AdumbroDeus said:
And people who haven't even seen the piece start commenting about how modern art is trash, typical.
Perhaps you guys don't realize this, but YOU'RE NOT THE CROWD THAT IT'S AIMED FOR.
Compare a lot of modern to games like limbo. Notice how stylized the game is, to the point where everything is completely abstract and seen only as shadows. That conveys a lot of meaning, but at the same time, principal one of modern arts is:
1. The more abstract the art becomes, the more meaning it can convey, but the more difficult it is to discern the meaning of the piece.
This is true to the point where some pieces intended to convey many layers of meaning are complete gibberish. This is the point where people can sneak bullshit in as "art". Since this is the level where telling the difference between something that has many layers of meaning that are simply difficult to discern and having no meaning whatsoever requires a significant art education, this is the level where people can give meaningless pieces to rich people who like being opulent.
What do you mean I am not the crowd that the art installation is aimed at? apparently neither was the cleaning lady, or 99% of this Forum, then who the blooming heck is the intended audience? It's supposed to be
public art. You can't make an artpiece, have everyone tell you "That's a load of bollocks!" and then say, "Well YOU can't criticise it, because YOU are not the intended audience." To come up with that excuse shows that there is something gravely wrong.
The point of the shadows in Limbo are that they appeal to our simplist instincts. They are jagged, dark and dangerous looking, which universally creates the feeling of dread, of a dangeous, unfriendly world that you are not safe in. There is no "Well, that particular jagged edge is personally very meaningful to be because it appeals to my socialist fears and discredits my far-right leanings, from a political perspective..."
The shadows in Limbo create a universal ambience that
anyone, from any race, background, social standing, will find makes the game more tense, darker, and more mysterious. No one will play that and say "Oh yes, the shadows reminded me of the My Little Pony cartoons!" What a delightfully whimsical feeling the game created.
To use the shadows of Limbo as a stylised feel for the minority is bullcrap.
Good art should be recognisable to all, if not, the vast majority of people. Stand that cleaning lady in front of a Da Vinci painting, or under the Cistene Chapel, and I'm sure she will be able to appreciate the skill and craftmanship that went in to it. Read her some great poetry, "The Raven" By E.A.Poe, which is written in such a way as to invoke dread pretty much universally in it's hearers, or sit her down in front of an orchestra, and have them play some Bach, or Beethoven. Again the melodies, harmonies and various crescendoes etc. will fill her with delight, or at the very least she will recognise that it took considerable skill and effort to come up with such music.
I have a paint-stain in my Garage. It is, for all intents and purposes, similar to the fake rain stain that was so vigourously bleached away by the cleaning lady. Now, if I were to show that paint stain to anyone else it would mean nothing.
That stain was made by my dad, who has a furious temper and will bite the head off you whenever you do the tiniest thing wrong, but one day when he was mixing paint he knocked half a tin of emulsion paint onto the garage floor, and it dried there and has stayed ever since. I could call it "Nobodies perfect" and seeing it would remind me that, looking at our strained relationship, even he makes mistakes.
Again I have two secondary school history books of his, one Classwork and one homework. My dad is a serious academic and amateur historian, he pretty much holds academia above all else, so it greatly amused me that, while his History schoolwork book is full of perfectly neat written essays all with 9 or 10 marks out of 10, his homework book is an absolute shambles, filled with disasterously incompetent scrawlings clearly written in the toilets and clockrooms in a blind panic 5 minutes before class. My favourite piece in it is a 3 page essay about the Communist "Leon Trofsky" (marked 3/10 )
The best bit about knowing he was terrible at doing his homework is that I was exactly the same way (and since we both went to the same school we probably did our homework in the same toilet cubicle)
My point being that those things, while having immense personal value to me, mean absolutely nothing to anyone else. They are not art, and certainly not public art. They are mementos, or keepsakes. To quote a bloke from radio 4, in an argument as to why videogames aren't art: "I'd suggest that the things we really consider art are the things that allow us to ask profound questions about who we are, how we live and the state of the world around us. I think most games don't get to that place, and it's important to set that bar quite high." Now, you can't say of the now extinct puddle exhibit "You are not the crowd it's aimed for" because the piece raises no questions of ourselves, or the world around us. In that case it is the fault of the piece, not ourselves. If an exhibit designed to create an emotional or intellectual response in a person does not achieve that goal, then it is a failed exhibit.
Finally I would just like to pull you up on this point:
telling the difference between something that has many layers of meaning that are simply difficult to discern and having no meaning whatsoever requires a significant art education
Bullcrap. This is the same type of attitude that leads to all those crap interpretations of poems that are obviously false. I did English for A-level, and we did poem interpretations, of which there were two stages. The first was to look at the technical and academic devices in the poems. Alliteration, Similies, metaphors, the rhythm, rhyming structure, assonance, etc. And this showed the skill of the poet, to be able to create such a deliciously flowing collection of prose that tripped off the tongue and would sound so pleasing to the ear when read.
Then we had to interpret them, and this relied totally on the ability of the reader to talk absolute codswallop about nothing at all, "Oh, this poem is actually about war, or sex" (Handy Hint: virtually every poem in existence can be interpreted to be about war or sex.)
As I said, if you need an art degree to understand public art then you are most certainly doing it wrong! No one ever looked at Michaelangelos David and said "I don't get it, what is it supposed to be?" It is this hoity toity attitude that the strength of the art is in the personal interpretation of the viewer that has resulted in so much bollocks being produced. The artist should be the one creating the visual metaphors and intellectual themes through his art, not dumping a pile of rubbish on the floor and saying "That's my work over, now you have to work out what it means. Can I get paid now?"
Thankyou for listening. I have been Hero in a half shell, and this has been the Escapist's Art Corner. Goodnight.
