-deductibility already implies significant government involvement—who gets to dispense money, patronage, and status from tax-deductible funds is by no means a simple and straightforward question.
But more importantly, there is the question of status. Note the immense status contrast between people shopping for home decorations in a big-box store and someone buying something generally recognized as a “work of art” for a hefty price. The former is about people indulging their honest aesthetic preferences in a way that’s likely to be low-status; the latter is as close to a pure money-for-status transaction as anything gets—even if the actual “work of art” contains no discernible marks of talent or aesthetic qualities at all. So who are these “artists” who get to have such high status that a whiff of it is readily paid for with piles of cash?
The key point is that nowadays the hierarchy of status in art is essentially a vast and sclerotic bureaucracy. Within this system, there are still some classic forms of art that have been traditionally high-status for many generations, such as classical music. However, these are rarely (if ever) tremendously profitable, and also require a lot of skill to practice. On the other hand, the modern art scene is almost purely about bureaucratic careerism. Those on the very top are laughing all the way to the bank, getting vast sums for random junk, sometimes made by hired low-wage labor and just signed upon completion. For those in the lower levels, it’s the standard dreary bureaucratic fight over small stakes but with no alternative life prospects.
Overall, the point is that artistic status itself has been monopolized by a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that has led to its almost complete disconnect with skill and aesthetic value (as measured by satisfying people’s honest aesthetic preferences). If you work outside of this system, even if you get rich, and even if your work is vastly above anything made by the top-ranking official artists by all objective measures, you will always be assigned to the low status of a kitsch peddler.
You’d think some of them would attempt to counter-signal by doing just that.
I didn’t say anything about modern art or art that contains “no discernible marks of talent or aesthetic qualities at all” or whatever. I said bureaucracies do NOT fund the majority of art in the US. And it doesn’t.
Your claim is that basically it’s either art that’s low-status or art that people like. And that’s just blatantly false. Not all art today is modern you know. There are still ballets, operas, shakespeare theaters, orchestras, realism galleries, and independent film theaters. These are high-status but high-quality. You have a warped view on the art world today.
Yea, I think you overestimate the power of bureaucracy here. Maybe if you showed that modern art makes way more money than non-modern art you’d have a case.
Those high-status individuals are the ones supporting the art system because they want to. It isn’t because they’re part of some invisible bureaucracy. It’s because they have money and they see something they like and give their money to it. That is the way it works. Have you ever worked in art development? Everything is individuals.
And I call bullshit. There is nothing “bureaucratic” about what you’re talking about. Rich people like the art they support. It is not just about status. Or else it wouldn’t matter what kind of organization they donate to, but that’s not true (donors typically have very specific preferences). Many rich people care about status but don’t support the arts at all (they can always donate to churches and charities after all). Many donors are heavily involved in the organizations that they donate to.
Uhm. No? I mean there are artists that have became wildly famous and everything, but high-quality artistry is still around and still high-status. So I don’t understand where you get this idea from.
It doesn’t follow that because not all rich people who care about status support the arts, support of the arts by rich people is not just about status. Not everyone takes every possible action in support of their goals, indeed, for something like status, with so many avenues of pursuit, it’s unlikely that anyone does. I’d be willing to bet that more rich people care about status than give to charity as well.
I don’t doubt that there are rich people who care strongly about the arts. There are certainly non-rich people who do, and I don’t think richness would filter very strongly for people who don’t care about the arts. But I think you underestimate the importance of status signalling; being seen to be heavily involved in a cause is a stronger status signal than being seen to merely donate.
I’m not saying that they aren’t status-signaling, but I would argue that it isn’t just status-signaling and tax-deductions.
After all, because there are so many avenues of pursuit, there must be some way for people to decide which to take. I mean if there’s a contemporary art gallery I’m bored of, and an impressionist art gallery I like, I wouldn’t donate to the contemporary art gallery because of status. I would donate to whichever I like the most. Both of them give me status.
You mean, less per-capita funding than there is in other countries?
I have seen lower than average state cigarette taxes described as “encouraging smoking”.
Yea, I believe it’s per capita, but I wouldn’t be surprised in general as well.
It’s more about public vs private funding. Not discouraging or encouraging art. Though I have heard from my friends in art development that it is more difficult to find private donors in countries with more government funding due to it. Quick google search yielded this, but there’s probably more to the debate.
As a separate point, what “simple boundaries around concentrations of unusually high probability density in Thingspace” exclude the military from being “art”? The best I can think of is that it’s not intended as “art”.
Most of it is bad art. But when members of SEAL Team Six, from concealed positions on a rocking boat, simultaneously fire at pirates, on a different, distant rocking boat, who are holding hostages, and achieve one kill per shot, and the hostages are unharmed, what else does one call that?
Whether or not a round semifurry purple object is really a blegg, I would be surprised if the aesthetic value of a special ops team would be large enough to justify its price relative to more conventional forms of art (which normally get larger audiences, too).
I’m not saying that it really is a blegg, but that if modern art is a blegg, and the NEA stuff is all bleggs, then this is a blegg too.
The pro-spending public money on art/pro-art/pro-modern art “side” also argues that aesthetic value isn’t as important as you seem to think it is.
Once again, military planning at any level and/or execution of plans is short of aesthetic value to the average person (usually?), and requires various amounts of background to understand, but if all these other things are “really” bleggs despite also having that deficiency, let military spending be considered public spending on art, let a tenth of it be considered spending on art, and the USA spends more on art than any other country.
“Skill” ? Or “craft”, maybe.
It’s zawa all right.
Doesn’t make it not art.
I don’t really know how the art could evolve besides just accurate shooting.
However, most composers and visual artists before Beethoven considered composition a craft, not an artform. So I don’t necessarily think it needs hard delineation. “What is art” discussions tend to go in circles though.
“Art” typically implies constructive, expressive creativity. There may be some measure of creativity involved in some instances, but it’s not expressive and it’s not constructive. It’s up to those using the word to decide whether this places it sufficiently far outside the typical “art” grouping to not deserve the label, for whatever purposes they wish to put it to.
I don’t really know what this means.
Whereas money is the unit of caring, I’m not sure what difference in kind could apply.
Technically, anything done by humans (at the very least) can be art, and everything is—or so I’ve been told. However, I would argue that the vast majority of art, as diverse as it is, does share one property: its primary purpose is to be observed by other humans.
For example, consider a masterfully carved wooden chair that was commissioned by a millionaire, who intends to put it in his library so that he has something to sit on. According to the above-mentioned model, this chair is not art, because its primary purpose is purely utilitarian. If the same chair were created by an artist for the purpose of being exhibited at an art gallery, then the chair is art.
I think this is one way to interpret the term “constructive, expressive creativity”, though there may be others.
Google gives as sense 1, “effectively conveying thought or feeling,” and this is more or less what I meant.
I am not sure precisely what you are getting at. What I had meant was that art is typically the creation of something new, rather than the destruction of something existing. One could argue that they are creating new corpses, but broadly we perceive corpses as broken people, not people as aspiring corpses.
In any case, remember (as you earlier emphasized) that we are talking about clustering and relative degrees of similarity, not necessary and sufficient binary conditions. Can you stretch definitions to fit? Absolutely. But with each tug, we’re representing a point a little further from the center of the cluster.
I think this is present in military planning, and inferable from outcomes.
That’s not at all how it seems to me. There is a good deal of inferential distance here.
--Sun Tzu, translated
The art lies in reducing the number of corpses,etc.
Excellent, yes! I agree that in English “art”, unmodified, does not refer to war and should not be used to refer to war or a broader category of art of which one thinks war is a member. However, this is significantly due to historical use, rather than being the simplest stroke circumscribing a concept in concept-space. Excluding the art of war from “art” is somewhat like considering dolphins “fish”.
I acknowledge there is some tugging involved, but what hasn’t been shown to my satisfaction is that less tugging is involved for modern art, or other things generally considered art.
Your stretching pulls the word over so large an area as to render it almost meaningless. I feel as though it exists to further some other goal.
The last time I heard art defined, it was as “something which has additional layers of meaning beyond the plain interpretation”, or something like that. I’m not sure even that’s accurate.
However, if you’re going to insist on calling a spec ops team in action “art”, then that level of stretching is such that so could designing a diesel locomotive, or any number of other purely practical exercises which are not performed for their aesthetic value. A “found object”, or Jackson Pollock painting, or what-have-you, is created primarily for aesthetic value and/or communication of additional layers of meaning.
Art is a blast, un.
In my experience they tend to select the ones with the worst taste.
I think the hatred of all modern art is such a common meme that there are a good many people who repeat it without knowing anything about modern art.
On the other hand, sometimes cursory knowledge of a subject is sufficient for forming an accurate opinion about it. For example, I think my opinion about healing crystals is completely accurate, even though my knowledge about this practice is extremely rudimentary. Similarly, I think a cursory glance at the output of modern art is entirely sufficient for making correct sweeping judgments about it—and it’s hard to imagine how anyone could live in the modern society without having at least some exposure to it.
You’ve probably got an argument from physics about healing crystals.
However, in the case of modern art, you might contemplate people who think they know enough about science fiction to condemn it even though they know almost nothing about it.
Bruce Pollack, a contemporary abstract artist I like a lot. A little discussion of his work—the first picture is presumably something more current from the gallery where he was displayed—I think it’s the sort of modern art neither of us like.
Some people really don’t react well to the experimental nature of modern art. This trait has been shown to increase in the face of thinking about death, and individuals described as having a high need for structure display an amplified response under these conditions.
source discusses the data as well as the limitations of its useful interpretation
A lot of people in the West also don’t seem to grok that the aesthetic movements surrounding our own artistic traditions are not deeply-underlying human universals (representational art is very common, but not universal, and our focus on it is certainly not), or that there are entirely different approaches to the creation and function of art. The Modern and Postmodern movements in Western art are largely defined by their break from a lot of traditions.
A lot of people seem to also think “Art” means “highly-involved production of images for the sake of creating scarce aesthetic value” and don’t like anything that fails to conform to those rules, or appears to be “cheating” (Andy Warhol comes to mind). Which makes it really deliciously funny when such people consider Shakespeare’s works literary classics, or who just fail to grasp how many artists were not critical successes within their own time.
To the best of my knowledge, until modern art, all art showed a high mastery of craft. It might not be realistic representation, it might not be representation, it might not be pretty by Western standards, but no one could reasonably look at it and say “My five year old could do that”. Any exceptions?
Or is that what you meant by “highly involved”?
Do you really think that prior to the 20th century, there was no neglected, unremarkable, in-style but sub-par art, or art that might succeed on its own merits but failed to impress for other reasons, or art that just failed to ever catch on with those who had control over funding/critiquing/displaying it? Do you think that there was no prettying-up of mundane items, creating aesthetically-pleasing but not-terribly-formalized objects and images, no creative commission of form and image to medium for the sheer hell of it, regardless of what high society was upvoting as “the in thing” this year?
What you’re calling “art” is a small subset of the actual collage of human creative endeavor of art generally, and is better termed “fine art” (and in the context of this thread, you seem to be confining yourself to visual arts). Most of art made by humans throughout history and prehistory has been decorative and utilitarian in its impulses rather than created by highly-trained individuals working within a well-defined tradition and its strictures for the sole purpose of aesthetic expression—this is still the case today.
Modern Art itself is largely within the “fine art” category, and it includes all kinds of things you may be familiar with as “good art.” Could your five-year old do a van Gogh? A minimalist or Futurist building? A photorealistic painting? Salvador Dali? Matisse? Picasso? Monet? The buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright? Those things are Modern Art too.
Yes, some things labelled Modern Art look like a box of crayons exploded, or they’re almost absurdly simplistic, or they break from tradition but fail to do anything interesting with it. Especially given it’s a movement strongly influenced by breaks from tradition, one oughtn’t be surprised—and it’s easier than ever for a given work to find space, or be sent around on tour, or to be created essentially because someone wanted a thing there and didn’t have a lot of specifics, felt like leaving it up to the artist they hired. There’s more art, period, than there was in previous eras—more people making it, more people comissioning it, more people interested in displaying it, more people trying to get into it with varying degrees of talent, more people finding something they like and going “here, this is pretty awesome.”
And because you’re living here and now, you have a much higher chance of seeing something made recently that flops, or just doesn’t do it for you personally, from within that timeframe. The flops and failures and embarrassments of centuries past are, by and large, not widely-circulated today—unless they found a niche later on.
How many execrable pieces of old and even ancient art are you not seeing because time has marched on? How many things you find to be the height of aesthetic refinement couldn’t get an audience in their maker’s lifetime? How many have gone on to be considered classics despite their reception at the time?
And how many things that entirely meet the general definition of art are you not even considering because they don’t at least pretend to emanate from one of those establishments?
IAWYC, but I think this thread is quite a bit past due for “art” to be tabooed. Since the discussion is partially about how modern connotations of “art” effect people’s usage its hard to say exactly when the line was crossed, but IMHO
is pretty clearly getting into arguing over definitions.
Fair enough. I was aiming to answer NancyLebovitz’ question in a way that didn’t amount to just “your definitions are broken” without really explaining why I think that.
I am sure that there was all of that, but having seen some works that I know were simply “churned out” to meet the trends of the time, were done by artists considered mediocre in their time (these pictures may not circulate around high class galleries, but people still own them,) or did not achieve popularity in their own time, I have to say that I haven’t found any less appealing than I find nearly all Modern Art.
I know that there are people who appreciate it much more than I do, and I’m sure that many of them can argue coherently for their appreciation, but to me, and I believe for a number of other people here as well, Modern Art appears to be a genre that does not demand redeeming qualities in exchange for success.
And that is precisely the problem with them. They have nothing to them except rebellion for its own sake.
If “art” doesn’t create aesthetic value, what’s the point of making it.
In modern art, there hasn’t even been any real rebellion in a very long time. What we see is a pretense of rebellion by doing the same old tired épater la bourgeoisie act that has lost all its shock value many decades ago, or “creative” breaking of long-gone traditional norms. At the same time, these people would never dream of touching any real taboos of the present day, and are bending over backwards to signal their unreserved allegiance to every single respectable high-status belief—and their professional world is a dreary pyramid of bureaucratic patronage that makes the bureaucracy of a typical government department look free-spirited in comparison.
To take only one illustrative example, even in Catholic Church—an institution that is often considered as the very epitome of hidebound reaction—a preference for traditional church art and architecture is likely to mark one as a contrarian these days.
We do not agree on these things, and I do not highly rate either of our odds of being able to make headway in this argument in a rational sense. So instead I will aim for transparency of content:
Boo thing you said. Yay thing I said.
Your turn.
He appears to be an example of what I called a “good” modern artist, which is to say, he’s still worse that just about all pre-20th century western art.
Wait. Huh? Pre 20th century? What about
Nikolai Fechin
Frank Frazetta
Andrew Jones
Geoffrey Mimms
James Gurney
There are lots of guys making art these days. You really don’t like any of them?
I’m pretty sure he wasn’t saying that; he’s saying that prior to the 20′th century and the advent of “Modern Art,” hardly anybody was making art that he considers as poor as the works of even those he considers to be the best participating in the genre of Modern Art, which is not the same thing as the works of all artists who produce art in the present day.
What Desrtopa said.
In my experience, most people who hate it do so because it’s extremely unfamiliar to them, because they’ve only experienced a handful of examples of it (often the most difficult or “shocking”), and because they mentally associate it with snobbiness.
Also (at the risk of sounding snobby!), it’s generally referred to as “contemporary art.” “Modern art” refers to a period of art history that’s been over for several decades.
Specifically, what you mean is “high-status art produced since the mid 20th century that I don’t like”.
Isn’t the idea that modern art is “uniform” in any way just ridiculous?
In the early 20th century we had a huge mix of different ideas. The idea that it’s all just a big swath of ‘generic modern art’ is just silly. I’m better at music in terms of knowledge, but I find it odd to immediately denounce Stravinsky’s works simply because it’s ‘modern.’
I mean I don’t denounce John Cage because it’s ‘modern.’ I denounce it because it doesn’t sound and makes no aural sense and things like that.
Contemporary art != modern art.
I believe he was using ‘modern art’ in a nontechnical sense, but my point doesn’t really change. Just replace John Cage with a Total Serialist composer.
I mean modern art (that is, early 20th century art) was the time period where we had an explosion of different ideas in all the different artforms. Dismissing them as ‘uniform’ in any way is crazy. Many of Stravinsky’s works are perfectly accessible to non-music people. It’s not like Realist Artwork or Tonality just vanished or something. There is Modern Realism and Modern Tonality.
Edit: Besides, isn’t this aggression towards modern art a “curiosity stopper”?
I suspect the colloquial use of “modern art” in this thread is perhaps better described as some unholy conglomeration of abstract expressionism and minimalism. Think Pollock, Rothko, Mondrian and Malevich. (Yes, I know they seem quite distinct to you, but the common link for most people is “my five-year-old could do that.”)
And I can’t speak for others, obviously, but I actually quite like modern art. Sculpture and architecture more than paintings or music, though.
Ah no but you see, modern art is good. Your move.
Seriously though, would I be right in saying you come from a background where most people can be expected to have an educated opinion on art? Because that’s the only way I can imagine you’ve never met someone who claimed to hate modern art but folded completely after waiting to meet someone inside the Tate Modern, or catching a documentary one day. It’s just too common in my experience, and yet I’ve never seen or heard of anyone doing the same thing with modern academic music or painting. I’m left to assume that they are genuinely lacking in the qualities which make naive audiences enjoy them and their reputation is reliable for everyone.
That just won’t fly though for modern art, which was frequently very popular. Rather I think that what’s happened is that the Young British Artists were not even trying to be good, especially as the bubble went on, and their output was as much confirmation as people needed to assume that they are also part of the down to earth sensible people who only like “representative art”, when frequently they aren’t.
I think both are equally bad, to be honest, but that the latter is less common than the former. I think that people, given enough exposure to a diverse selection of some medium or some category, will eventually come to like at least a section of it. The widespread hatred of “modern X” is probably more often down to ignorance than signalling. Most of the signalling that goes on here is from people trying to demonstrate how hip they are; familiarity with current art is good for the image they are trying to promote. I think anti-modern signalling is largely from people who are trying to prove how conservative or old-fashioned they are, as a way of reinforcing other parts of their image.
That said, I move in circles that are more artistic than academic, so this is an obvious way in which my results could be skewed.
Why ought there be more to this than going along with social signals? Isn’t all of art just one great gameboard on which to play boundlessly complex social status games? When you think of people who are obnoxiously devoted to social status games, the “hipsters”, you think of two things, fashion and art. Both are essentially meaningless except to define the rules of the games we play with each other.
If somebody enjoys something that they read or experience alone, then they must get some utility from art that isn’t connected with the associated social signals. I suspect that there are many people who are capable of appreciating art without talking about it.
(This does not apply if they read something alone, brag about it, and try to signal super-high status and nonconformity by only liking obscure things. THAT is the status game that I associate with hipsters.)
I consider that sort of social signaling basically orthogonal to liking art for being pretty, funny, thought-provoking, or sublime. Art that is liked solely for social reasons is unlikely to survive a change in social environment.
(EDITED for pronoun trouble)