There is no such thing as 'cheating' in art
muddycolors.blogspot.com
muddycolors.blogspot.com
Of course, good art uses the limitations to its advantage. Most paintings aren't photorealistic because they're not trying to be photos -- they're trying to say something through their limitations. A good book or a good text adventure allows each reader to create their own images in their mind.
So, is there 'cheating' in art? Of course not. It's simply a change of medium. If you want to cross photographs with painting, go right ahead. That's a new medium, capable of saying new things. Don't pretend it's the old medium, and don't try to compare it directly to works in the old medium. But also don't dismiss it as 'cheating'. Take everything for what it is, not for how it compares to what you were expecting.
In my opinion, text adventures can have a certain beauty
because they tell a story in simple words (for a great
example, see Photopia).
Likewise, as well as Nick Montfort; Ad Verbum is exceptional.
I think this is the fundamental difference of opinion between people who think you can "cheat" in art, and people who don't.
I would argue that judging the quality of art based on the difficulty of producing it betrays a shallow appreciation of art. A person who says that is basically saying "I have no basis on which to judge this other than whether or not I could have produced it myself."
This is why you'll see a lot of overlap between people who sneer at "cheating" and people who dismiss things like modern art and found art as "not art".
In other words, the two groups are essentially using different definitions for the word "art".
And if you use that definition, you can't 'cheat' at art.
Agreed. I've seen debates over whether various forms of "abstract" paintings are art, but that's not a particularly interesting debate. Of course they're art; the simpler and more useful question is whether they're good art.
I think that's the easy answer... but if you went to the curator of the art institute of Chicago, of the MoMA, or any other art institute of renown, they would have more strict interpretations of what's art, I would think.
That is there is "Art" and there is "art".
>"does someone call it art? Then it's art"
definition and have a poor opinion of anyone that attempts to be any stricter than that.
This comes from a painful history of curators dismissing lots of "modern" art in the 1960's, and thus missing out on lots of extremely lucrative investment opportunities.
But you're talking more about what becomes avant guarde and that's established by trendsetters. Sometimes that's people with money (maybe most of the time) --and curators race to tap that new trend. Sometimes there is little objective reason why something is "in" in art vs. something else. Remember the demand from Japanese patrons who had money before their bubble burst? And the artists raced to fill that demand and then the art dealers had no use for that art. So, some mediocre art can become important and the next day be forgotten. Curators, artists, galleries all are tuned into their patrons and their money. That's what sets trends and defines what's art.
There are few cases where that's not true --like the New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape exhibit. But that's the exception, I think.
None of which has much to do with what you might think of as reasoning about "is" and "is not". The question is never asked. There's no point to it. No value in the asking. That's an "art critic's" job. not a Curator's job.
And even in Art Criticism, since the dawn of "Post Modernism" there's been an implicit almost non verbal agreement to never ever question the "Art"-ness of something. It's never about whether it is or is not. Only what an artist is attempting to say, or what you are able to grasp from a work. To question the is-ness is boring and pedestrian, and marks you immediately as someone who is not really clued in.
Questioning whether something is art or "Art" with a capital A is kind of equivalent to an ad hominem. It has nothing to do with anything. It's name calling. It's not taking the argument or the artwork for what it is.
I may have mixed up the white card with a black one - but I do remember in travelling up the US east coast seeing three unaltered bits of paper in art museums, one white, one red, one black, with two of them in MoMA. I vaguely recall the red one having a thin, simple frame.
The thing to keep in mind with stuff like that is usually it is not a straightforward case of they have trolled you and the museum as you may naively think.
If something is a blank red sheet of paper in a frame, perhaps dated from the early to mid 1960's they are likely referencing Kazemir Malevich, and making a joke about it perhaps along the lines of "I wonder how far I can take this minimalism thing and have people still call it art".
Once you can notice this, the cultural reference and context itself become the art- not necessarily the physical object, which, devoid of such historical or cultural context, is indeed just a blank fucking sheet of paper.
You may as well criticize Doge because you don't get why it's funny.
It's not funny, but you can still understand its context in internet cultural history. In 30 years you will remember doge as some significant cultural event, and contemporary artefacts will acquire value for being related to the event.
None of it is funny or good. but you remember it for its cultural significance.
A blank sheet of paper from the 1960's in a museum needs a little bit more help.
Context is a weird thing with art. I remember an unsigned landscape painting that had experts split on whether it was done by $famous_artist or his student (I can't recall the artist). If it was $famous_artist, the painting was worth $200k, if the student, it was worth $2k. Independent of the merits of the specific painting itself, the name of the painter was worth 99% of the value. I get why that is, I just think it's a bit funny.
The problem is that set membership isn't always binary, and not all members of a set share all the same characteristics. Just because something isn't difficult technically, doesn't mean it's not art. More importantly, if you're using "not art" to mean "not difficult technically," then saying "this isn't difficult technically, so it's not art" isn't a worthwhile statement. It's the disguised implications of the word "art" which make such statements so contentious. To paraphrase Eliezer, the argument about what is and isn't art is really a dispute over whether to infer art-related qualities of the work, like fitness for a museum. A dictionary is of no use here.
I am not satisfied with this definition.
Suppose we have 4 bricklayers constructing a wall. The four have worked together for a long time, and are very professional; they are capable of creating a uniform wall despite the wall being the product of their combined effort.
One of the four bricklayers claims that brickwork is art, having been artfully laid by a skilled craftsman. The other three bricklayers make no such claims about their work.
Is the wall art? Are only portions of the wall art? Can we distinguish the disjoint segments of the wall that are art and those that are not? If the artful bricklayer claims that the work of his colleagues is art, does it become art? What if they insist that it is not?
You've stated the problem (that our definitions of art are too vague), but to take this to the next level, we would have to define art, and get everyone to agree. That's a bigger problem than the one we face now.
> I am not satisfied with this definition.
To move beyond rhetoric, you would have to propose a definition that everyone would agree on. In the meantime, art is in the eye of the beholder.
Photorealism refers to a specific period and set of artists, post Pop-Art. They used photographs very extensively, Richard Estes is one of the better known ones.
http://sayforward.com/ext/images/bus-reflections-flatiron-bu...
Art is all about limitations
The value of art is inextricably linked with the process used to create it. People will have a very different emotional reaction to a painting which is created by hand than a painting which is programmed into a computer and painted by a painting machine (this generalizes all sorts of ways, this is just an example). His examples were specifically of people who were deceptive about the process they used, first in the camera obscura, second in Frank Frazetta.
Of course, the term "art" is so imprecise that you can essentially import anything you want into it, including, if you so choose, the notion that part of the art is the practice of deceiving patrons about the way it's created in order to enrich yourself. I will allow that you can be an artist and lie about your methods to make your art more emotionally impactful, but I will not allow that doing so is the right thing to do or makes you a good person deserving of praise.
If I'm creating art by painting by hand on tiny grains of sand and the world becomes enamored with it, but it turns out I'm actually using a computer-driven process to paint them (in order to become rich and not to later reveal my actions as some sort of castigation of modern art or some other such thing; basically, take a charitable view of my example here), I think one of the following is the case no matter what your definition of art: 1. It's still art, but it's not art in the way I'm trying to suggest that it is, or 2. It's a performance art where the deception is part of the art, but I'm still a bad person for doing it.
Now, I'm not certain that the author would disagree with me (or that you would agree with me), because he doesn't directly address it in these terms. But he does say "I don't care how it's created: I only care about the results." and he also says that Frank Frazetta lying about how he created his art "does not diminish Frank Frazetta's art in the slightest." Perhaps he's saying that the art is still good taking into account the methods which he knows of and keeping mum on Frank Frazetta's deception. Maybe he doesn't think very thoroughly about ethics and so he's inconsistent, or maybe he has a system of ethics where deceiving people in this instance is okay.
Of course, presumably many artists are not specific about their methodology, or they could say that they want it judged by the results, not the methods, in which case I agree with the author that it should be judged as it is as an artifact. But I reserve the right to change my emotional reaction to the piece if I later learn that their method is to hire 10,000 third world artists to paint as well as they can and they select the best to portray as the result of their artistic process.
As for "copying", even copies can be quite extraordinary.
http://www.evoke.ie/photograph-of-an-old-guy-no-this-picture...
Art is easy because life is easy.
I've always gone by the idea that art is all just communication of some kind. There is a speaker, an audience, an idea sent, and an idea received. The exact idea received will never be exactly the same. It is always dependent on both the speaker and the audience, and how much shared culture they have. Art is fundamentally a fractal. It is the use of bits of culture to express new bits of culture.
Even people who say, "It means nothing" are saying something. They're saying, "your never-ending search for meaning in the world is inherently meaningless". Because if the artist never wanted anyone to interpret their work, they would never show it.
Art is not just for artists.
Similar to how Leibniz and other pantheists said God was everywhere, but this meant God had a different denotation that what everyone else thought when they heard the word 'God'.
Also, if I create a work that I immediately destroy and not tell anyone about, or give a private performance no one sees, did art not happen?
Your examples of a telephone book, a traffic signal, a TCP/IP packet, are interesting, because these are all things that, in their specific form are not made by a person, which fails on my first criteria. They're made by machines. However, the infrastructure in place to provide them was made by a person. And I would absolutely call the telephone system, the highway system, or the Internet a work of art. I don't think that's even controversial.
I had a friend that literally this is what he wanted. He wanted to to be told what was and wasn't art, what was good and what was bad art, so he could know what he should be spending his time and money on. Emphasis on had a friend, he was a dolt in a lot of other ways, we don't hang out anymore.
"Not everything can be art!" He would say. Why not? Really, who gives a shit? Why did he care that some things should not be art?
Art is fundamentally in the personal reaction, just as much as it is in the delivery. The two are inextricable. A rainbow is not art if you don't believe in God, but it is if you do.
I consider art appreciation to be an important step in becoming a well-adjusted, tolerant human being. You have to learn to know what you like, and why, and you have to learn that others won't agree with you. THAT'S why people refuse to define art, because they don't want others defining it for them and don't want to be found guilty of the same sin. Because it's in the personal reaction as much as the delivery.
So by that measure, no you can't (and I don't mean shouldn't, I mean it is physically impossible) to call something you've kept to yourself "art". The word "art" is itself a communication of an idea. To call a painting you burn before you let anyone see it, a dance you do in the mirror, a song you sing in the shower, is to attach meaning to it, and meaning is for the purpose of communication. At that point, if you do communicate it, you've performed it in some form. Perhaps the art is your retelling of how skillfully you masterbate. Or perhaps the person you are communicating to through your journal is your future self--who is himself of a different, more experienced, though shared cultural background, as present day you. Its artness is made in the transmission of the idea, and immediately so.
You might be familiar with the Fluxus movement in art; if not, you might find some of their ideas interesting too - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxus
There's very few things that won't make you feel something if you choose to look at them. By that I mean we ignore all kinds of stuff in our day to day lives but pull out any one thing, a spoon, a rock, a front door, a crumpled can, a beer, decide to pay attention to it and you'll feel something.
I don't have a better definition, all I'm saying is I could make an exhibit taking the next 50 things I see and just displaying them. Some would call that art. I'm sure they'll be a big debate about how collections are art, the act of creating an exhibition is art, etc. That's not really the point I'm trying to make. Rather it's that if I can pick up literally ANYTHING and display it and it magically becomes art that's not a really useful definition, at least to me.
As an example of your kids' mess, check out Tracey Emin's 'My Bed' [1], it's basically just a mess, but by deciding it is art and exhibiting it for that purpose it becomes art. But when it was in her house in the exact same state.. not art, as it wasn't intended to be.
It's important to remember though that confusion is not an emotion.
On the other hand, if you mean that nothing intended as art can lack artistic merit, making the concept of "artistic merit" useless in that context, then I fully agree.
"Mathematicians vote to disqualify new theorem discovered using brain-enhancing drugs"
Any constraints given to a "form" of art are illusory. Every constraint can be deconstructed and bent into meaninglessness.
There are no forms, just our perception through living. We have the benefit of sensation - creating contexts and realizing patterns. This leads to valuing or appreciating certain presentations, but that's all arbitrary based on how we experience our existence.
Art is a marketing term for what most of us would call living.
On one hand, it sounded like a ballsy excuse that could be used in any field to justify ripping off other people's work. On the other hand, the painting did spark an interesting debate about originality. No matter how you look at it, I think it's pretty funny.
Thus, when artists use photography they may not use it as a tool to expand their abilities, but as a crutch to compensate for lack of skill. And they try to argue around that by saying something like "art is not about skill it is about ideas and expression". But the thing is, when you get the skill then you can also have much more interesting ideas and expression.
For example if you look at a portrait done by one of the old dutch masters, you often see so much expression and emotion and character in the face. This is often much more than you can see in the usual modern photograph to say nothing about the crude camera obscura methods of the past. How do they do it? Well they use their skill in connection with their vision in order to make painting more powerful. They make minor embellishments and subtly change this or that to make the face look more striking.
But my point is, in order to do all of that you have to have the skill first. It is not that easy to separate skill and expression.
I think that is why many artists today are talking about how the old masters used camera obscura. They just want to provide an explanation as to why no-one seems to have the skill of the old masters anymore. By the way that theory is wrong. All you have to do to prove it wrong is look at some rembrandt self portraits, for which he could not have possibly used camera obscura and which do not differ in technique from his usual portraits.
Now maybe I am being too hard on artists. Those skills are tremendously difficult to master, even if you do have the talent. And considering people do not spend much on art anymore, it is probably unfair to expect today's artists to spend the enormous time and effort to obtain those skills. Perhaps, certain art skills will be permanently lost like ancient violin making.
That's ok, and I cannot blame artists for being creative and expressing themselves with the skills and techniques they can practically develop. But lets not lie to ourselves and pretend that it is just as good. Something is definitely lost when a photograph replaces a face drawn by a skilled master.
He's far from the only artist working today who's as hardcore as the Old Masters. He's just the first one who comes to mind.
Not one of the old Dutch masters, one of the old Dutch masters and their apprentices, who sometimes did most of the legwork for the master. Anyways, Holbein the Younger kicks most of them into space, except for Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
> I think that is why many artists today are talking about how the old masters used camera obscura.
Canaletto used a dark chamber, his paintings are considered to be so accurate that the Venice authorities have used them to assist in calculating the change in height of buildings over a two hundred odd year gap.
> All you have to do to prove it wrong is look at some rembrandt self portraits, for which he could not have possibly used camera obscura and which do not differ in technique from his usual portraits.
Are you sure all those usual portraits were painted by his own hand? The number of genuine Rembrandts has dropped a lot in the past few decades.
> Now maybe I am being too hard on artists.
No you are not, these days the artist can be very hard on the voyeur.
http://jakeanddinoschapman.com/works/zygotic-acceleration-bi...
Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no
possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.
- Salvador Dali- choice of language for a project
- the decision to use this library or that, or to "roll your own"
- etc
Ignoring the obvious "cheating" of plagiarism or copyright violation, there's still occasionally pressure, internal or external, focus heavily on tools and methodologies over building the actual thing and focusing on its essential traits, weaknesses, and strengths.
And finding the right balance between the attention given to tools versus the thing you're building is itself an art of sorts.
Cheating, in art, is generally linked to where the audience can later consider themselves unjustly deceived.