Thirteen Ways of Looking at Art
salmagundi.skidmore.edu
salmagundi.skidmore.edu
Art is a form of expression for the parts of us that are hardest to express.
The question posed in the first definition is perhaps the most interesting, i.e. why are flowers beautiful? Flowers appeared ~130 mya while mammals appeared ~225 mya, so this cannot be coded in our "reptilian brain."
I like the answer posed "natural selection went too far", the only answer we currently have. To push the analogy, these traits that we take to define our humanity are probably our brains "hallucinating," trying to optimize some unnecessary group of functions. Why are flowers beautiful? Why do we believe in God? These are probably unintended consequences of our evolutionary brain. Yet these "bugs" define us and are the source of all that we find great about us.
Some flowers are plain-looking because they are beautiful in infrared or ultraviolet, for example. That is, they are beautiful to their intended non-human audience. The fact that other flowers are beautiful also in the human visible spectrum is either a fortunate accident for us (if it is a wild flower) or a deliberate choice by their pollinators (if it is a domesticated flower that people plant on purpose).
Here's a quote by Georgia O'Keefe: “Whether the flower or the color is the focus I do not know. I do know the flower is painted large to convey my experience with the flower – and what is my experience if it is not the color?” I don't think color is the whole story: As I write this I have a vase of yellow tulips in front of me. My wife and I are particularly fond of this particular combination, any other flower of the same yellow color won't do.
A dominant theory is that natural selection favored individuals with extended long wave (red) perception. Better color perception enhanced locating high-quality food resources and avoiding toxic plants. Human vision also resolves finer detail than many mammals.
Flowers are worth noticing, after all, they're precursors to fruit which may be edible when ripe. Appreciating the form and color of flowers isn't a random phenomenon. In its present-day form, like most things human, the "beauty of flowers" is a complex phenomenon arising out of interacting biological, social and environmental factors.
Why limit to mammals? Female birds of paradise are way more likely to mate with the male birds of paradise that do exhibit the most harmonious colors (to our human eyes: so female birds of paradise happens to share the same taste as humans when it comes to harmony of colors).
I'm fascinated by how our brains get from "A beautiful woman" (feel free to modify according to gender and sexuality) to "A beautiful building."
Beautiful humans - whose attributes aren't necessarily physical - are mostly just high quality potential mating partners.
A beautiful building will have proportion, texture, and rhythm. But it's quite a reach to get from one to the other, even if you start from "symmetrical faces are attractive."
Somehow the experience became abstracted. Or certain features did.
And then you get music, which is even more abstract.
How does all of this work? I have no idea. It's fascinating, but hugely under-researched.
By that logic, isn't everything subjective? I mean, everything we experience triggers a subjective sensation on which we put labels.
The notion of beauty can be rationalized to some degree: that's the goal of composition. Let me give you one notable example: unity in diversity.
Clouds, flowers, trees (vegetation really), mountains, all follow this rule, and are generally subjects considered pleasant. The principle can be used to give a strong identity to an artwork, while keeping it interesting.
I let you ponder about how this principle manifests itself in music.
That's to say, I don't think it's under-researched. Instead, I think that the "everything goes" mentality we've had for a while now, especially in visual arts, has concealed the idea of the existence of such principles from everyday people. But they're still well-known, at least as soon as we demand strong technical skills from artists.
Why not?
> The true work of art leads us from that which exists only once and never again, i.e. the individual, to that which exists perpetually and time and time again in innumerable manifestations, the pure form (or Idea).
Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World
My 13 year old daughter came home last night and wanted to tell me some things about Schopenhauer. It was a good day.
What is untrue art?
Ymmv.
He reminds me of YouTubers that got famous making like reaction clips, pranks and the odd sketch that then think they can write (or even act in) a feature film
The fun thing with art is that people started making anti-art [2], which is now, of course, also considered art. Possibly the only thing not being art is mediocre art. I am perfectly willing to devote some time to making that into proper art as well.
Give a contrarian artist a definition of art, and they will destroy it.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/koonss-monument-to-the-unk...
The process of making art gets the artist high.
The consumer of the "art product" gets high too, but in a somewhat different and lesser degree.
-- https://www.superiorviaduct.com/cdn/shop/products/SV154_web_...
I have such little patience for this sort of writing. If you are going to claim there are 13 ways to look at something, then put numbers on them and make it a list so it's easier to consume.
"Art is for seeing the world from different perspectives. And also money laundering and tax avoidance."
;-)
The most telling (and frustrating) point of information is that 96% of people surveyed think art is important, but only 27% think artists contribute to society. (Did I read that in this piece, or run across it in something else today?) I mean, and I say it advisedly, WTF? That disjunction is what allows tech companies to get away with everything you point out. I have no idea how to fix it.
But... Yeah. That's probably the explanation for the disconnect. It's so extreme, though. Everyone (literally everyone!) owns and / or enjoys things created by artists. I think the education- / elite-driven insistence that Real Art is fine art (or maybe just old art) - like, Breughal counts, but the exquisitely crafted mug my wife bought at the farmers market last week doesn't - has something to do with it as well. Which is stupid, because that whole idea was stomped to dust by 1900 or so, and yet it remains.
People in dominant positions justified steamrolling people whose humanity was inconvenient, in part, by insisting on the universality of the rigid, outdated, old Western conception of art... and they clearly still do.
I was only really commenting on the blustery, arrogant yet often uninformed pseudo-intellectual conversations about art that always seem to happen in tech crowds. Cringey DK vibes. Even more since generative AI took off. Having worked as both a developer and a designer in software, I’m surprised I’ve never passed out because my palm was so consistently covering my face when these topics came up.
I dunno, I prefer art that is breathtaking at first sight and self explanatory (eg. Starry Night), versus a piece that requires an explanation, like Andy Warhol's soup cans or some abstract modern art that consists of random splashes of paint that somehow makes sense of it all.
In person it's overwhelming, because it's huge - much too big to hold in your head at once - and every corner of it has something happening in it. Something horrible, or a horrified / horrorific reaction to something horrible. The abstractions and symbolism also create this kind of dreamlike, inarticulable sense of "we'll never get to the bottom of this" - with this being the painting itself, and by extension the experience it depicts.
My guess is that an inhabitant of a future utopian civilization, which had eliminated violence for generations, would have no frame of reference, and no (or an inadequate) emotional response. I don't, however, think it would take any specific knowledge ("in 1937 the Germans..." blah blah blah) to recognize and respond to the painting as depicting experiences and responses common to violence and destruction and war anywhere and any time those happen.
Your own personal tastes don't apply universally to anything, especially art... so I guess don't understand the point you're trying to make here.
Not "Hmm... now what's this all about? A soup can?" And then someone has to explain "Oh, this is Andy's fascination with consumer culture and processes of mass production."
Same goes for photography. For instance, that famous National Geographic cover photo of the Afgan girl. I was a kid when I first saw it in the '80s. I didn't learn the history behind it until many years later, but I didn't need that extra layer of description for it to be forever etched in my mind.
Sure, and I'd love to change it!
If your opinion is "art must wow me immediately" you're missing out on a huge chunk of the human experience!
Not saying you have to go become an art historian, but an art history class can really open your eyes as to why our world is the way it is today.
I ended up traveling with the professor and a few students to Europe on an 'art history tour' and it was absolutely mind-blowing.
If you are truly interested in art, I highly recommend getting a class on both how to look at but also understand and even critique what you see, as it can really change your worldview for the better.
But yea, I'm definitely interested in art. Aside from my day job as a digital artist, I love painting on canvas. Nothing that would win an award, but it's fun: https://i.imgur.com/L4kMhg9.jpeg
AI art is attractive to people who
a) want to experiment/discover (novelty)
b) have mediocre/no taste (commodification)
Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of the amazing stuff that's coming out – but art is an inherently human-to-human transaction, and taste is one of those things that is both hard to describe but easy to detect.
Bet. Of course if what you care about is something that has nothing to do with the actual content of the painting, then you'll need to generate that part too to make a comparison.
bzzzzzt wrong! ;)
History.
Context.
Culture.
Aesthetics.
All of these things can be associated with objective facts, not just relative interpretation. As a for-instance, Guernica is a depiction of an important event in history, by an important Spanish painter, who was exploring new ways to visualize and record the world through his own lens.
Conversely, using generative AI, I can synthesize any history, context, culture, or aesthetic input. Very cool and novel I'm sure, but completely disconnected from, say, the screaming women, dead babies, and dismembered soldiers of the Spanish Civil War that Guernica depicts.
Those may be objective facts (I'd argue some of them are subjective judgements, but let's put that aside), but they are not the content of the painting. As Magritte would remind us, Guernica (the painting, rather than the town) does not contain any "screaming women, dead babies, and dismembered soldiers"; rather it contains arrangements of pigments that we interpret as representing those things.
Maybe I was spoiled by art of folks like Rembrandt or Vermeer viewed in museums, I like this form of art, I like seeing proper multiyear effort of struggling artist recognized only long after death and the resulting beauty, this sort of suffering always brings the best artist forward.
Especially compared to folks who pump their ass full of some color, spray that shit on canvas and sell it for millions. The only emotion in this is insult, and you definitely don't need art for that, daily news is enough. Literally everybody I ever asked this, from various professions and intellect and so on has roughly same opinion.