Thirteen Ways of Looking at Art

https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/477-thirteen-ways-of-looking-at-art

by prismatic • 2 years ago

116 70 2 years ago

salmagundi.skidmore.edu

saiya-jin• 2 years ago

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.

lqet• 2 years ago

I find this a concise definition of good art:

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).

Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World

xbar• 2 years ago

Worthy of contemplation and a fuller read.

My 13 year old daughter came home last night and wanted to tell me some things about Schopenhauer. It was a good day.

pontsprit• 2 years ago

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)

progmetaldev5• 2 years ago

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.

brudgers• 2 years ago

I am always wary of “true” as a qualifier of art.

What is untrue art?

Ymmv.

gniv• 2 years ago

If you're wondering why 13, I assume this is the reference: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45236/thirteen-ways-o...

eyeundersand• 2 years ago

Wonderful poem. Thanks!

jensgk• 2 years ago

Art is for seeing the world from different perspectives.

foofie• 2 years ago

And also money laundering.

philprx• 2 years ago

Excellent composite quote:

"Art is for seeing the world from different perspectives. And also money laundering and tax avoidance."

;-)

vmoore• 2 years ago

Banksy — 'Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable'

wittierusername• 2 years ago

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

jevoten• 2 years ago

As long as you don't think more than 60 seconds on what might comfort someone truly disturbed, this is a great definition.

prewett• 2 years ago

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?

progmetaldev5• 2 years ago

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.

freejazz• 2 years ago

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.

Fricken2• 2 years ago

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.

65• 2 years ago

The purpose of art is to figure out what the purpose of art is.

Towaway69• 2 years ago

That's philosophy. Replace the word 'art' with 'philosophy' and it makes more sense.

mbivert2• 2 years ago

"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!).

oldstrangers• 2 years ago

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.

progmetaldev5• 2 years ago

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.

swayvil• 2 years ago

Art is for getting high.

The process of making art gets the artist high.

The consumer of the "art product" gets high too, but in a somewhat different and lesser degree.

rufus_foreman• 2 years ago

"Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To"

-- https://www.superiorviaduct.com/cdn/shop/products/SV154_web_...

madmountaingoat• 2 years ago

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'

23B18• 2 years ago

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.

pwython4• 2 years ago

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.

everybodyknows2• 2 years ago

To anyone familiar with the history of the Spanish Civil War, Guernica requires no explanation.

eszed4• 2 years ago

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.

23B18• 2 years ago

Why would a painting need to be self-explanatory?

Your own personal tastes don't apply universally to anything, especially art... so I guess don't understand the point you're trying to make here.

progmetaldev5• 2 years ago

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.

23B18• 2 years ago

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.

lmm4• 2 years ago

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.

23B18• 2 years ago

Please describe to me what you think "the actual content of the painting" is.

smokel• 2 years ago

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-art

everybodyknows2• 2 years ago

Maybe not quite what you mean by "mediocre", but there have been claims that deliberately pushing kitsch to the extreme elevates it to Art:

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/koonss-monument-to-the-unk...

Jun82• 2 years ago

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.

saint_fiasco• 2 years ago

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).

Jun82• 2 years ago

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.

jrapdx3• 2 years ago

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.

actionfromafar• 2 years ago

Isn't the human liver also very good at breaking down toxins?

chickenWing• 2 years ago

We should resist the temptation to create "evolutionary just-so stories" to explain human behaviors.

progmetaldev5• 2 years ago

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.

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

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).

TheOtherHobbes• 2 years ago

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.

mbivert2• 2 years ago

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.

breathen• 2 years ago

Flowers appeared ~130 mya while mammals appeared ~225 mya, so this cannot be coded in our "reptilian brain."

Why not?

chefandy4• 2 years ago

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.

eszed4• 2 years ago

Cynicism is cheap. What's some "art" you like?

chefandy4• 2 years ago

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.

codingdave• 2 years ago

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.

jj999• 2 years ago

This guy do love to namedrop.

opmelogy• 2 years ago

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.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Art

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