All that to say, I really like this series of works.
It's a bit like coding, where simple and elegant solutions only come to you after you reach a certain level. People looking into your work might think that the solution is simple enough that even a junior could do it, but it's not the case. It takes another good engineer to spot one. :)
This is incorrect (although I don't know anything about the artist in question). Contemporary art degrees are heavily moving away from teaching craft or even consider it a valid aesthetic or criterion for judgement (along the lines of rejecting the notion of good/bad/better/worse). Was there any identifiable craft involved in this piece? Did the artists remove from circulation the boxes that weren't broken in just the right way? Is the art more interesting to look about than to talk about? Marginally... I find the pile of boxes sorta aesthetically pleasing, but its not clear to me that was even done by the artist (and not the gallery).
What part of this piece are you proposing that a total outsider/complete amateur couldn't create on a first pass? The form of the glass looks to be haphazard, (ie, unimportant the artist). The boxes are off the shelf. What else is left?
That is an interesting perspective. I have always judged art by its aesthetics and its ability to elicit thought / conversation equally.
In my view art becomes shallow when it is purely visually appealing with no conceptual backing or purely conceptual with uninteresting visual components.
Damien Hirst once had a work on display and a janitor threw it out - because he truly thought it was garbage. My toddler daughter once “ruined” a Mathew Barney work on a wall - it was a smear of black jelly that she smeared some more. The guard quickly looked the other way while motioning us to leave.
Working in the gallery world I would read the epic descriptions of works for sale. A lot of ink went in to creating and describing the value of art works that had no apparent worth. It is fashion to be sold and adorn and tell your friends about.
Not all modern art is like this, some works can be appreciated for its intrinsic properties. But this requires more skill, and dedication, and is rather rare.
I value art similar to the rule about food - if your grandmother would recognize it as art then it probably is, if not then maybe not. And all things art - it boils down to opinion. This is mine.
http://absurdnotions.org/an20020724.gif
http://absurdnotions.org/an20020731.gif
http://absurdnotions.org/an20020814.gif
(Images taken from (http://absurdnotions.org/page104.html) and (http://absurdnotions.org/page105.html))
Actually I thought it was Tracey Emin, I searched for it and it was both - and more other occurrences in other countries. https://www.bing.com/search?q=cleaner+throws+away+art&first=...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Nicholas_Serota_Makes_an...
No wonder the janitor thought it was trash and threw it out.
That's a great story and gave me a good laugh. But with a lot of these pieces, there is a strong sense that the object isn't really the artwork, in the same way that a program isn't really the exact bits on my machine.
Recently SFMOMA put up a Sol LeWitt, one of his "Wall Drawing" pieces, which involved some employee of the museum carefully painting it on the wall. At the end of the exhibit, the whole wall got painted back over. In my opinion (and that of the curators of SFMOMA), they weren't actually destroying a Sol LeWitt; the actual piece is something more abstract, including but not limited to the instructions used to paint it onto the wall.
In the same way, most of the wall drawings of Matther Barney are about the act of drawing, not really the artifact that is the result: https://d2jv9003bew7ag.cloudfront.net/uploads/Matthew-Barney...
We'd all be alot better if in circumstances like this, we would say "I don't personally value this" instead of "there is not value in this for anyone."
If there weren't people that valued it, it wouldn't exist. The fact that it exists demonstrates a certain level of cultural value.
Modern Art == "I could have done that" - "Yea, but you didn't"
Imagine instead, someone makes a post on https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/ about how they connected some glass panels together and shipped them in fedex boxes. Then put them in their living room on top of the boxes they shipped in as an art piece.
The next place that post would end up is DIWHY. The reason anyone thinks its a truly inspired meaningful commentary on modern times is simply that it's being presented as such. It's on a clean floor, with professional photography, with a news article about it. The context, the author, and the opinions of the people around you, all work to subconsciously influence your opinion.
I could totally see the top post in the subreddit with the carpet-pedal bike as part of a season exhibition in the Tate Modern.
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
Like Tom Knight, I was able to fix a broken machine by slowly power-cycling it :)
As far as discharging capacitors, that's an issue if you turn the computer off and on rapidly; the power supply can continue supplying power for a few seconds due to its capacitors, so the system might continue uninterrupted.
So, when someone says, "anyone could do that", it's likely a statement about being able to produce a similar piece of art. Could they paint a painting similar to the squares above that people could mistake as another painting from the same artist? Yes, so they make that statement. Could they write a novel that could be mistaken as a follow-up book from a famous writer? Not likely, so they don't say it. So, it's not a statement about being able to directly copy the work (like I might have referred to in my previous comment), or a reference to the creative effort involved, but a statement about being able to produce a similar piece. However, I think people mostly take into consideration the technical ability of the artist, they overlook the creative process to reach that point, and they're focused on a single piece when a large part of the talent is in being able to consistently produce such work.
The reason that people won't say "anyone could do that" about something that is indeed incredibly difficult is simply because it would be a clearly false claim. I didn't try to list all cases where people would not say that. I only explained what I think people generally mean when they do say that. Of course most people cannot do these supposedly "uncreative" yet difficult tasks like running really fast or lifting very heavy weights [0].
People say "anyone could do that" about things which they think are fairly simple to physically reproduce and which they think required very little creative effort. Physically reproducing a famous novel on a typewriter is relatively simple, but the creative effort required is clearly immense. Thus people do not say "anyone could do that." Physically reproducing hundreds of pages of seemingly random text like "asdfasdfasdf" is roughly as easy as reproducing the famous novel, but certainly appears to require much less creative effort. If someone was shown a book with hundreds of pages of that seemingly random text, they very well might say "anyone can do that."
[0] I actually reject this part entirely, because I suspect world-class excellence in all of these things actually do require a great deal of creativity and original problem-solving in honing one's mental and physical states. Photorealistic pencil sketches, for example, presumably require no less creativity than photography, and photography is widely recognized as a creative art form.
It's amusing how well this correlates with having little experience or background (this doesn't apply only to art). Not perfectly, but extremely highly correlated.
It's also often the case that people make these sorts of comments not after seeing the art itself, but after seeing a decription or low fidelity reproduction of it.
Modern art = I could do that × Yeah, but you didn't
https://design-milk.com/images/2010/11/modern-art-craig-damr...
Not that this incarnation isn't clever as well.
Which touches on one of the disenchanting things about technology (that is probably not actually true, but how I feel): it feels like we've only got "hard ideas" left, most accessible to the experts, those with resources, those with a lot of time.
Art is showbusiness, and success is largely the result of flukes and many of the great names of history would easily have been unremarkable if it hadn't been for several fluke events.
It's entirely possible that many did such things before, but never became famous with it, and one did, and largely became so as a fluke simply because, say, an influential critic came across it by chance, and decided to write a positive piece, after which the ball was set in motion.
Yeah, that's the problem. Surely people did this for kicks from time to time. When I was younger, I used to fill old wine bottles with water, freeze them, then turn the cracked remains into candle holders. I had a few of them, and thought they looked cool.
There's some disconnect between what I did as a bit of crafts, and calling it an objet d'art that's a commentary on .. well, anything, that I don't fully grok.
I once saw an piece in a Boise gallery that consisted of a cardboard box filled with opened tubes of squeezed paint. Many people would walk by dismissively but upon closer inspection the entire thing was a ceramic sculpture.
True of all good design - Art and Software included
A lot of modern art I've seen maintains the "lots of people could do that relatively easily" aspect, but it doesn't have the "if someone else had built the same thing, I can see how it would have succeeded." Ie it's easy in retrospect, but it's not obvious.
My personal take on it is just that a lot of it is basically nonsense / garbage, but perhaps I'm just cynical and closeminded.