This argument is often made, and has been common since the 1960s. Many good essays have been written, and are worth reading, but in the end they can all be boiled down to this: popular arts have become somewhat more important and fine arts have become somewhat less important. Movies are still important, pop music is important, graphic design (of magazines and web sites and apps) is more important than it has ever been before. But the elite edge of art is less important to the public, in the ways mentioned here:
"A basic familiarity with the ideas of the leading artists and architects is no longer part of the essential cultural equipment of an informed citizen."
That doesn't mean that art has become irrelevant, only that certain kinds of art are less relevant, and other kinds of art are more relevant.
People change, and the culture changes. When I was a little kid, my mom would read the New York Times and she would clip out articles about what the great novelists were writing and what the great architects were building, and whether New Urbanism would rescue the suburbs. Nowadays, my mom reads the New York Times and she clips out articles about cloud computing, and she talks about whether the USA is investing enough to modernize its communication infrastructure.
>Movies are still important, pop music is important, graphic design (of magazines and web sites and apps) is more important than it has ever been before.
Pop music is not as important as it was either. Musicians used to be huge cultural phenomena, and a kind of escape into another world, now there are tons of similar escapes (computer games, for example, a huge thing, weren't even available to the common how when pop was huge, nor where social media, chat, YouTube, Instagram, the modern "artistically relevant and high production quality" tv series and tons of other things). Now you can ask 10 people and they wouldn't know a current top 10 song -- whereas in the 70's for example it would be inescapable.
And graphic design has faded too -- there was a brief period in the mid-eighties to early 00s were graphic designers were huge pop heroes -- interviews in magazines, stars like Neville Brody, David Carson that you get to hear about even as a layman, etc. Now it's only other graphic and web folk care about graphic and web designers.
>People change, and the culture changes.
It's also good however to be making judgement calls on those changes too. Else we accept everything and anything as fate.
> Serrano’s photograph of a crucifix immersed in a jar of his own urine was called "Piss Christ."
I remember when this was part of the national debate around the NEA. The reason that the people seeking to defund this stuff was that it simply was garbage as art. If classic art sought to pull on "positive" emotions and move and inspire; modern art seemed determined to confuse and then move on to outrage.
Somewhere in this dwelling in negative emotions, modern art became indistinguishable from a satire that nobody was bothering to produce. It was an overly serious bunch of belly button dwelling backed by amateurishly crafted production most pre-schoolers regularly produced. Instead it became a game of one-upsmanship and gross-outs devised in the minds of 10 year old boys. Anything that wasn't deliberately trying to rile the audience was laughable "craftsmanship" and interesting in any way. The art scene became incestuous and further and further isolated itself from any potential audience.
Classical art was put out in public places for any passerby to see -- Michelangelo's "David" was displayed in a public courtyard. While it's true that classic forms became tired and formulaic, the modernist movements didn't generally replace those forms with anything of particular value.
There's interesting things going on in art in the modern world, but modern art isn't one of them.
> The reason that the people seeking to defund this stuff was that it simply was garbage as art.
Or, more generally, any potential value of it is subjective, and evaluations of merit aren't actually taking even that into account.
Offensiveness doesn't seem even remotely relevant; some people may enjoy works that others find offensive. On the other hand, foring others to involuntarily fund "art" without using any measure of the value provided either to the people viewing it or to the people funding it (and utterly disconnecting those two groups) seems ridiculous, and leads to problems like this. And then you get into definitions of "art", and criteria for what should and shouldn't get funded.
With all the myriad ways of connecting with potentially interested audiences today, much of the rationale for speculatively funding art no longer exists. If you make something people find worthwhile, you don't need public support, and if you're not, you shouldn't receive public support. Produce samples, get people interested, find patrons (or customers, or both), build larger projects, repeat. And if you want to work on something that nobody else cares about enough to fund (or that you don't care about seeking funding for, for any number of reasons), that's called a "hobby".
That doesn't mean that "culture" devolves into exclusively "pop culture". It doesn't take a large number of interested people to provide a substantial amount of funding; a very small amount of money from a thousand people can fund a career for one. So this certainly doesn't mean that only the makers of mass-market popular culture can get funding; quite the contrary.
Defining "art", or setting criteria for receiving funding, then becomes irrelevant for anyone other than philosophers or art critics. If people like something and want to support it, they can.
There is a lot more going on in Serrano's work than these kind of off the cuff comments give him credit for.
I saw the original series in the early 90s in a retrospective in Manhattan, and your characterization of it as "garbage" is shallow and erroneous.
First off, they are large prints, and beautifully colored and detailed. They have a beautiful, aestheticized quality. The series of photos also uses other bodily fluids like semen, milk, and blood -- fluids which are highly symbolic, especially for Catholics (Serrano is a believer).
Seen as a body of photos, it comes off as transgressive, sure, but also suggestive of processes that run the world -- reproduction, excretion, nourishment, care for young. But also, at the very same time, richly symbolic in the Catholic tradition.
As a point of reference, if you are familiar with the works of Gilbert and George (NSFW: http://www.harpersbooks.com/pictures/16976_cspread1.jpg), who have also worked with large scale photos of shit, semen, etc. -- Serrano's works are not provocative in the same way. His series was actually rather philosophical and meditative.
Todays best known painter, Banksy, is a street artist. So his art is displayed by its very nature in public places and personally I do not find it very shocking.
>If classic art sought to pull on "positive" emotions and move and inspire; modern art seemed determined to confuse and then move on to outrage.
Your definitions of "classic art"[1] and "modern art"[2] have to be pretty narrow to argue this. I know anyone can pull a few counter examples to any objectivist statement on the arts, but I have a very difficult time believing any argument that's based on the earnest belief that classic art drew on "positive" emotions while modern art is driven by "negative" ones. What kind of art are you looking at?
Just want to point out; that Jeff Koons piece is displayed publicly.
Negative emotions are deep and profound. Positive ones are silly and trite. To smile or be happy is the least sexy thing a person can do, and negative articles get a few orders of magnitude more clicks than positive ones.
It's the old "if you mistake a bush for a lion that's fine, but if you mistake a lion for a bush you are dead" cognitive bias. I've thought for a long time that it manifests in art via shock, negativity, outrage, etc. being a cheap route to profundity. You have to work hard to make positive art profound because the bar is higher... you don't get the easy free profundity points negativity gives you.
Art is exploding these days. Maybe not "fine art", but when I was growing up, everyone said, "Oh, no, I cannot draw." Today, the internet is full of art being created and shared. Even by teenagers or other folk who "can't draw". Anime is popular, and many people and trying out that style as well. Painting is as popular as ever, and the crafting movement, too. The geek culture of the internet has spawned people making geek art in all kinds of media.
Not much of this (if any) is going to show up on gallery walls, and I am not even claiming that I like much of it. But it is art. And it is absolutely relevant to the people creating and viewing it.
We have an entire generation of people growing up knowing that they can create. Whether those creations use traditional art media, digital media, crafts, or something entirely new, the point is that the creative process is alive and well, vastly more so than when I was young.
Creativity is everywhere and in our daily lives and basically infused into every corner of the new culture. Damn near everyone is a photographer, and a hefty number of us don't suck at it either. We're writers, critics, performance artists, musicians and videographers with a huge shared publishing platform. We can share and sell our creations and art with huge audiences with ease. Problems are approached as creative exercises. I'd even argue that the code we write may be art - I profess to find great beauty in some of it.
It's pretty cool that as weird as Snapchat is to some of us, and as creepy as Facebook is, they're popular mostly because they allow people to share their creativity, as mundane as it may seem.
Yes, some if not much of it is pedestrian at best, but the rate at which we consume art, and the ease with which we can create and share art is mind-boggling for those of us that remember "before."
Agree. The things that are dying are older traditional forms and older means of promulgating art. Artists aren't too interested in painting new religious frescoes these days either.
The other change is that there is less of a gulf between "fine artist" and the common person who likes to "do art".
I would however like to see people made aware of the fact that they are "making art": Not so that they can be conceited about it or high-brow, but so they can understand their connection to all the art and artists that have come before.
"Today's art has given us nothing that bears the slightest resemblance to our own lives, touches our fears and cares, evokes our dreams, or gives hope in time of darkness. Today's art is no longer a part of life, no longer in the domain of the common man, no longer an enriching, ennobling and vital partner in the public pursuit of civilization, no longer the majestic presence in everyday life that it was in the past. It is not that the public has failed art; it is art which has failed the public."
Well that's a pretty standard Decline of Civilization article there. Well done!
There are issues with modern art and sophomorism, yes; essentially, the big problem with art is artists, and the way they learn to spew bullshit about their production.
There are also big problems with architecture, which is really a τέχνη, and not really an art in the fine arts sense; big architecture spends a lot of time on arty one-upmanship and not enough on the practical matters that make a building work and last.
This article is really not true at all. Art is not becoming irrelevant, it is just changing.
We are bombarded with audiovisual media now. A painting, a song, or even a "shocking" performances is much less valuable in a supply/demand sense than. (500 years ago, something as beautiful and pure as a painting was very rare!)
But new forms of art have replaced them. Relational art ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_art ) is a popular one. Relational artworks use humans, not media, as material. A relational artist might say that what is rare and valuable today is not visual media, but human connectedness and meaningful experience. A relational artwork might try to help a community solve a social issue, or create social connections that would not otherwise exist.
These new forms of art are not evaluated on how shocking they are. They are evaluated on how they affect the world.
I would find this article hilarious if I weren't horrified that people may take it seriously.
In the 50s, people could identify Buckminster Fuller, Saul Bellow, or Jackson Pollock. Many educated people now could identify Frank Gehry, Toni Morrison, or Jeff Koons. But having a cadre of public artists who "shape in meaningful ways our image of ourselves or define our collective values" is a very narrow way framing the issue and has not been the trajectory of art for decades, if ever.
Look at that reception to Marina Abramović's The Artist is Present. People stood in line for hours. I saw a segment about it on CBS Sunday Friggin' Morning. The public is engaged with art, it's just not the art that the writer wants them to be engaged with.
Social and political commentary by its nature, will alienate a large portion of its consumers. The strange morphing of the definition of Art into only High Art, I think leads to the opinion of the author, and the disproportionate amount of High Art that is exclusively commentary leads to an obvious disengagement by big chunks of the population.
Through out history the majority of artist have been craftsman that create for the sake a client, state, or church. Sometime in the last couple centuries working artist have become taboo, and that meaningful creation for a purpose other than that of the "pure" artistic value has been pushed out of High Art.
The fact that art the Author classifies as art, is not modern media form(TV, CINEMA, DIGITAL) seems to ensure that the prophesy should be self fulfilling.
I do not know of any contemporary ceiling painters.
"it's just not the art that the writer wants them to be engaged with."
Its a classic holiness spiral. How do you denigrate the average american slightly more than the last guy without offending, or being ignored, by the average american? Its the confusion of art with political propaganda.
Whatever happened to beauty in art? Much of the article focuses on art whose only purpose seems to be so "say something", to shock its viewers, to do something nobody else had ever thought of doing before. At which point in time did we lose the mother of all art - beauty? Aesthetics? Craftsmanship?
Now do not get me wrong, of course artists must engage in a dialogue with the society in which they live, and of course art is a great way of expressing political and social opinions. But when the fundamental purpose of art - the creation of something beautiful - is lost, all that remains is politics masquerading as art. And no wonder nobody wants to see that.
It is perfectly possible to produce art containing both: beautiful content and a strong message. Just take the Expressionist artists and poets of the Great War as an example. Wilfred Owen, Georg Heym, Otto Dix - they all produced incredibly strong anti-war art (poems and paintings) that still displayed a very high standard of artisan skill. There are many, many other examples, from many different points in history.
There was once agreement on what "high culture" was - classic paintings, symphonies, opera, and ballet. Those are the art forms that have stone palaces downtown. Those forms have lost some social significance in the last few decades, which means that the hangers-on, the gallery operators, art historians, and collectors don't have the status they used to have. The institutions with the stone palaces, especially below the top tier, are having some trouble getting contributions.
But not that much trouble in major cities. Even the Detroit Museum of Art just managed an expansion. The Cleveland Museum of Art is expanding. In SF, in the last twenty years there's been the new Asian Art Museum, the new DeYoung building, and the SFMOMA refurbishing. On the other hand, the George Lucas Ego Museum was banished to Chicago, and the Grateful Dead museum didn't get built. The City of San Francisco has access to a huge stainless-steel peace symbol, but nobody wants it in their neighborhood. The classic fine arts are still winning.
> There was once agreement on what "high culture" was - classic paintings, symphonies, opera, and ballet. Those are the art forms that have stone palaces downtown. Those forms have lost some social significance in the last few decades
Which is a great shame, because there is incredible beauty in those art forms that many people nowadays miss completely. All because we somehow gave the high culture/classic arts the labels "snobby", "stuffy", "boring", "unintelligible"...
IMO it's a big mistake to feel that art should be above the viewer. Good art should be exactly at your level, speaking to you and enriching you. Given the choice between "guilty pleasure" and "conspicuous consumption", good art should aim for the former. For example, the video game Loom speaks to me, the webcomic Homestuck speaks to me, the drawings of M.C. Escher (derided by the artistic world at the time) speak to me. Modern art doesn't speak to me at all, I feel like it's talking to someone else who died a while ago.
Art should not be above the viewer in the sense that it seems to say "You're too dumb and too uneducated to understand me".
It should totally be above the viewer in the sense that it should get him to broaden his horizons, to deepen his thinking and to cultivate an appreciation for the craftsmanship that goes into art.
Art that is exactly at your level may give you some temporary pleasure, but little else. The German classical poets saw art as a means of educating peoples' personalities. If you always stick to what you can already understand without a problem, when are you ever going to grow?
To expand, good art should be exactly at the level of anyone who looks at it; accessible to newcomers and rewarding for insiders. Incidentally, this is really hard to pull off.
On the discussions below of whether something is art or not, I once read a good (not perfect) rule: "If something has to be on a museum for you to know it's art, it isn't".
> Fifty years ago, educated people could be expected to identify the likes of Saul Bellow, Buckminster Fuller, and Jackson Pollock. Today one is expected to know about the human genome and the debate over global warming, but nobody is thought ignorant for being unable to identify the architect of the Freedom Tower or name a single winner of the Tate Prize (let alone remember the name of the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature).
Artists have failed to keep up with the times in terms of scientific knowledge. Humanity's understanding of, and relation to the universe is completely different compared to a century ago. Those on the soft side of CP Snow's Two Cultures have responded to their waning relevance by denying the importance of their technical counterparts, however, world culture cannot be fooled so easily. Scientific literacy is now as necessary as the ability to use language, and there's no going back. Our artists will now have to keep up or else they will become obsolete.
Of course there was talk about the end of art for many decades now. At least when going to college in early 2000s I remember there was already enough written about "What comes after post-modernism". At least the art critics are busy -- talking about end of art.
The part about art auctions and art pieces being sold for more and more money, make sense. With growing inequality it makes sense to cater to the few super rich. You can sell them paintings, or custom hand made golden watches, or what-have you.
But yeah the middle class, which is supposedly erroding, like to go to museums because, well they are there when they visit a new city, but they'll probably not be spending $5-10K buying paintings or sculptures.
There is a mention of digital and film, and that is a valid point. Video games are art, design is art as well, so is film. Movies and shows are popular still. Perhaps peformance art and other traditional forms are in decline but digital lives on.
Digital art and music is also combining. I found about vaporwave a few years back, for example :
It is kind of fascinating, it combined early Internet and computer art -- images of Windows 95 load screens, with a synth music. It has elements of late 80s and 90s nostalgia, it both glorifies and makes fun of consumerist culture.
Vaporwave, Retrowave, etc. are all interesting throwback forms that seem to be grounded in reproducing and modernizing a certain audiovisual aesthetic...without being specifically constrained by the forms being paid homage to. I find this movement very cool.
For decades there's also been a few "underground" digital art scenes that are unusually vibrant and have gained some measure of respect outside of their specific milieus. The demoscene in particular has become famous for audio/visual and technical excellence that almost requires an educated and informed audience to appreciate on deep levels, but is also at least entertaining to non-in-crowd viewers.
> ...the making of art was far too serious to be left to sentimental clients who might mistakenly desire a narrative painting with a clear moral message, or a facsimile of a villa they had admired in Tuscany.
> “We are making it out of ourselves” is a fair summary of the revolution in patronage the modern movement had brought about, in which the artist himself had now been transformed into his own patron.
So at some point, artists stopped working for a living. And who doesn't want to do that? But work has a curious way of keeping things grounded and relevant.
Fine art has become irrelevant as a consequence of the mass consumer society we live in. Once upon a time there was a class of people who were viewed as being above everyone else in terms of artistic skill and taste. Whatever you want to call them, they were a result of a parallel elite social and economic group that was viewed as being above the others. They elected their group of painters, musicians, architects, etc.
Modern society has shaped a world where the mass of people dictates what is interesting or not based on the money they pay for that product. So, the Beatles are viewed as important, not because their musical skills were better than thousands other musicians, but because they were consumed to a point of making a big difference in our society.
In a mass society, there is a huge pressure to lower the quality of everything, because this means that more and more people will be able to enjoy it. That's why people are not creating the next 5th symphony, they're creating instead the next Justin Bieber song. In such a world, fine arts have no power because they are not able to move lots of people in the same way that a video game or the next Star Wars movie can.
A documentary about modern art I recently watched. I was never really good at interpretation of art. I did find this interesting
This is modern art - Hollow laughter (BBC documentary)
https://youtu.be/ZK7EJOfULSA
One of the author's first arguments is a common one, but one that I think is an oversimplification: That after WWI art started depicting the awfulness that Europeans had suddenly been exposed to, and therefore became "unpatronable" in the traditional sense since it wasnt pretty pictures of lily pads anymore.
Look up fin de siecle Vienna if you aren't familiar with it. Decades before the war, artists in every discipline were pushing in weird directions (not necessarily in a bad way!).
I think its important to recognize this. Then more than now art was an important aspect of everyday life, and I dont think they write in history books that "many people in Austria and Germany were going batshit crazy" was an important part of the classic WWI "powderkeg".
The article is a fascinating read. Reminded me of a discussion in a class a long time ago about art and what it means; I settled on defining "art" as any artifact labeled as "art" and that someone is willing to pay for, excluding the artist's mother.
An operational, if cynical, definition. But it will have to do until we go back to not being afraid to judge, to offend, to debate views that are not "politically correct" (the recent Rhodes statue "controversy" being a ridiculous case in point)
[+] [-] lkrubner|10 years ago|reply
"A basic familiarity with the ideas of the leading artists and architects is no longer part of the essential cultural equipment of an informed citizen."
That doesn't mean that art has become irrelevant, only that certain kinds of art are less relevant, and other kinds of art are more relevant.
People change, and the culture changes. When I was a little kid, my mom would read the New York Times and she would clip out articles about what the great novelists were writing and what the great architects were building, and whether New Urbanism would rescue the suburbs. Nowadays, my mom reads the New York Times and she clips out articles about cloud computing, and she talks about whether the USA is investing enough to modernize its communication infrastructure.
[+] [-] askafriend|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|10 years ago|reply
Pop music is not as important as it was either. Musicians used to be huge cultural phenomena, and a kind of escape into another world, now there are tons of similar escapes (computer games, for example, a huge thing, weren't even available to the common how when pop was huge, nor where social media, chat, YouTube, Instagram, the modern "artistically relevant and high production quality" tv series and tons of other things). Now you can ask 10 people and they wouldn't know a current top 10 song -- whereas in the 70's for example it would be inescapable.
And graphic design has faded too -- there was a brief period in the mid-eighties to early 00s were graphic designers were huge pop heroes -- interviews in magazines, stars like Neville Brody, David Carson that you get to hear about even as a layman, etc. Now it's only other graphic and web folk care about graphic and web designers.
>People change, and the culture changes.
It's also good however to be making judgement calls on those changes too. Else we accept everything and anything as fate.
[+] [-] kingkawn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bane|10 years ago|reply
I remember when this was part of the national debate around the NEA. The reason that the people seeking to defund this stuff was that it simply was garbage as art. If classic art sought to pull on "positive" emotions and move and inspire; modern art seemed determined to confuse and then move on to outrage.
Somewhere in this dwelling in negative emotions, modern art became indistinguishable from a satire that nobody was bothering to produce. It was an overly serious bunch of belly button dwelling backed by amateurishly crafted production most pre-schoolers regularly produced. Instead it became a game of one-upsmanship and gross-outs devised in the minds of 10 year old boys. Anything that wasn't deliberately trying to rile the audience was laughable "craftsmanship" and interesting in any way. The art scene became incestuous and further and further isolated itself from any potential audience.
Classical art was put out in public places for any passerby to see -- Michelangelo's "David" was displayed in a public courtyard. While it's true that classic forms became tired and formulaic, the modernist movements didn't generally replace those forms with anything of particular value.
There's interesting things going on in art in the modern world, but modern art isn't one of them.
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|10 years ago|reply
Or, more generally, any potential value of it is subjective, and evaluations of merit aren't actually taking even that into account.
Offensiveness doesn't seem even remotely relevant; some people may enjoy works that others find offensive. On the other hand, foring others to involuntarily fund "art" without using any measure of the value provided either to the people viewing it or to the people funding it (and utterly disconnecting those two groups) seems ridiculous, and leads to problems like this. And then you get into definitions of "art", and criteria for what should and shouldn't get funded.
With all the myriad ways of connecting with potentially interested audiences today, much of the rationale for speculatively funding art no longer exists. If you make something people find worthwhile, you don't need public support, and if you're not, you shouldn't receive public support. Produce samples, get people interested, find patrons (or customers, or both), build larger projects, repeat. And if you want to work on something that nobody else cares about enough to fund (or that you don't care about seeking funding for, for any number of reasons), that's called a "hobby".
That doesn't mean that "culture" devolves into exclusively "pop culture". It doesn't take a large number of interested people to provide a substantial amount of funding; a very small amount of money from a thousand people can fund a career for one. So this certainly doesn't mean that only the makers of mass-market popular culture can get funding; quite the contrary.
Defining "art", or setting criteria for receiving funding, then becomes irrelevant for anyone other than philosophers or art critics. If people like something and want to support it, they can.
[+] [-] mturmon|10 years ago|reply
I saw the original series in the early 90s in a retrospective in Manhattan, and your characterization of it as "garbage" is shallow and erroneous.
First off, they are large prints, and beautifully colored and detailed. They have a beautiful, aestheticized quality. The series of photos also uses other bodily fluids like semen, milk, and blood -- fluids which are highly symbolic, especially for Catholics (Serrano is a believer).
Seen as a body of photos, it comes off as transgressive, sure, but also suggestive of processes that run the world -- reproduction, excretion, nourishment, care for young. But also, at the very same time, richly symbolic in the Catholic tradition.
As a point of reference, if you are familiar with the works of Gilbert and George (NSFW: http://www.harpersbooks.com/pictures/16976_cspread1.jpg), who have also worked with large scale photos of shit, semen, etc. -- Serrano's works are not provocative in the same way. His series was actually rather philosophical and meditative.
[+] [-] yk|10 years ago|reply
Two examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mauer-betlehem.jpg
http://nypost.com/2013/10/21/new-banksy-artwork-has-fans-flo...
[+] [-] mmcwilliams|10 years ago|reply
Your definitions of "classic art"[1] and "modern art"[2] have to be pretty narrow to argue this. I know anyone can pull a few counter examples to any objectivist statement on the arts, but I have a very difficult time believing any argument that's based on the earnest belief that classic art drew on "positive" emotions while modern art is driven by "negative" ones. What kind of art are you looking at?
Just want to point out; that Jeff Koons piece is displayed publicly.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Francisc...
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Bilbao.K...
[+] [-] api|10 years ago|reply
It's the old "if you mistake a bush for a lion that's fine, but if you mistake a lion for a bush you are dead" cognitive bias. I've thought for a long time that it manifests in art via shock, negativity, outrage, etc. being a cheap route to profundity. You have to work hard to make positive art profound because the bar is higher... you don't get the easy free profundity points negativity gives you.
[+] [-] protomyth|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codingdave|10 years ago|reply
Not much of this (if any) is going to show up on gallery walls, and I am not even claiming that I like much of it. But it is art. And it is absolutely relevant to the people creating and viewing it.
We have an entire generation of people growing up knowing that they can create. Whether those creations use traditional art media, digital media, crafts, or something entirely new, the point is that the creative process is alive and well, vastly more so than when I was young.
[+] [-] themartorana|10 years ago|reply
Creativity is everywhere and in our daily lives and basically infused into every corner of the new culture. Damn near everyone is a photographer, and a hefty number of us don't suck at it either. We're writers, critics, performance artists, musicians and videographers with a huge shared publishing platform. We can share and sell our creations and art with huge audiences with ease. Problems are approached as creative exercises. I'd even argue that the code we write may be art - I profess to find great beauty in some of it.
It's pretty cool that as weird as Snapchat is to some of us, and as creepy as Facebook is, they're popular mostly because they allow people to share their creativity, as mundane as it may seem.
Yes, some if not much of it is pedestrian at best, but the rate at which we consume art, and the ease with which we can create and share art is mind-boggling for those of us that remember "before."
[+] [-] rrmm|10 years ago|reply
The other change is that there is less of a gulf between "fine artist" and the common person who likes to "do art".
I would however like to see people made aware of the fact that they are "making art": Not so that they can be conceited about it or high-brow, but so they can understand their connection to all the art and artists that have come before.
[+] [-] carsongross|10 years ago|reply
--Frederick Hart
[+] [-] alricb|10 years ago|reply
Well that's a pretty standard Decline of Civilization article there. Well done!
There are issues with modern art and sophomorism, yes; essentially, the big problem with art is artists, and the way they learn to spew bullshit about their production.
There are also big problems with architecture, which is really a τέχνη, and not really an art in the fine arts sense; big architecture spends a lot of time on arty one-upmanship and not enough on the practical matters that make a building work and last.
[+] [-] suncanon|10 years ago|reply
We are bombarded with audiovisual media now. A painting, a song, or even a "shocking" performances is much less valuable in a supply/demand sense than. (500 years ago, something as beautiful and pure as a painting was very rare!)
But new forms of art have replaced them. Relational art ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_art ) is a popular one. Relational artworks use humans, not media, as material. A relational artist might say that what is rare and valuable today is not visual media, but human connectedness and meaningful experience. A relational artwork might try to help a community solve a social issue, or create social connections that would not otherwise exist.
These new forms of art are not evaluated on how shocking they are. They are evaluated on how they affect the world.
[+] [-] pdiddy|10 years ago|reply
In the 50s, people could identify Buckminster Fuller, Saul Bellow, or Jackson Pollock. Many educated people now could identify Frank Gehry, Toni Morrison, or Jeff Koons. But having a cadre of public artists who "shape in meaningful ways our image of ourselves or define our collective values" is a very narrow way framing the issue and has not been the trajectory of art for decades, if ever.
Look at that reception to Marina Abramović's The Artist is Present. People stood in line for hours. I saw a segment about it on CBS Sunday Friggin' Morning. The public is engaged with art, it's just not the art that the writer wants them to be engaged with.
[+] [-] frankydp|10 years ago|reply
Through out history the majority of artist have been craftsman that create for the sake a client, state, or church. Sometime in the last couple centuries working artist have become taboo, and that meaningful creation for a purpose other than that of the "pure" artistic value has been pushed out of High Art.
The fact that art the Author classifies as art, is not modern media form(TV, CINEMA, DIGITAL) seems to ensure that the prophesy should be self fulfilling.
I do not know of any contemporary ceiling painters.
[+] [-] VLM|10 years ago|reply
Its a classic holiness spiral. How do you denigrate the average american slightly more than the last guy without offending, or being ignored, by the average american? Its the confusion of art with political propaganda.
[+] [-] veddox|10 years ago|reply
Now do not get me wrong, of course artists must engage in a dialogue with the society in which they live, and of course art is a great way of expressing political and social opinions. But when the fundamental purpose of art - the creation of something beautiful - is lost, all that remains is politics masquerading as art. And no wonder nobody wants to see that.
It is perfectly possible to produce art containing both: beautiful content and a strong message. Just take the Expressionist artists and poets of the Great War as an example. Wilfred Owen, Georg Heym, Otto Dix - they all produced incredibly strong anti-war art (poems and paintings) that still displayed a very high standard of artisan skill. There are many, many other examples, from many different points in history.
What happened to that legacy?
[+] [-] miahi|10 years ago|reply
> Witnesses to a knife attack at a Miami art show thought they were witnessing a piece of performance art.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...
[+] [-] cLeEOGPw|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
But not that much trouble in major cities. Even the Detroit Museum of Art just managed an expansion. The Cleveland Museum of Art is expanding. In SF, in the last twenty years there's been the new Asian Art Museum, the new DeYoung building, and the SFMOMA refurbishing. On the other hand, the George Lucas Ego Museum was banished to Chicago, and the Grateful Dead museum didn't get built. The City of San Francisco has access to a huge stainless-steel peace symbol, but nobody wants it in their neighborhood. The classic fine arts are still winning.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|10 years ago|reply
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=high+art&year_...
[+] [-] veddox|10 years ago|reply
Which is a great shame, because there is incredible beauty in those art forms that many people nowadays miss completely. All because we somehow gave the high culture/classic arts the labels "snobby", "stuffy", "boring", "unintelligible"...
[+] [-] cousin_it|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] veddox|10 years ago|reply
It should totally be above the viewer in the sense that it should get him to broaden his horizons, to deepen his thinking and to cultivate an appreciation for the craftsmanship that goes into art.
Art that is exactly at your level may give you some temporary pleasure, but little else. The German classical poets saw art as a means of educating peoples' personalities. If you always stick to what you can already understand without a problem, when are you ever going to grow?
[+] [-] isolate|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sanoli|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zhkirill|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pervycreeper|10 years ago|reply
Artists have failed to keep up with the times in terms of scientific knowledge. Humanity's understanding of, and relation to the universe is completely different compared to a century ago. Those on the soft side of CP Snow's Two Cultures have responded to their waning relevance by denying the importance of their technical counterparts, however, world culture cannot be fooled so easily. Scientific literacy is now as necessary as the ability to use language, and there's no going back. Our artists will now have to keep up or else they will become obsolete.
[+] [-] coldtea|10 years ago|reply
Then again, that's not their role.
Besides scientists have failed to keep up with the times in term of aesthetics, emotional development and morals too.
[+] [-] rdtsc|10 years ago|reply
The part about art auctions and art pieces being sold for more and more money, make sense. With growing inequality it makes sense to cater to the few super rich. You can sell them paintings, or custom hand made golden watches, or what-have you.
But yeah the middle class, which is supposedly erroding, like to go to museums because, well they are there when they visit a new city, but they'll probably not be spending $5-10K buying paintings or sculptures.
There is a mention of digital and film, and that is a valid point. Video games are art, design is art as well, so is film. Movies and shows are popular still. Perhaps peformance art and other traditional forms are in decline but digital lives on.
Digital art and music is also combining. I found about vaporwave a few years back, for example :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave
It is kind of fascinating, it combined early Internet and computer art -- images of Windows 95 load screens, with a synth music. It has elements of late 80s and 90s nostalgia, it both glorifies and makes fun of consumerist culture.
Here are few example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU8HrO7XuiE, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RFunvF0mDw, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyEusKu44wc, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t0fVy0Td64
[+] [-] bane|10 years ago|reply
For decades there's also been a few "underground" digital art scenes that are unusually vibrant and have gained some measure of respect outside of their specific milieus. The demoscene in particular has become famous for audio/visual and technical excellence that almost requires an educated and informed audience to appreciate on deep levels, but is also at least entertaining to non-in-crowd viewers.
[+] [-] necessity|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solidsnack9000|10 years ago|reply
> “We are making it out of ourselves” is a fair summary of the revolution in patronage the modern movement had brought about, in which the artist himself had now been transformed into his own patron.
So at some point, artists stopped working for a living. And who doesn't want to do that? But work has a curious way of keeping things grounded and relevant.
[+] [-] coliveira|10 years ago|reply
Modern society has shaped a world where the mass of people dictates what is interesting or not based on the money they pay for that product. So, the Beatles are viewed as important, not because their musical skills were better than thousands other musicians, but because they were consumed to a point of making a big difference in our society.
In a mass society, there is a huge pressure to lower the quality of everything, because this means that more and more people will be able to enjoy it. That's why people are not creating the next 5th symphony, they're creating instead the next Justin Bieber song. In such a world, fine arts have no power because they are not able to move lots of people in the same way that a video game or the next Star Wars movie can.
[+] [-] nan0|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] liamconnell|10 years ago|reply
Look up fin de siecle Vienna if you aren't familiar with it. Decades before the war, artists in every discipline were pushing in weird directions (not necessarily in a bad way!).
I think its important to recognize this. Then more than now art was an important aspect of everyday life, and I dont think they write in history books that "many people in Austria and Germany were going batshit crazy" was an important part of the classic WWI "powderkeg".
[+] [-] noir-york|10 years ago|reply
An operational, if cynical, definition. But it will have to do until we go back to not being afraid to judge, to offend, to debate views that are not "politically correct" (the recent Rhodes statue "controversy" being a ridiculous case in point)