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Comment by selune | Hacker News Reader

Is it even a widespread idea that "art promotes empathy"?

I feel like nowadays we're talking about morality of art mostly when we're talking about mainstream media (representation in popular media etc).

I'm no art critic but I've always thought that generally accepted truth about art is that there is no single concept, idea or purpose behind it. It used to be something along the line of "art is beautiful" but it's not even that now. Anything can be art and art can be anything and it can be perceived in numerous ways.

I haven't finished it yet tbh but I find this piece of writing weird because I really don't see where it's coming from.

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Roger Ebert, the popular film critic, observed that the purpose of the best filmmaking was to generate empathy in the audience

https://www.npr.org/2014/07/03/328230231/a-machine-that-gene...

As a simple-minded movie lover I agree with that sentiment regarding films. :) But cinema is just one of many artistic forms.

Do St. Peter's Basilica or Rei Kawakubo's clothes generate empathy? Should they even? Those are prominent, largely influential examples in their respective fields (architecture and design of clothes).

I think they do. If I found out someone loved those good things I would care about them more than if they thought good things were worthless.

Sort of off-topic here, but if you're a fan of Kawakubo and haven't yet read John Waters' hilarious essay about her, you'll enjoy it: https://032c.com/role-model-john-waters-rei-kawakubo

Maybe it would be better phrased as "art has the capacity for exploring and engaging with empathy"? Just because someone said a urinal is art doesn't mean that The Brothers Karamazov is less impactful to me.

It would make more sense but then what's the point in arguing about it? It has that capacity, because, well, I feel empathetic towards certain people/groups of people after, say, watching some movies. Case closed.

I feel like the writer wants to explore how effective this could be as a tool for social change since there is a huge discourse going on about it in the context of pop culture (representation in popular media, glorification of certain subjects (war, violence), objectification, etc) but ventures into weird and a little bit difficult to comprehend (at least for me) philosophical space.

A lot of people seem to hung up on the idea that art has to be good. Art can be completely deplorably awful, it doesn't have to be good to be art.

my understanding of (modern) art is that it's an avenue to explore/uncover cutting-edge and uncomfortable ideas, which is why it's often described as being "edgy". it can be seen as empathetic insofar as it makes us confront our own emotions toward others in relation to those others.

and the "goodness" of art is about consensus around the level of interestingness of the ideas behind it (ideally; of course, social considerations make that murky).

so it's not art if there is no interesting ideas behind it, or if people find it banal. if i hold up my starbucks coffee cup and say it represents hegemony and should be considered high art, well, no one will really care.

There is Found object genre(?), style(?) of art so Starbucks coffee cup could be an art object/piece if presented in a specific context.

yes, (well-known) found art has those two properties. the artist imbues the art piece with grand ideas about society (or whatever) at large, and a bunch of influencers (other artists, critics, collectors, etc.) find it interesting enough to elevate it to art.

i'd once heard a joke (story?) about found art where a janitor accidentally left a mop and a bucket while cleaning a gallery space and it attracted a crowd trying to discern what it meant. =)

You'd like an example of someone believing an obviously bad idea? To Twitter!

https://twitter.com/page88/status/1100441460934131717

In which we find a link to an entire book oin the idea:

https://press.princeton.edu/titles/6675.html

It is not necessarily a bad idea, it's just one of the ideas.

IIRC Ruskin, a leading art critic in 19th century, argued that art (aka paintings) should be moral and Christian and I'm pretty sure at least a few really clever medieval and ancient guys shared the same notion (albeit their ideas of morality were probably different).

But it's not a universally accepted truth. Just one of possible interpretations I guess.

Art is compression. The denser the data, the more meaningful/beautiful/elegant.

"Meaningless but aesthetically pleasing" is just decor.

Eh, aesthetic pleasantness does not always go hand-in-hand with art, not nowadays.

But yes, I can agree that art is essentially encoded data.

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