Junk art and music.

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twistedtom
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Junk art and music.

Post by twistedtom »

There is a lot of what may be called art around that looks like a preschool kid made it. A lot of it is junk some one found and put together, maybe painted it, but it is in my mind ugly, and with out talent. I just think someone hung out in the right circles or had one hell of a line of BS. I suppose it is all taste, I do like modern art, but I like it to be more than paint tossed randomly at a canvas, junk painted and glued together, some of it looks like sloppy paper Mache. I went to the Portland Art Museum, and where most of what they have is fine art, they have a bunch of what I feel is crap. Four florescent lights bolted together are not worth being in a museum. Then I hear some of the music that is out, some from talented people, and some just things the found that other people did and glued together in a different way. Some how I think this is just a way for people who do not have the talent, or want to study and work at having talent to be an artist, or a musician, am I being a snob for wanting some kind of actual talent?
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MIDI Life Crisis
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Re: Junk art and music.

Post by MIDI Life Crisis »

I hear that Tom and feel the same way - but there may be "exceptions" to consider.

I recently attended the Matisse exhibit of cutouts made by the artist when he could no longer paint. I was unpressed and went home, borrowed a few pieces of construction paper and copies the idea: looked pretty good too.

Then I watched The French Connection. Don Ellis did the highly deconstructed score. Most casual viewers would be left scratching their heads. "That's music?" they might ask.

I tried to have discussions about "art"
in my music classes when I was teaching at UCSB and came to the conclusion that there is not and never will be a definition. It is one person or persons expression of an idea - any idea - and to 'qualify' as art, any other person's acceptance or understanding or reinterpreting the intention of the creator.

I also think that the "arc" of the artists work sometimes needs to be taken into consideration. In the case of Matisse, the cutouts were an extension of his earlier work, which I do love. There's the matter of selecting paper and finally, the understanding that the cutouts were sometimes intended to be converted into giant mosaics (which were also on display). All part of the arc.

As for the lights bolted together I suspect I'd have had a similar reaction. But obviously the curator and staff at the museum saw something you didn't and it spoke to them on a different plane.

Maybe it was a statement that something as simple and free as light could be packaged and delivered? Or maybe it was a comment on just how ugly (or beautiful) the industrial use of those fixtures are. And then again, maybe it's just plain old crap! Like the PC v. Mac debate, it all depends on who you ask.

BTW, I HATED Don Ellis' music when I first heard it. Now I think he was a visionary and decades. if not centuries, before his time. Then again, he might just have been high. Most assuredly, he was that too. Still, his score to the French Connection is no less brilliant than Elmer Bernstein's Man with the Golden Arm... unless one doesn't like that sort of thing. :)
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Re: Junk art and music.

Post by bayswater »

I live next door to an art history prof, so I can ask her to explain the point of objects in art galleries, or more often, the point of public art left in front of new buildings that looks like some construction debris they forgot to haul away. There is always an idea, concept, etc behind the object, and the example MLC gave about portable light is pretty typical of the answers I get. Sometimes the idea is "so what" and the object is something anyone could make, but as my neighbour explains, if you want really great stuff you have to experiment, and if you experiment you might get crap.
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Re: Junk art and music.

Post by MIDI Life Crisis »

Sometimes it's not the fact that "anyone" can make it - that is clearly true. The "art" sometimes come in actually selling the stuff. This is true of all art, including but not limited to music.
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Re: Junk art and music.

Post by Gravity Jim »

bayswater wrote:ISometimes the idea is "so what" and the object is something anyone could make, but as my neighbour explains, if you want really great stuff you have to experiment, and if you experiment you might get crap.

Exactly. New, great work comes from the avant garde, and about 90% of what the avant garde produces will strike the average viewer as meaningless. It may, in fact, be. But you have to have all that flotsam to get the 10% that's brilliant and moves the work forward.

Complaining about it makes you sound like a geezer, or a lowbrow. You have to embrace - which is not the same as enjoying - all artistic expression to be a good artist yourself. Unless you're trying to develop, as many do, a kind of atrophied competence in a limited style. I know a well-known (around here, anyway) artist and art teacher who hasn't done anything but charcoal and pencil drawings of nude figures for 30 years. She hasn't learned a single new thing, and she won't. That's not creativity, that's just learning a craft.
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Re: Junk art and music.

Post by MIDI Life Crisis »

No one has to accept "art" as valuable art. Elephant and monkey works are sometimes better than conceptual works by humans. But there's nothing wrong with being a craftsman or artisan either, IMO. DaVinci was a master craftsman. Of course, many think he was also a pretty good artist, but I think when you have both, the results are more pleasing - at least to me.

But yeah, there's some pretty awful stuff that passes for "art" at times. Expensive, too, and often offensive. Then again, some artists go for that in the first place. Bukowski as a poet does, for sure. James Joyce is another. Some love them guys, others... not so much. So is it art? Does it have value?

Well, if it sells, then the answer is celery... maybe. LOL!
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Re: Junk art and music.

Post by bayswater »

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:Sometimes it's not the fact that "anyone" can make it - that is clearly true. The "art" sometimes come in actually selling the stuff. This is true of all art, including but not limited to music.
Very true. The answer to "anyone could have done that" is "anyone didn't. he/she did."
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Re: Junk art and music.

Post by Prime Mover »

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:Well, if it sells, then the answer is celery... maybe. LOL!
There's an old Doctor Who joke in there somewhere... gotta be.
bayswater wrote:The answer to "anyone could have done that" is "anyone didn't. he/she did."
Exactly, I really hate that response: "anyone could have made that!" I hear that all the time. But that suggests that to be real art it has to be difficult to make, which is a very shallow view of artistry, IMO. The value of art really shouldn't be how difficult it is to produce, the only thing that matters is the end result. I think the real seed of art is in the idea behind a piece, the actual construction is just craftsmanship, which although shouldn't be overlooked, isn't quite as much at the heart of matter. Through the craftsmanship, we're given a glimpse of the original idea, but maybe it doesn't take skilled craftsmanship to present a unique and artistic idea.

People think of art as purely aesthetic, and while I agree that most is, I think the definition is a bit broader. Sometimes art can be as simple as presenting a creative idea in its rawest form, divorced from any semblance of aesthetic nature. I always find myself having to justify John Cage's work, for instance, some of which isn't meant to have much aesthetic value, but change the way we look at our world in a creative manner.

I had a composition prof at Oberlin—I actually didn't like him much, but he did have some good points—who once gushed over Monte Python's "Ministry of Silly Walks" as an incredibly artistic work. I don't think he's incorrect either, the point he made was that as goofy as it is, it calls to attention an aspect of everyday life that we don't think about 99% of the time, and brings it to the forefront of our minds for evaluation, and may slightly change the way we look at walking in general. I'm sure everyone who's seen the sketch probably later saw someone walking who may have had a different gate and was reminded of that, and for the next few minutes, began to look around at how other people walk. I know I do from time to time. In that case, beyond the aesthetic humor of the piece, it has really effected the way we look at the world around us. It takes vision and creativity to do that, and regardless of whether it takes craftsmanship or not (in this case, obviously), I believe that's the most important part.
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Re: Junk art and music.

Post by MIDI Life Crisis »

Prime Mover wrote:
MIDI Life Crisis wrote:Well, if it sells, then the answer is celery... maybe. LOL!
There's an old Doctor Who joke in there somewhere... gotta be.
WEll, no, it's a spell checker error I missed. LOL! And now THAT'S art.

Starting bid is $5k. Do I hear 5-50? 5-50? 5-50?

Going once.
Going twice.

SOLD to the man seated at the piano and singing into the microphone for $5,000.

And now for something completely different.

Carrots.
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Re: Junk art and music.

Post by bongo_x »

am I being a snob for wanting some kind of actual talent?
While I agree with you about a lot of art being crap I don’t agree with your conclusion. I think you’re confusing two things; art and craft. Talent is craft. Art is something that speaks to me. Completely separate issues, they just sometimes happen to be a part of the same work. Saying something isn’t good because you don’t think it took enough talent to make is, to me, like people who say a movie isn’t good because it was sad. That’s more of a preference.
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Re: Junk art and music.

Post by MIDI Life Crisis »

There's also "commentary." I submit two very famous pieces:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN2zcLBr_VM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTQ7bmfAkNA


Worthless crap? Social commentary? Avant garde expression?

... or art?

I call this next one "200 by 200"

Image
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Re: Junk art and music.

Post by crduval »

I remember going to a modern art museum in Dusseldorf Germany one day (I was in town for work). They had an absolutely huge canvas on display by some artist (i wish i could recall the name) that was all one color. I thought "you've got to be kidding me, anyone could do that!" Then I stood in front of that canvas so that it filled my entire view and suddenly I was overwhelmed by the feeling that I was falling into the painting, that there were subtle textures within the single color that attained great depth. It was so startling and intense that it made me dizzy. After that I thought "ok, not just anyone could have done that!"

A lot of art that i make sounds like crap the next day, too!

:)


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Re: Junk art and music.

Post by MIDI Life Crisis »

crduval wrote: A lot of art that i make sounds like crap the next day, too!
Wow! When you find the secret of getting it to last that long, please share it! :rofl:
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Re: Junk art and music.

Post by twistedtom »

One of the works was a doll tied to a chair being raped by a teddybear, including the male part in her face, yes I know what it means. Then there is the guy that signed his name on a canvas with out painting it, he said it was the absolute in minimalist painting. I still think a ton of it may be considered art as it makes a statement, but the guy who did it was better at a line of BS that having talent, craftsmanship. As for being original I keep seeing the same stuff being made by a number of people. My question is, would you want this in your house? Yes Yoko Ono's chants may be considered art, but I think her music is horrible. I will admit art is objective, so maybe what I am saying is the lack of craftsmanship in much of this so called art and music. A remix may be new but it is using other people's work. Yes you need to know the history of an art or music piece, but crap is still crap. Now there are some very nice works that are and have been on the forefront of creativity, I am not talking about that. As far as my statement that any one can do it, tons of this stuff all looks the same, so any one did do it. If you guys have such a open mind on art, why do you criticize singers who can't sing on key or sound bad? If they had a good line of BS their vocals could be called art. So I change my statement to a lack of craftsmanship, and aesthetic value, as in it looks like junk. So maybe I am not as high brow as I have some standards.
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Re: Junk art and music.

Post by MIDI Life Crisis »

And sometimes it's not so much the judgement of the artist as it is that of the purchaser or the curator. I never did buy a copy of 4'22" and always found Yoko kind of coo coo as well well. Clearly, anybody can anything art. One thing we can agree on is that money is money and I for one was not happy about "Piss Christ" being funded, in part, with an NEA grant. The photo is effective, but water color or oil would have been as effective. Would anyone one have heard of it then? Probably not, and that's kind of part of the deal. Be bold, be crazy, be insulting, and people might remember you. But the question is: remember you for what!

:vomit:
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