The easiest way to understand art is that it allows you the freedom of abstraction. I'm a designer / artist, I come from an art family. As a designer my work has to be agreeable, coherent, and functional. As an artist, I have no such restraints. And by nature, my wildest thoughts can only have a home as "art", because even trying to articulate those thoughts might not be reasonable.
Art is a form of expression for the parts of us that are hardest to express.
Your last sentence rings true for me, when it comes to the style of art I enjoy. Often darker themes that other people may be disgusted or disturbed by, I find peace in, such as death and alienation.
Excellent piece that touches on a diverse variety of thoughts! Each of the thirteen would make for a good conversation in cafe with one or two friends while drinking good coffee and sharing lemon and poppyseed muffins.
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.
They can also be unintended consequences in the evolution of the flowers. As I understand it, they are beautiful because they are trying to attract the attention of their pollinators.
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).
Good point about coevolution. Of course all thoughts on this subject are (currently) speculation.
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.
I imagine the answer to "why are flowers beautiful" is probably linked to a different question: why do humans have superior color vision vs. almost all other mammalian creatures?
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 do humans have superior color vision vs. almost all other mammalian creatures?
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).
Specifically in regards to flowers, I believe the vast majority of flowering plants are not fruiting, so there would need to be some other case here. More likely not having to do with humans, and more to do with attracting pollinators.
Flowers aren't beautiful. We experience flowers as triggering a subjective sensation we label beauty. Which is not the same thing.
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.
> Flowers aren't beautiful. We experience flowers as triggering a subjective sensation we label beauty. Which is not the same thing.
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.
> 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).
great quote - and the dialectic is that it is only through the most "individuated" individuals that such work can be brought forth (the Frankfurt school would say during Modernity, such individuals are not so much distinct, but the most alienated)
I think this individuation and uniqueness is probably what makes art truly "beautiful." I tend to be drawn to art that is often darker and would be described as depressing by most people, while finding positivity in the themes.
I prefer to think of art as anything made by man. Using this definition I can cherish a poorly crafted thing made by a friend, a child's scribble, a well crafted gear or an antique bronze from thousands of years ago as art. And that means we all are artists. All artistic categories are just groupings around an idea. Imagine a taxonomy tree where each branch has proponents screaming 'here is where art starts'
Banksy's art is definitely closer to teenager #deepthoughts Instagram pages than contemporary art imo.
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
I’m really tired of “art” needing to have an edgy message. All this messagey art doesn’t have the one quality I want in art: beauty. Why can’t art celebrate the good and beautiful in the world? What value does focusing on all the ugly stuff in the world have? It’s easy to find dirt in the ground, but rare to find gold; why not focus on the gold?
Art doesn't have to have a "message" to be "edgy" and to say that art doesn't celebrate the beautiful in the world makes me think you don't engage with much contemporary art. What it makes me think is that you engage with art by reading about other people's reactions to the type of art you are decrying, and then jumping to the conclusion that is what makes up contemporary art.
The issue is that everyone has a different definition of what is beauty. Sometimes focusing on the ugly helps to confront it in a way that isn't possible outside of art, for example, death. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I think it's very subjective, so you may find some things edgy and ugly while I find beauty and a way to connect to a difficult concept.
Art isn't beautiful if it's a cliche, and that makes it difficult. You can't just keep churning out the same kind of stuff and expect it to resonate the same way each time.
On the contrary, most great art - the kind people actually like, not the weird economic/signalling game sort - comes from exactly that, churning out the same kind of stuff.
Populism is for the artistically illiterate. Maybe a typical 5 years old thinks apple juice and hotdogs are the height of culinary arts, but their opinion is worthless to me because they're too uncultivated to know any better.
One productive way to think about the question what art is, is to consider the concept of "Family resemblance" [1].
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.
My undergraduate degree is in Fine Arts, and we did a Senior Seminar which amounted to a month of talking for a few hours a day on these kinds of topics. It was a ton of fun, and did force us to really go deep down all the paths mentioned here, and many others... and at the end of it all, there are no definitive answers. Art is whatever the artist or the audiences make of it.
> In order to go far enough, to make that feeling strong enough, it went too far. Others are powerfully lovely to us, but so, in a strangely different, strangely similar way, are flowers and sunsets.
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.
He does manage (via a cornucopia of namechecks) to implicitly —in addition to the thirteen explicit ways— provide a fourteenth way: by comparing and contrasting each work to its memetic neighbours.
(somewhat like albums and radio DJs used to do, but they, unlike Deresiewicz, usually limit themselves to not only a single medium, but even a single genre)
Well, I read it closely on your recommendation. It definitely had some worthwhile points. Still don't like the style very much. Still think he should learn to write, or at least learn how to write for regular people. (But maybe regular people weren't really his audience?)
"Philosophy" etymologically, is the "love of wisdom". It's very remote from what people commonly understand philosophy to be nowadays (and that you seem to be alluding to!).
Art(n.): An overloaded catch-all term for various creative things which people can nearly define however they want in any given context to lend unearned credence to their glib and/or self-interested philosophical stances.
I'm not actually cynical about art. My life is art: I went to art school and am a professional commercial artist. I'm cynical about the way people in the tech crowd use the word, now: glib, hamfisted philosophical snippets to redefine art to only legitimize fine art without monetary compensation so they can totally ignore the human effects of spraying the entire world with the vacant sheen of generative AI. Yes. I am very cynical about the tech world's attempt to define art right now.
Former performing artist here, and I totally agree. Thanks. I don't think that's what this article was trying to do, although it wasn't particularly great.
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.
The problem is the 'art is important' people think about stuff like The Peasant Dance (Breughel, 1568). When they say 'artists don't contribute' they think of the 120k USD banana taped to a wall (which was promptly eaten by a hungry student).
Ironically, the banana piece was all about pointing out the triviality of (much) contemporary art!
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.
I just watched a solid mid-90s documentary about African art on YouTube. It focused on the colonial Europeans and subsequent anthropologists wild misinterpretation of beautiful African objects, and how that was used to justify the oppression. In many African traditions, the idea of "art" as it exists in the European cultural vein doesn't even exist: the aesthetic imbued into the practical everyday objects like masks used in ritual is inextricable from its function and the tradition of craft that informed its construction. It would be ridiculous to say it isn't art, but equally ridiculous to interact with it using Western philosophical conceptions of art.
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 agree the article wasn’t trying to do that, and I also didn’t think it was good. It read like an arrogant philosopher trying to be edgy at the apex of a coke binge.
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.
A useful reminder to the AI crowd: it is an inherently human experience. You can gin up all the picassos you want on your LLM, but it'll never achieve the impact or emotion of Guernica.
> You can gin up all the picassos you want on your LLM, but it'll never achieve the impact or emotion of Guernica.
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.
The actual content of the painting is the arrangement of pigments on the canvas. Anything above that is interpretation. (E.g. I'd argue that discussion of the hare in "Rain, Steam and Speed" is often not really about the content of the painting)
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.
> 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.
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.
I'm curious if you think that AI art is only attractive to people generating the content? Surely there is an audience, since it continues to grow in popularity.
Popularity isn't highly correlated with artistic value.
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.
Your example of Guernica: If someone with no knowledge of the meaning behind it, and saw it for the first time... would they really be emotionally blown away? Should a painting have to be explained?
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.
My taste is in agreement with yours, but I'm not sure Guernica fits the other examples you gave.
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.
It's just my opinion, but I like visual art that you'd say "wow!" or "beautiful!" when you first look at it.
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.
I took an art history class at my local community college just on a whim.
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.
That sounds awesome. I actually went to Barcelona once (where Picasso studied art at one point). Some cool pieces there to see.
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
I come to art for a very different reason than modern art tries to press on me and emotions they try to evoke in me. I simply refuse to play that game, have herd mentality and just accept opinions and emotions of others.
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.
