Ko0K on 13/7/2006 at 04:22

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(2 minutes X 15,330 members) / (60 X 24) = 21.29 days of Internet fame! :D Of course that assumes that "we" represent the whole.

Sap'em on 13/7/2006 at 14:01

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:laff: :thumb:

Shadowlord on 14/7/2006 at 18:03

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If it's still close to the idea of art, then how can art be an expression if it's either rebelion or along with what art is suppose to be. There are no two people that look at something the same way. In a simular way maybe, but never the same. Each of us is a individual, and showing that individuality through a painting or lyrics or the way they take pictuers is showing it to everyone how they view things, or what comes to mind.

demagogue on 15/7/2006 at 15:25

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At the risk of keeping this thread choking on, I'll answer a direct question. People can disagree on the content that a particular painting or roadkill is trying to express, but they can still agree that the artist intends to say something loosly artistic in asking a museum to hang it on the wall. And what we think of as "art" depends more on the second than the first. That's about all I was saying before.

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As for the expression itself, you have a point, but there's still something public there, I personally think anyway. So in previous times in art history, there were pretty set rules for how to interpret a painting; painters followed the rules in making a painting, observers followed them in interpreting it. But now with Modern Art, the rules sort of get thrown out. Painters can come up with their own rules or methods (in some cases flaunting tradition, like you say), and observers are sort of left wondering how to interpret it, still using the previous era's rules (which would be perverse), trying to devine what ideas the painter was thinking, or just try to fit whatever fits. And here there's lots of room for discussion and disagreement.

But I still think that it's still somewhat grounded by the fact that the ideas an artist uses are still public ones. If an artist depicts something that looks like a crescent moon, the one thing you can't say is that "well, whatever it is, it doesn't evoke a moon". Who cares what the artist intended or what we may feel about it. We have a moon shape that evokes that idea, and he raised that public expression in showing us something that looks a lot like a crescent moon; it's a choice he made. If he uses blue-tones, it evokes passiveness; red-tones evokes assertiveness -- that's how the color choice will be pubically recieved. Again, who cares what the artist intends or what we may feel. He made a choice to raise a publicly recognizable aspect in choosing blue-tones over red-tones, so we recognize the choice for what it is. And if an artist is consistent in his style or method lasts over time, then it becomes part of the public consciousness to understand later works. And of course the artist very often publically says what he was thinking, in interviews and monologues, etc, and that also goes into the public consciousness. All of this may only go so far, and there's still lots of room in the margins for disagreement and maybe personal idiosyncrasy ("this means something special for me, because of my experience with X"), and all of that's valid I think. But the idea with art interpretation (at least academic or public art interpretation) is trying to find the best *public* interpretation. Personal experience isn't supposed to play a role in selecting a public interpretation, since by definition it's not public. And it's discursive in the sense that there doesn't have to be an absolute right answer to find, but one is built by adding up all the choices the artist made invoking public aspects. And there might even be a "best" interpretation (in that it's better than all the other candidates, even if it's on the horizon, we can never quite get to it, only closer or further), and still we don't have to say there it is the absolute "right" one; just the best one.

And now it occurs to me that we may just be talking about apples and oranges, the difference between personal art interpretation (what a painting means to you personally when you go to the museum) and academic or public art interpretation, which is trying to fit a work within the art world around it using only publically recognizable reasons, not private.

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Edit: Anyway, I have to run, so I have to close this fast. This sort of question is the thing they write books about, so everything I just said I recognize is horribly inadequate. But I'll leave it at, I'm thinking about academic art interpretation in its public sense and don't mean to say anything about what any individual person wants to get meaning out of art, since that will always be of course a private thing that person can deal with himself, and of course him finding private meaning out of a painting, when he's using private methods of interperation, is practically tautological. There are still lots of questions here ... An individual may want to participate in the public interpreting of art, or he may be content with just giving a psychological report about his private mood or thinking when looking at art, perfectly valid, but nothing anyone can share with him, and for that reason not really saying anything about the public, expressive parts of the artwork, just a psychological report about himself. The act of interpretation it seems to me should be something public that people are supposed to be able to share with each other using ideas that make sense and resonate with each other. But that doesn't mean art appreciation has to be limited to that, since art can have all sorts of uses private and public.

I realize a lot of what I say is subject to misunderstanding because I don't have time to explain it all or add ideas or clarify... I need to explain how something can be both public and subjective (since everything going on is subjective, but it can still be public if people can share aspects of their thinking, e.g., intersubjective), what is private vs. public, what is a public interpretation (e.g., "the symmetry is aesthetically pleasing" or "alludes to X tradition in the art world") vs. a private psychological report ("I feel sick today, so all this green makes me feel sick" which may be true, but not really anything about the artwork), etc. So maybe I shouldn't have started this if I can't finish it. I just feel strongly about the "sharing" part of interpreting (whether it's art or language or law or music or literature, etc). People should have the capacity to share the reasons for their interpretations (e.g., they should be public), at least as long as it's really "interpretation" that they want to do. But most of what everyone has said in this thread I can happily agree with because I feel like they are talking about something a little different than what I'm worried about, which is also important, and I don't want to dismiss it, either. That's just where I'm coming from.

duckman on 16/7/2006 at 08:53

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Its art because you experience emotions when looking at it and it makes you think, weather it be "wtf" or "i love chicken". That is at least according to a fat university professor. Personally I think modern art is shitty.