MrHoatzin

Um, method acting?

Does your thesis have anything to do with promiscuity and/or realism?

lol

Holy cow! There is a huge retrospective of Maurizio Catalan's work in the Menil in Houston! I need to check this shit out! :tup: Any of you local/regional punks up for an excursion? The show is open until August, and I am currently in the middle of buying a house and moving, so a weekend later this summer?

I'd argue that modernism is more rife with dead-ends. Post modernism is just aimless. How many kids do you know who paint color fields? To be fair, a badly compressed dinky jpeg is hardly representative of what that thing may look like in real life. I've seen some really impressive, humongous color field paintings that seem to bend the space in front of them and do surprising things with subtle shifts of color. I think promiscuous realism is useful tool for an outsider to make sense of an observed conflict (i.e. you looking somewhat detachedly at what the two of us are bickering over). There is something unsatisfying and ersatz about this kind of relativism that assumes that neither side is correct and that neither side is wrong. On top of that, as you've presented it, it is a conversation killer wherein no ideas get shared and no minds can be changed. Agree to disagree and fuck all. We're not arguing over specific applications of our prejudices and premises. We're defining premises from which to start thinking about things.If a person's working definition of art involves beauty and virtue and Great Ideas and a decorative object in a museum, I don't buy that they can never recognize my definition, that the two definitions are patently incompatible and mutually unsatisfying. The only difference between the two is that there is about a 150 years of weird thought between them. If this person takes his/her definition, walks through a museum and sees garbage stapled to the wall and a fawning curator ejaculating all over it, I can see how he/she can declare that art is dead and meaningless. I'm trying to rewind these 150 years to explain how we got here. Either way, the people guilty for getting art where it is now are the tricksters of the art world, the people who looked at the art world around them and declared it to be decadent, depraved and incestuous, dead and meaningless; Impressionists, Dadaists, Duchamp, Pop Artists, Yves Klein, Anselm Kiefer, all the way to Maurizio Catalan today, they all said, fuck this shit and threw a wrench into the machine. The machine said, hmm delicious, and then their work became the defacto avant garde of the day. It is crazy weird that in their constant struggle to catch up with fashion and preempt it, the museums have left the general public behind. I think this is changing, though. All the curators I know are very anxious about appealing on as many levels as possible. Not necessarily. The end product, the result is the evidence of the process and the thought. If it doesn't convey it all itself, no amount of explanation on the wall next to it will do it to it. Often times, if I like a work but don't think it is telling me enough about itself, I would rather look at the artist's wider body of work than read the statement. Really, the only times I go to statements is when the work is about esoteric or political topics I know nothing about. Also, if the work is so bad that reading the statement provides additional schadenfreude value. :tup: It happens. Nothing is preventing you from finding something worthwhile and poignant in something that has no higher aspirations than entertainment. I saw the Addams Family movie from the early nineties the other day. I really liked the way they depicted all these murderous, grim satanists as ultimately loving family people. I thought that was something that transcended the promise of an entertaining romp through a cheesy horror house. Pirates of the Caribbean's story is a lot of fun and you can see everyone had fun making those films. It doesn't do much new, and the Davy Jones story is a kindof paint-by-numbers tragedy, but I don't think it is an irrelevant work of art. It has entered the culture and touched a whole generation of kids and created some neat archetypes that will stick around for a while. It is art. It is just not fine art (fine art, in turn, is defined by sitting in a gallery). A couple of podcasts ago Chris mentioned a little vignette from the new STALKER game, where he snuck around a dark room with some sleeping monstrosity and being freaked out by accidentally waking it by shuffling through his inventory, then running in circles from it, in the dark, etc. This is a perfectly viable example of how an emergent systems-driven creation can still be art. It is a comprehensive new experience that says something about how humans react under pressure. He wanted to do some sort of slick silent kill, but ended up just flipping the fuck out and shooting a dozen shotgun shells in the dude's face. Now, this game is about shooting things in the face (like most games), so I could see how someone could make a blanket declaration about how dumb games are. However, I don't see anything inherently preventing this kind of system-driven-auteurship from being applied to any interaction other than "shoot in the face". We're making small steps. The first novel was a weird, formless, meandering thing. It took 300 years to get from that to Great Literature Classics of the 1800s. A lot of deviant art is sortof tagging things already made by others and existing in the culture at large. The content of this stuff gets seldom beyond, I like Edward Scissorhands, so I will draw him! I also like Final Fantasy VII, so I will draw next to him the chick that just dropped dead in the middle of the story (whatever her name is)! And because this is deviant art, I'll make both of them into humanoid animals! I don't think this kind of thing is unimportant. It is quite important to people who made it, and people who like to be reminded of how much they like Edward Scissorhands and FFVII and sex with animals. The bottom line is, these kinds of arts don't have much to say. And I can see how a good number of video games can also be folded into this category. But there are plenty that do something more.Ok, so that was a lot of text.

I don't think this is necessarily a futile debate. I am enjoying this particular thread more than I would a comparable thread on, say, Shacknews or something. I really like the idea of promiscuous realism, but I am not sure that is what is happening here. I guess I am having a hard time looking at the purple bullet list above as arbitrary and subjective and personal. I could more easily look at it as awkwardly comprehensive—or, for that matter, entirely nebulous—than simply a kind of projection that Rodi doesn't care to acknowledge because it doesn't fit his scope of interest. We're not trying to ignore an existing category (lilies) in our own unique ways (cook vs. flower peddler), so much as come up with a satisfying definition for something scattered and hard to pinpoint.

Ok, took me a while to boil stuff down to bare bones. I am open to amendments, questions, booing, hissing: • Art is an alchemical process wherein a complex idea, an emotion or a feeling is conveyed to an audience. • The medium of art is arbitrary. Art does not have to be aesthetically pleasing or technically proficient. • Any value given to art is a social construct. • Art never exists in a vacuum. The audience brings its own context. Society applies another. History yet another. A corollary to the first bullet: An art that falls in the forest doesn't make a sound.

I think at this point James Lipton is an act more than an actual human. He's been at it for 20 years now. I find his affect hysterical. In small doses.

Pirate Bay is no more. Don't use that shit. I got badly virused a little while ago through Pirate Bay, forgetting they've been sued out of existence and sold to who knows who.

Man, no, that is not what I wanted to say. I just figured it would be more helpful to offer what I know as a starting point and talk about specifics than to just say GO READ ABOUT ART AND COME BACK WHEN YOU'VE UNDERSTOOD IT ALL, ASSHOLE. I have ABSOLUTELY no intention of pulling an Ebert here and judging shit as Worthy or Not. I do think I may have more of a granular historical perspective on this than other people here who want to participate. I may be able to give a TLDR version of theory since I may have a lot of this information internalized or a more direct line to relevant literature.

I don't think he made that argument, or at least he hasn't made it successfully. Either way, I disagree. The fact that in the last half century museums have gotten into the fashion business and started stocking up on (and raising the profile of) things that probably shouldn't be in museums doesn't mean we should stop using the term art and employ the more banal words descriptive of the medium (painting, sculpture, comic book, etc.). Rodi effectively wants there to not be a distinction between decoration/escapism and Something More, which is drastic and unhelpful.

Your attempt to expunge a common, widely-used word from the lexicon is a crazy academic exercise far more pretentious than acknowledging that there is confusing art out there and shit that blurs the line between random, far-fetched, fanciful, conceptual crap and classical, goop-on-canvas, hunk-of-rock art. I think if you spent a little time looking into the last 120 years of art history and theory the vagaries that anger you so much would make sense and not seem so obnoxious. There is no such thing as ovals! Ovals are meaningless! People who insist on ovals are deluded pretentious fucks, etc. You're too passionate about damning a large number of people who do see value in art that you do not—who see a need to distinguish between art and craft. I used to be there with you, hatin' on the ovals, but then I got better. This is not to say that I swoon at every piece of conceptual asshattery out there, but that I have figured out where all that stuff is coming from, historically speaking, and can see a) the difference between Art and Not Art, and where and when and why this became an issue at all. There are many different ways to draw this border. I personally like to ask if something passes the decoration test: does this painting do anything more than decorate? Is the artist trying to solve some sort of problem (conceptual, technical, narrative, architectural, etc), or are they obviously entirely in their comfort zone, churning media? And even then, I can see how someone could subvert decoration as a medium and use it to some conceptual end—whereupon they would still pass my test without creating a paradox. I would be happy to throw light at any specific annoyances with art you may have. Feel free to ask away.

I am shocked this kind of sentiment hasn't attained critical mass to be noticed by the management. HBO of all stations is probably the best positioned to charge the internet for its content.

It is not art's fault people make shit art. Guns don't kill people, etc.

Having worked on multiple monitors at work for a while now, I feel claustrophobic using photoshop on just one monitor. Throw all the docks and things on one and have a clean working area on the other. Keep mail and ichat in the secondary, a few terminal windows, textmate in both when needed. I also do the whole exposé thing with multiple desktops and different apps locked to each... It is probably far more complicated than it needs to be, and also far less organized than it could be. But yeah, multiple monitors for the win.

Feh. /me shrugs

To be fair that guy dumped a phone book into his article. Not mentioning Citizen Kane would've been a gross omission.

Apparently, since Katrina there's been a large influx of idealistic educated white kids into the city from all over the states. I think he's supposed to be one of them.

I just realized I don't agree with anyone who has vehement opinions about art. One way or another. They are often enough too dismissive, too specific, too angry, too dumb and caustic and pointlessly cynical (about art or about the plebeians who don't get it)—and they amount to the same retarded absolutist statements like Ebert's on which we're shitting right now. Congrats Rodi, you suck! Plus, I am really exasperated by the use of pretentious in the context of art. Please stop. Art does not need your approval to be art, nor does it need to be populist. It doesn't need to be elitist either! It is just that sometimes you need to use big words to talk about things and sometimes you resort to using a specialized lexicon or an agreed-upon format (talking about yourself in third person, for example*). Throwing PRETENTIOUS at things just makes you seem like a bitter outsider. Art is not just some rich kids club talking in tongues, though that is indubitably a part of it, and arguments can be maid that this is a bad thing for art and society and so on. But art in general is not vague and meaningless. Just like with any body of jargon-laced lit out there, there is bullshit and there are people who're actually saying things. Lumping all of the above into strawmen does no good to anyone. Here, for example, listen to what this cowboy has to say. * Personally, I can't stand artist statements. Too many people see them as an alternative to saying things with art. If I like the work, I may read the statement, and more often than not it tries to bite more than it can chew and it just makes me angry to the tune of, Sorry son, your shit doesn't do half of what you claim it does.

AAaaaaaaarrrggghhhhhhhhhhh aaack ick ptooey.

Spam, dude. You're talking to spam.

By making art.

:tup:

Looking forward to whatever the hell this is! :tup:

I think he is just vain.