I hate the debate over “what is art”. Honestly I think the best answer I could give to the question is “something that was ruined by a bunch of idiots asking ‘what is art’”.
That said, and not wanting to go into that discussion, calling this guy an “artist” seems like a mockery. He’s not an artist, he’s just some idiot with double sided tape.
i’ve heard similar arguments against rap music that it’s not actually music or that producers aren’t musicians if they sample. people always try to diminish new forms by being elitist
Run all the samples through a computer, write a prompt telling it to create music in the style of (x), and keep tweaking the prompt to reiterate the result until something desirable emerges. No skill or understanding of music required, just keep hitting “generate” or whatever until something gets spit out that sounds good.
Vs
Thousands of hours of music making experience, understanding of musical styles, lyric arrangement, composition, heck…even music theory and the ability to read and write musical notes…and take all of that and make something original that, with permission of the original artist, uses modified clips of others’ tracks.
It’s funny because trip-hop landed in pretty much elitist, conceptual album category for snobs and luxury products’ ads, with sampling being one of it’s core features. Useless gateekeping and/or mischaracterising the ‘art’ word as something well-defined.
I agree with the first part, disagree with the second.
Jackson Pollock was just some idiot with a paintbrush. John Cage was just some idiot with a piano when he wrote 4’33". “I could have done that.” Sure, but they did. Having the concept and then executing it is as much of the art as the finished product.
Those artists at least had a recognizable and identifiable style. It was easy to mimic yes, but they became icons for the identifiable style. If Altman snuck this in to the museum I’d give him some credit for it I suppose, but the style already exists and isn’t novel or identiable to a particular artist. Other people have snuck crap into museums too. There’s no novelty or creativity or unique iconic style here. It’s just sludge.
Disumbrationism was a hoax masquerading as an art movement that was launched in 1924 by Paul Jordan-Smith, a novelist, Latin scholar, and authority on Robert Burton from Los Angeles, California.
Annoyed at the cold reception his wife Sarah Bixby Smith’s realistic still lifes had received from an art exhibition jury, Jordan-Smith sought revenge by styling himself as “Pavel Jerdanowitch” (Cyrillic: Па́вел Жердaнович), a variation on his own name. Never having picked up a paint brush in his life, he then painted Yes, we have no bananas, a blurry, badly painted picture of a Pacific islander woman holding a banana over her head, having just killed a man and putting his skull on a stick. In 1925, Smith entered the banana picture under a new title of Exaltation in New York’s “Exhibition” of the Independents at the Waldorf-Astoria. He made a suitably dark and brooding photograph of himself as Jerdanowitch, and submitted the work to the same group of critics as representative of the new school “Disumbrationism”. He explained Exaltation as a symbol of “breaking the shackles of womanhood”.[1] To his amusement, if not to his surprise, the Disumbrationist daub won praise from the critics who had belittled his wife’s realistic painting.
More Disumbrationist paintings followed: a composition of zig-zag lines and eyeballs he called Illumination; a garish picture of a black woman doing laundry that he called Aspiration, and which a critic praised as “a delightful jumble of Gauguin, Pop Hart and Negro minstrelsy, with a lot of Jerdanowitch individuality”;[2]: 111 Gination, an ugly, lopsided portrait; and a painting named Adoration, of a woman worshipping an immense phallic idol, which was exhibited in 1927.
I hate the debate over “what is art”. Honestly I think the best answer I could give to the question is “something that was ruined by a bunch of idiots asking ‘what is art’”.
That said, and not wanting to go into that discussion, calling this guy an “artist” seems like a mockery. He’s not an artist, he’s just some idiot with double sided tape.
Jokes on you, putting up bullshit in an art gallery is a classic art move.
im not sure i agree.
i’ve heard similar arguments against rap music that it’s not actually music or that producers aren’t musicians if they sample. people always try to diminish new forms by being elitist
Run all the samples through a computer, write a prompt telling it to create music in the style of (x), and keep tweaking the prompt to reiterate the result until something desirable emerges. No skill or understanding of music required, just keep hitting “generate” or whatever until something gets spit out that sounds good.
Vs
Thousands of hours of music making experience, understanding of musical styles, lyric arrangement, composition, heck…even music theory and the ability to read and write musical notes…and take all of that and make something original that, with permission of the original artist, uses modified clips of others’ tracks.
Sampling isn’t the defining difference.
I think that art can be defined as a creation that elicits an emotional response. The method of creation has little to do with it.
Whenever digital artists started becoming a thing, they were gatekept as well.
It’s funny because trip-hop landed in pretty much elitist, conceptual album category for snobs and luxury products’ ads, with sampling being one of it’s core features. Useless gateekeping and/or mischaracterising the ‘art’ word as something well-defined.
I agree with the first part, disagree with the second.
Jackson Pollock was just some idiot with a paintbrush. John Cage was just some idiot with a piano when he wrote 4’33". “I could have done that.” Sure, but they did. Having the concept and then executing it is as much of the art as the finished product.
Those artists at least had a recognizable and identifiable style. It was easy to mimic yes, but they became icons for the identifiable style. If Altman snuck this in to the museum I’d give him some credit for it I suppose, but the style already exists and isn’t novel or identiable to a particular artist. Other people have snuck crap into museums too. There’s no novelty or creativity or unique iconic style here. It’s just sludge.
And here we are talking about it.
If I take my pants off and walk down the street people will talk about me. Seems like a low bar.
Yeah, it’s called performance art. You’re not wrong in disliking it as slop, but the barrier for what is art is empirically low.
Last time I did it the cops didn’t take that excuse. You’d think doing it near a school would make it obvious it was an artistic performance too.
If.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disumbrationism
https://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_disumbrationist_school_of_art/
Jordan-Smith did too, though, and his work doesn’t qualify. I think that one has to both do and maintain a straight face for the rest of one’s life.
Except this is missing the executing part. Prompting isn’t work.
You’re missing it. It got sneaked into a museum and hung on the wall. That’s an extremely important part of it.
Indeed, the art is the reverse heist.