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Comments
This is why I prefer art in the form of books and movies and such.
not, but with very few exceptions, failing as a communication device means failing as art.
I think the stumbling block here is that we disagree on the purpose of art. I do not feel art exists for the gratification of the audience, it is for the satisfaction of the creator. Certainly, Art can have an audience, but the purpose of painting a painting or taking a photo is to gratify the person with the brush or the camera, not the person looking at the end result. The fact that people are willing to pay for art is something of a happy accident that came about as a result of the overlap between aesthetic craftsmen and artists.
Just curious, what is your opinion on Pollock and abstract expressionism?
I, personally, like abstract art only if I am able to see some aesthetic value to it. For example, I find Mondrian's paintings to be quite beautiful, but I simply can't see the beauty in Pollock's art, so I can't like it.
I can't separate art from the audience. Something the creator does on their own time for their own purpose is a cathartic activity, but to me art exists for everyone else.
And bleugh abstract expressionism. If Pollock or Newman get their jollies by flinging stuff at a canvas, whatever, but don't expect me to concede that it's particularly deep.
Oh, see, I agree that art is there for the artist first and foremost. An artist should embark on a project that manages to reflect on his own personal vision and idea of what art is as well as what he feels art should be.
The thing is, normally, artists intend to say something with their art. There's no such thing as art that is completely made in a vacuum, as art normally responds to the world and other art. I mean, look at Dadaism, for instance. The whole thing is born out of disconformism with the mainstream idea of what art is. And I feel that when artists fail to make such message explicit or implicit, they fail as communicators.
ETA: As for Pollock, I like his aesthetical proposal, but otherwise, I don't think his art does much as a communication device. With that said, he's in the rare exceptions where his aesthetical proposal makes up for his failure as a communicator.
Fair enough.
Basically, Juan said what I am thinking way more eloquently. When there is no message that the piece of art tries to convey, the only thing left to judge is its aesthetic quality. I find Pollock's art ugly as hell, so I can't find any quality to it.
the thing about Pollock is that he spent almost his entire life struggling with a severe Alcohol addiction, and his paintings were essentially vast acts of catharsis. Abstract expressionism pretty much embodies what I said earlier, about art existing for the Artist, not the audience.
My photo teacher, who is a huge Pollock fan, actually showed me an interesting fact about Pollock's work. There's a certain element of his paintings you can't describe that brings them to life, but if you look at the stuff he did during a period where he was broken free from his alcohol abuse they are just dead paint on dead canvas, because they were done without any of the emotion that drove his other work.
Its because of this that, I think, trying to apply the idea of Aesthetic Value to abstract expressionism, especially action painting such as Pollock, simply does not work because its entire purpose is bypassing aesthetics. They are emotion itself, expressed in a medium, without filtering through the traditional "rules" of art.
ED: I also should note that I feel meaning can exist separately from communication. A lot of abstract stuff does not exist in a vacuum, but it doesn't try to communicate anything to any audience.
And see, to me bypassing aesthetics isn't necessarily a good thing. They're there for a reason.
Like, I understand that Pollock was a troubled guy who needed to vent things, but while that makes for catharsis it doesn't necessarily make art.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and aesthetics have never been anything but a puny attempt at the objectification and systematization of subjective reactions that always fails to be all-inclusive
I can't help but differ. There're a lot of aesthetical patterns and notions that almost every artists follows or breaks in order to convey an image. Rule of Thirds comes to mind, for example.
That is where we differ, as I believe that an element of catharsis is far more important and necessary to making something "art" than adherence to one of thousands of contradictory and noncomprehensive aesthetic rulesets.
Honestly, I'm going to say that both are tangential to what makes something art. A personal component is not necessary for a work to be artistic, and neither do they have to follow or break rules. But both of those components can help a work trascend its own medium in order to become something more valuable as part of a culture and society.
^^^ ...Erm, doesn't breaking or following encompass ALL artists in that case?
As I often say, we need to separate "it's not art" from "it's bad art." Just because Sonichu is artistically bankrupt doesn't mean it doesn't function under the same principles as The Order of the Stick (or, to a lesser degree, XKCD)--it just doesn't apply them as well.
Now, with that in mind, I can agree that Jackson Pollock's paintings are art. If we say that the audience determines art, then I can't say whether they're good or bad, because I don't understand them. If we say that the artist determines art, then I still can't say whether they're good or bad, because I'm not Pollock. I think the latter is more limiting than the former, since after all, there are far more artists who I'm not than who I am, and the same holds true for any other person who follows this logic.
This would be true if we met another species with both reasoning ability and a concept of aesthetics that differs from our own. Why consider the general agreed points of aesthetics invalid because of some people don't like it? Within a frame of reference the subjective can be considered objective.
I meant consciously.
I like Pollock's splatters. It doesn't have to be realism to look pretty. Now, perhaps there are people out there who'd call a photo of a man's dong on a cross "pretty", but I'm hardly one of them.
Decent advice?
Absolutely. This one really resonates with me because as much my personal philosophy is about knowing as much as possible about basically everything, my first girlfriend back in high school did not know a huge amount of stuff that most others did, and people were incredibly cruel about it. And Frances, brilliant as she is, has a similarly turned-inward mind and these days only gets broad cultural inflow from tumblr. And from me.
When she visited last summer we spent hours just looking at memes, so she could become familiar with how they worked. I've introduced her to so much music and a lot of anime. And this really isn't what Randall was talking about, is it?
Randall can teach people about math/science stuff! I'm one of those liberal arts/humanities guys he's always mocking and as history majors go I kind of suck at it. Tropers/IJBMers/BTLers in high school know more about history than I do! So what can I tell people about, really? Well, the history of my own university, but no one wants to hear it, and they can't be the 10,000 because there's only 5000 people here, most of whom I don't know. :P
BUT ANYWAY. Never assume anyone knows anything, and be nice when it turns out they indeed don't. The comic is basically right. Re: the alt text- I wish I knew more about the supervolcano!
Wikipedia is a good place to start. A quick browing online hasn't correlated it yet to any supervolcano doomsday scenarios I've heard associated with the Yellowstone Caldera, but still interesting.
I agree entirely. It's better to educate than to mock or denigrate and, as the comic points out, much more fun and interesting. One of the side effects is that the person you talk to might feel more comfortable admitting ignorance in the future and be all the richer for the questions they now do ask. Albert Einstein himself claimed that genius was in asking the right questions rather than having the right answers. There really is no such thing as a stupid question, apart from questions specifically designed to be stupid.
In the three-and-a-quarter years since I've been out of high school, I've become all the more enriched because I asked "why?", even if it wasn't to anyone in particular. The thing about private high school is that its whole structure revolves around the answers you need being provided for you in some way or another, but the real world doesn't work that way. So now I seek my own answers to the things that interest me. If I could change anything about how high school is handled in particular, I would ensure that it provides ample reason for students to seek answers rather than waiting to be fed them. It's a common saying that high school is poor preparation for real life, but that never hit me until I actually left -- it's kind of depressing how removed from actual academia, discussion and progression it is. High school is a fantasy land of its own, not only in social aspects, but in the way it skews one's perspective of the real world.
So, yes, I think the educational approach is always better. And it's always much more fun to learn from someone who sees this as an opportunity to have fun, especially if that person is skilled in describing things in ways that makes them interesting. For instance, I wish I knew a way to describe my form of swordsmanship in a way that garnered more interest, because some of it is mindblowing. Training with a sword is one thing, but understanding the system opened me up to new ideas and helped link knowledge I already had about unrelated things to a martial art from the 14th century -- pretty amazing stuff, yet it all comes down to slamming chunks of steel together.
Well the thing is, my high school friend/girlfriend, it wasn't about asking questions or anything. Things would would just come out like that she thought a certain now-President candidate was named (this was back in '07) Baracko Bama, or that (sometime in the next year, junior year) she'd never heard the word "cunt", much less knew what it meant. Or that, I think I've mentioned this one before, I stumbled upon the fact that not only did she not know what an aircraft carrier was, she hadn't even been wondering. Like, somehow she'd completely missed the existence of the whole concept, and when I introduced the idea as casually as could be, she was astounded by the fact that a plane could land on a ship. She remembered large swaths of 90's pop culture because it was sort of unavoidably shoved in her face in elementary school, and that amused me because it seemed rather out of character for her.
She was also the flat-out nicest person in our class and probably the only genuine idealist about global issues and world peace and stuff. Nearly everyone hated her. Can you see why?
She is not part of what today's XKCD is talking about. Not exactly at least. But there are an awful lot of people like her out there. Will XKCD ever talk about them? I doubt it. Randall might have hated her too if he knew her then. But it's important to realize that there are people like that out there and I don't really know what to call them but they're not stupid. I think I talk about my high school experience too much on the internet, but I hope it's getting through to people that this is kind of an issue. A minor one, maybe. But it's something.
How about ignorant by circumstance? They don't willfully ignore things, just for whatever reason, they never learned or even head of them.