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[wombat]

Sure, but guitar playing and songwriting are different skills. Why is everyone smushing them together like this? Beethoven could write a symphony with parts for all the instruments in the orchestra even though he did not personally play every one of those instruments. Composing and performing are not the same thing.

[AugustWest]

But isn't there room enough for both?  Isn't there a place for both Segovia and Sid Vicious?

I think it comes down to the purpose of art (art in its broadest sense, whether visual, musical, verbal or whatever).  I think an artist's purpose is to elicit a feeling in the perceiver.  What's wrong with trying to elicit odd or even unpleasant feelings?  Or with using unconventional or even offensive methods, if necessary?

Since we're on the subject of guitar playing, Frankenchud played our third gig today -- a Derby party.  We played for about an hour and half to around 50 people.  They seemed to enjoy it.  A few girls danced and a couple folks were very complimentary.  I mostly played banjo, but I did a few guitar songs too.  Fun times!

[theinevitable]

It is totally fair for someone to have a recording contract because they are a great songwriter even if they are not a virtuoso player. But I would not call someone a good guitar player because they were a good songwriter. Why not just say they are a good songwriter? These things are not difficult to tease apart.

I think this is the thing going on with these paintings. There are aspects of the practice of artistic painting that are different than "representing things on a page with paint." You could learn to reproduce objects in photorealistic detail and maybe be considered a painter, but without the other aspects of artistic representation you would not be "an artist." Painters make decisions about coloring, composition, framing, subject, and on and on. Abstract expressionists are focusing on these aspects rather than their technical ability to paint stuff. Color choice, dimensions, technique, texture, etc.

[pmcd9]

A Derby party, like Roller Derby... and only 50 people showed up?

[Nabubrush]

More likely a Kentucky Derby party, I'd think.

[pmcd9]

More likely a Kentucky Derby party, I'd think.

Oh yeah.

[Nabubrush]

Right after I posted that I thought "Paul is just busting on Aug" but I went ahead and left it.

[wombat]

But isn't there room enough for both?  Isn't there a place for both Segovia and Sid Vicious?

No one's suggesting there isn't, but shouldn't we distinguish the two?

Painters make decisions about coloring, composition, framing, subject, and on and on. Abstract expressionists are focusing on these aspects rather than their technical ability to paint stuff. Color choice, dimensions, technique, texture, etc.

That makes a lot of sense, and what is wrong with American education that no one ever explained that to me that clearly before. But then here's the thing: sometimes the results of those decisions are hard to distinguish from something done by the proverbial kindergartener, or like those Rothkos, a house painter. And that is when it is really hard for the average person not to suspect they are observing the output of a circle jerk.

[theinevitable]

What it took for me to realize that that was what was going on was a discussion about a girl we know who almost got kicked out of art school, because they found out that all of her paintings were "copies" of some photographer. My art friends were much more upset by this than I was, so they explained that this is major cheating.

[side_show]

The harder question is the one about art that does not require skill.

It's all in how you define skill.  When it came to my past work, when teaching children to understand and appreciate various forms of creative expression, I follow the theory of multiple intelligences.  Within this frame work, you can look at an artist, say an untrained actor who is incredibly skilled at interpreting and eliciting emotions and appreciate that they have strong skill in interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences, while maybe they lack in other areas.  If they lack in other areas, if they have a capacity, an artist can work on building their intelligences in other areas, but no matter how much he studied, I doubt Mikhal Baryshnikov could become a math genius.  I guess this is why I defend Rothko so vehemently.  He has strong intrapersonal and visual-spatial intelligence.  If you measure a painter's skill by the kinesthetic skill to be able to control a brush, and say produce a photo-realistic image, then Van Gogh would be considered a failure - he himself in his earlier career was constantly frustrated by his inability to control the brush, and was driven out of more than one art school and condemned as a failure because of it, until he decided to move away from attempting to recreate an image and instead to paint the underlying emotion of the image.

Which image of night do you prefer?



One is "Edge of Night - Timber Wolves" by Robert Bateman," who is known as a virtuoso of the kinesthestic skill of brush control and naturalistic intelligence related to a strong understanding of biology, botany, etc., while the other is Van Gogh's "Starry Night."  It's clear who has the stronger brush control of these two artists, and I think, also clear who has the stronger grasp of emotional expression.

When it comes to appreciating art, it's a personal experience, very much about which areas of intelligence stimulate you and which you value most.  Just because an artist lacks a skill you value most doesn't necessarily make them unskilled.  People can deeply value a Rothko painting because they hold values different from your own.  This doesn't mean your values or theirs are wrong, just different.  It's what makes art so interesting and controversial.  

[Jaded Tersk]

That was a pretty awesome post.

[Nabubrush]

Mel, you know I really love your writing, but if you convince us all that saying "your favorite band sucks because I don't like it" we might as well shut the board down.

I hope it was clear in my little post about movies that I wasn't so much dogging out those movies I don't like as expressing surprise that the same critics could be enthusiastic about both Repulsion (which I thought was spectacular) and L'Eclisse (which I thought was very dull). However, I'm pretty sure it's me that's fucked up, because Scorsese liked it and he knows some shit about movies, whereas I don't.

[side_show]

Thanks JT.

I think, despite the fact wombat is implying Rothko or other abstract artist have no skill (and I disagree), maybe what wombat is really getting at is not necessarily about this.  She is getting at the fact that there are artists out there who actually do not give a fuck and are genuinely creating art as a little inside joke to themselves and maybe another small circle of assholes who are in on the joke.  Some of these artists have massive aesthetic understanding and do these things in ways so veiled that it breeds a sort of distrust of all art.  There have been several movements of artists like this over the years, as well as plenty of solo assholes out there doing the same.  I can't recall the names of movements, I think one in the visual art world was called "fumism" or something like that - translated from French, which is the art of blowing smoke up one's ass.  Basically artist who are intentionally trolling their audiences, patrons, funders, etc...  Like "I am going to smear my feces on a canvas, put a price tag on it, give it some ambiguous name, and some dumbass who doesn't know it's a joke will buy it and hang it in his dining room."  

What should give us all some peace is that though those assholes are out there, they are outnumbered by passionate people creating because of a deep inner devotion to their creative forces. 

[Victoria Waterfield]

Is something art just because you hang it on the wall?

Don't get me started!

[wombat]

I think, despite the fact wombat is implying Rothko or other abstract artist have no skill (and I disagree), maybe what wombat is really getting at is not necessarily about this.  She is getting at the fact that there are artists out there who actually do not give a fuck and are genuinely creating art as a little inside joke to themselves and maybe another small circle of assholes who are in on the joke.  

All I'm saying is that it's really hard for a normal person to tell if abstract artists have skill so I think you can't blame people for being skeptical. I mean, I think the reasonable hypothesis is that Rothko is a great artist under some definition of great art that I can't appreciate, just because I don't think you can fool the whole world of museums and academia and collectors to that extent. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, and I don't think you'd last long trying to convince people that the paintings of some orangutan were by the next great young artist. Those artists you can't remember the names of didn't manage to do something similar, clearly, since you can't even remember the name of their movement, so they didn't make much of a mark.

But still, anyone is physically capable of painting two blobs of color next to each other, so personally I have no way of knowing that he is not pulling that kind of inside joke, except the word of some kind of highly trained authority.