Art and the Philosophy of...

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Giger is darker, this is more.. insane.

Modern art is pretention. It has no value than what the market assigns to it. I do agree that we crave for beauty, so it is not necessarily a bad thing. However, I do not understand most of the modern art. I'd prefer to watch the sun set than go to a museum of modern art. I have no empirical approach to art, but if I get a rational approach to it (Escher's works come to mind), it is somewhat more valuable to me.

The nice things about a sunset is that it's cheap, you can't sell it, it's frequently beautiful and it has no meaning. There are lots of modern art pictures that are beautiful and have no meaning but otherwise there are problems.

There are those who would not classify the works of Moritz Escher as art. Escher's intent (judging from the collection of his work) is to concretize and illustrate some rather abstract mathematical concepts. His stuff can be very useful for a mathematician who wants to sharpen up his visual intuition.

ruveyn

Well, there's your problem right there. Museums are the devil. Putting something in a museum is like embalming it.
<---Is a museum goer.

As an artist I enjoy going to museums and exhibitions. I learn a great deal from what other artists have done and are doing. If the work is mysterious and meaningless to you and you are angry because you are puzzled that is your personal problem. It takes a lot of effort and study to understand what artists are doing and if you are not interested in making the effort it is your loss.

Whatever a person, or significantly large enough group of people want to call art.


By whatever metric people give it, whether this is individualistically or sociologically determined.


The same value of everything else, subjective desire.


I find that with most things, rationalists are imperfectly rational, and empiricists are bound by their system of viewing the world. If anyone thought that the mind was some divine organ, they must have been insane, for flaws abound throughout our epistemic tendencies.

I don't think any amount of study will ever make anything Tracy Emin does actually "art". "Arse" perhaps, but not Art. And when an old till receipt can be sold as a piece of art, then you have to start wondering if you're looking at anything of merit at all.

Visual art is only one approach to perceiving the world. Literary art is another. No one would question a writer's right to attempt to present his or her views. The attempts may be foolish or imperfect or totally insane but it all falls into literature. Visual art is the same type of effort with different means. It may or not be successful but it should be looked at as an attempt from a personal point of view. There are different ways to value each attempt in any medium. Literature has the advantage in that a work may be reproduced at small relative cost and distributed widely. Painting and sculpture can be reproduced but rarely is the reproduction perfect or inexpensive and it suffers greatly from reproductive inadequacies. So, more or less, each effort is unique and acquires value from both its uniqueness and its success in whatever direction is attempted. The market value of a piece of art is most frequently confused with its effectiveness and it is a common mistake to value a work of art on its market value which, in many cases relies on provenance and scarcity rather than on perceptive and innovative qualities. If a viewer is interested in only understanding the motives of the artist and not in purchasing or investing in the monetary value of a work of art how much it is valued in money should have no effect on its artistic quality.

Wow, you guys have a lot of bright answers to my questions.
Now to mix things up..."Pretensious and wanky topic of the day!!"

Are video games art?

I believe Roger epert er however you spell his name, he thought it was impossible for video games to be particular art forms

Now I'm kinda on the fence about this topic, because I don't want to join the rabid custody battle over the meaning of art in the game community, however, I think that it can be justified that not all games can be considered art, however it would kind of be biased as I'm not into sports games or First person Shooters. Then again...Not everybody is into Dadaists and their shenanigans!

I think that games that venture out to present a moral to the audience are considered art...just as a movie or a book. Like Catcher in the Rye (one of my favourites) or Citizen Kane.

I think that Role Playing Games are big candidates for the art medium, however I think it's mainly those JRPGs. Those suckers are all out to make sure you're into a world, and an atmosphere.
Those developers tend to apply a lot of creativity into making vibrant worlds and rich plots yada yadda yadda...you know what I mean.

Any points?
What do you guys think?

I think that video games can be art.

In fact, a game that I enjoyed when I was younger(and still think quite cool) is actually compared to a literary piece in a New York Times piece. http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/ ... 7game.html RPGs are definitely strong candidates, however, I am crazy enough to allow a piece of poo on a stick to be called art if people want it to be. I do think that any game could theoretically be considered art.

art
–noun
1. the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.
2. the class of objects subject to aesthetic criteria; works of art collectively, as paintings, sculptures, or drawings: a museum of art; an art collection.


Subjectively, but since this presents difficulty, by consensus.


Intrinsic beauty and any deeper meaning expressed. All subjective, of course.


It really does not sound to me as though either of those applies very well to art of any form.

I personally do not generally appreciate the visual arts, but I am a music lover. (Real music, not the crap that people listen to these days)

A hard question. I daresay everything is art. Everything.



Upon whatever criteria you choose, from feelings and political messages to composition and color usage. However, an education in art does help most people in appreciating it.



What is the value in art? Holy s**t, where to begin? How about the fact that it was art that brought Europe out of the Dark Ages? Little known facts about history (art history, specifically):

Beginning in the 8th Century as the Christian Churches obtained obscene amounts of power, they decreed that any piece of art that didn't depict holy figures (aside from fancy decorations) was evil and had to be destroyed. Therefore, the eventually pretty much all of the art of the Romans and Greeks and everyone else under Byzantine and Catholic control was incinerated. Thing is, this included architectural drawings and other intellectual pieces of art.

Remember that back then, most people were illiterate. In fact, becoming literate was almost a profession, as a scribe or scholar. Therefore, the primary way of transferring knowledge from generation to generation was through pieces of art. Take, for instance, how to manufacture scaffolding or construct buildings that were structurally stable. This comically led to many early Cathedrals collapsing and killing their builders in the process of construction.

The Muslims at the time revered the knowledge of the time (Islam beginning in the 7th Century) as their sacred roots and preserved the knowledge of the Greeks and Romans during the centuries to come. In the late 15th Century, a Muslim faction (the Moors, I believe) had conquered Spain. The Spanish Church declared the "Reconquista" to take back the land. In the wake of their successful campaign, the people rediscovered the knowledge in these pieces of art, which proliferated throughout Europe and was a prime contributor to the Renaissance.

Subsequently, people realized the power of art and after Martin Luther's thingy (Reformation?), his new church didn't abhor art. In fact, they commissioned works to decorate their church, and then rich people started buying art again. Then, the Catholics (ridiculously rich) began to commission massive works to draw people back to Catholicism, and funded artists all over Italy, including Michelangelo among others. Enter Renaissance, Enlightenment, Baroque, and on to today.

Moral of the story? It's fine to knock art, but know that we probably wouldn't be here without it.