Tell me this: how can a drunkard madman, flinging paint at a canvas, arrive at a point where he can reliably produce images which are later determined to be mathematically perfect examples of what the human sensory mechanism perceives as ideal??? THIS IS NOT AN ACCIDENT. I leave you with a question: is this art... or craftmanship?

Let me put this out there:

A person has taken many art history courses. Along the way, they learn what made that art popular in that time, what the context was, what the social mores were that led to a certain art being popular and a certain art being shunned. You learn about who did what first, who copycatted, who expressed themselves or their world for that time, and who became famous because they knew the right people and who wallowed in poverty because their art wasn't appreciated, but they kept doing it...and so on and so on.

Art history isn't just a timeline.

So, knowing these things, having a working knowledge...doesn't that make one a more discerning critic?

We might think the caricature artist at the fair really does a bang-up job...and perhaps in other parts of their lives they are actually creating, but a caricature as we see all the time isn't really 'art' it's more 'craft.'

Everyone should absolutely enjoy what pleases them, but calling out those who have studied many aspects of the creative process (and all the things I mentioned above) as "snobs" isn't quite right either.

I could think Dick and Jane is the best literature on the planet: because even I can understand it. That hardly makes my opinion an enlightened one.

two cents and all...

(Oh, and part of MY definition of art is that it doesn't give it all to you. It makes you think. A story about how a boy and a girl meet and fall in love and break up and all the laughs and boo-hoos can be a GREAT time, but I separate that story from one where I'm not quite sure what the ending was...my imagination has to come in and make some decisions. I have to think.)

That sounds to me like;

Pushing boundaries, maybe. I don't think it has to make people uncomfortable. And I think a nice painting "in the style" of a favorite artist can be just as meaningful to me as a picture in a book or one hanging on a museum wall.

Well, as someone said, it isn't an answer to be solved. It's a tricky one. I guess for me, though, is if it's too "easy" (and admittedly I can't explain what that means to me, can't quite word it out) then it doesn't evoke what something that makes me think and wonder and extrapolate and imagine does. So maybe it is partly being uncomfortable...not like a spider is sitting next to you but more like that "tug."

Hey, this is making me think! This thread is art! :)

Hey, stop thinking! And stop calling things art!

You aren't qualified to have an opinion on that unless you are one of squirell nutkin's condescending PhD friends who know everything.

I don't know shit (spits chaw on the ground.)

I did like that there paintin' I saw at one of them MUseums, the Bar at Folly Berger's was the pitcher I seen. Folly looked kinda cute and I always like them bars.

What is art? "It WORKS, mate!" . . . Yes, and what makes it work?

That is the interesting question, if, as a lowly member of the uneducated masses, I may be permitted to suggest.

Which would come first: Jackson Pollock reaching the "mathematical ideal perfect score", or two card shuffles being the same? And if you put them on a treadmill...
:p:

....they'd buttfuck you in the mouth and kill your hobo.



Now that's art.

The Flint/Pooka family went to the Fort Worth Main Street Arts Festival, although I was a little uncomfortable with the word "art" in the title, not knowing whether a team of PhDs had scrutinized all of the participating "artists" to determine the validity of their so-called work.

In reality, though, there were some very interesting pieces to check out. Like these, three-dimensional objects that pretend to be rendered in unrealistic perspective, by Fred Stodder; these, motorized, perpetual motion "Rube Goldberg" machines, by Jeffery Zachman; these, vibrant geometrical contrivances, by Terry Habeger; these, larger-than-life "Dr. Seuss" apparatus, by Andrew Carson & Shelly Corbett.

Each of these men/women I considered to be artists with some accomplishment to speak of; although if the grand inquisition of "true art" deems them to be otherwise, I suppose I shall have to (as a good citizen) punch each of them in the nose, for tricking me into appreciating their non-art garbage.

Looks like a good non-art show.

Thanks Flint! I love the Golberg perpetual motion sculptures! I can not buy one. I would walk by it and be forced then, to cancel everything to stare at it for hours. :)