I don't really make distinctions between "art" and "not art" anymore.
If art HAS to have some ethical/moral purpose than I'm not an art person because both visually and musically I value the aesthetic results more than the cause or inspiration for the work itself, if that means I'm not treating it the way art is meant to be treated than that's too bad. I'm a low culture dumbass.
It doesn't mean I don't think about the themes being explored in a work of art and I do highly value art that sparks the imagination. But usually I judge art in a very subjective way as in you will never be able to see a work the way the artist truly saw it when he made it even if you do a ridiculous amount of study on the subject, you could get a good idea but you wouldn't really know quite how these images came to his mind.
And so I think judging art is all about how you interpret it instead of trying to study it as much as possible to understand what the artist's point of view was, unless it's your academic field of interest. I don't feel like you need to go to art school to validate your opinions about everything.
Not saying you shouldn't get information about the things you are interested in when they can give you more insight about it.
It would be pretty stupid for example if someone were to write off a painting and not even know what movement the artist was from and what period it was made.
Overall I find terms like "art" and "kitsch" to be pretty useless and everything is how you percieve it.
Sorry I'm going off topic here. I simply think great art is great art, it doesn't have to have a "message". And while I won't deny that stuff like conceptual art is art, because the aesthetics aren't valued it doesn't appeal to me and it's not because I refuse to think about things, I think about real life issues all the time. It's just that conceptual pieces that I've seen usually try to make some kind of point that is so simple and obvious that I actually find it condscending.
Like you can take a chair, a picture of a chair and a dictionary definition of chair and group these things together, call it "one and three chairs" and exhibit it in an art gallery, and it IS art, but I don't have to like it, or be impressed by wordplay that a 5 year old could come up with.
Self referential art (or art for art's sake) was great when Duchamp did it because it was groundbreaking at that time but now it's such a stupid overused gimmick. "Look I know what art is, see how witty I am". Like people are getting too lazy to make actual art so they would rather just make pieces that preach to you about what art is.
Last edited by boo boo; 07-24-2010 at 01:48 PM.
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