Modern art ... again

[seebs]

Imagine, if you will, two pieces of representational art, both basically similar; they cover the same topic, they depict the same objects, they are of similar technical merit.

But one somehow looks cluttered and is hard to perceive the intent or focus; the other is arranged such that the colors are pleasing, and the composition draws the eye naturally to some particular details or otherwise enhances the enjoyment of the piece. The difference? Choice of color and relative positioning.

Now, imagine that you were to step back from that, and examine the colors and positioning that make the second piece better -- and then to paint them straight up. Instead of lines which exist as the edges of objects, simply draw straight lines. Instead of shading, have blocks of color.

If you do this to both pieces, the one with better composition will almost certainly still look better -- it still enjoys the same composition it had before. However, many artists can't do that. The ones who can are able to express something interesting.

It's like the shift from trying to explain addition through apples ("and then how many apples would you have?" "five, because by then my sister woulda stole one") to talking about operations on groups. The proof that the intersection of the multiples of 2 and the multiples of 3 is also closed under addition -- any multiple of 6 plus another multiple of 6 is a multiple of 6 -- is okay, I guess. The proof that the intersection of any two groups is itself a group, though, is much prettier to me. It has had the things that are not the structure stripped away, and it is clearer and simpler.

For this reason, I quite like some non-representational art, and some only sort of representational art. Jesse did a wonderful piece which I cannot easily describe, except to say that if you've ever heard the Crystal Method album Vegas, it is obviously a painting of Trip Like I Do. It looks like the music sounds.

[freemonkey]

Originally Posted by godfry n. glad

And...If anybody makes money by doing 'art', those doing the 'real art' refer to them as 'artisans'. And the word is said with a sneer.

My intent was not to denigrate "artisans" or designers or anyone not doing "high art". I appreciate their work.

However, those employed to build churches, design museums and create ads, for instance, are more likely to see higher, regular and sustained financial rewards for their work. On the downside for those artisans, they are usually helping to build someone else's vision.

[davidm]

Originally Posted by godfry n. glad

Just out of interest, are there many of the 'great artists' who come from the ranks of the 'poor', the 'working classes', or others who didn't have plenty of ability to engage in unproductive (in the immediate, hand to mouth sense) artistic endeavors...or, did they all become 'artisans'?

Eh ... what?

Uh, you do know that Vincent Van Gogh spent ten years as an artist, in which generally speaking he literally did not even have enough to eat, lived in lice-infested hovels, never had money, and then later he went mad and tried to drink turpentine and then he, uh, shot himself to death? Gaugin also spent his working aristic life in penury and tried to kill himself and cursed the fates when he failed. In fact, practically all of the artists whom we associate as forerunners of modernism were dirt poor and in fact all through history, including right up to the present, very few artists, unless they are commercial artists, get any money for their work.

Jeez, I could tell from your last post that you somehow think "art-eests" are this hoity-toity wine sipping bunch who turn out daubs while flicking their wrists and have nothing in common with the meat-and-potatoes, salt-of-the-earth guys who make the world go round, or something like that. It's all bunkum, of course. Even Rembrandt, who had paying patrons (which is the only way you could work back then) ran into financial trouble.

It's also interesting that you picked up on the fact (which I was going to point out) that you were going ga-ga over the abstract non-representational designs of the Hermitage. Well, what, if it's good enough for architecture, it's not good enough for painting? Why not?

[Goliath]

Originally Posted by seebs

Imagine, if you will, two pieces of representational art, both basically similar; they cover the same topic, they depict the same objects, they are of similar technical merit.

But one somehow looks cluttered and is hard to perceive the intent or focus; the other is arranged such that the colors are pleasing, and the composition draws the eye naturally to some particular details or otherwise enhances the enjoyment of the piece. The difference? Choice of color and relative positioning.

Okay.

Now, imagine that you were to step back from that, and examine the colors and positioning that make the second piece better -- and then to paint them straight up. Instead of lines which exist as the edges of objects, simply draw straight lines. Instead of shading, have blocks of color.

If you do this to both pieces, the one with better composition will almost certainly still look better

It would look better to you, perhaps. Other than the different colors, they would look no more different to me than the painting in the OP ("Looky here! It's a buncha rectangles!").

It's like the shift from trying to explain addition through apples ("and then how many apples would you have?" "five, because by then my sister woulda stole one") to talking about operations on groups. The proof that the intersection of the multiples of 2 and the multiples of 3 is also closed under addition -- any multiple of 6 plus another multiple of 6 is a multiple of 6 -- is okay, I guess. The proof that the intersection of any two groups is itself a group, though, is much prettier to me. It has had the things that are not the structure stripped away, and it is clearer and simpler.

Although I obviously agree with you on the relative generality of mathematical statements, I fail to see how this applies to real art vs rectangle paintings (or other "works of art" such as splashing buckets of paint onto a canvas).

If you take a painting and, to make up a phrase, "rectangalize" it, you don't get a more general painting, you just get a bunch of rectangles. Or, to be more precise, if you take a particular painting, rectangalize it, and then move from the rectangalization to another painting, the two paintings need have nothing to do with each other (think about moving from the integers to ice cream cones).

Jesse did a wonderful piece which I cannot easily describe, except to say that if you've ever heard the Crystal Method album Vegas, it is obviously a painting of Trip Like I Do. It looks like the music sounds.

I literally am unable to comprehend how a painting can look like a song sounds.

[seebs]

The good rectangle paintings (and not all are good, I freely admit) manage to maintain some of the same element of structure that makes other good art pleasing.

As to how a painting can look like a particular piece of music, I don't know how to express it. The colors suggest the timbres, the patterns suggest the structure.

[Goliath]

Originally Posted by seebs

The good rectangle paintings (and not all are good, I freely admit) manage to maintain some of the same element of structure that makes other good art pleasing.

But it's just a bunch of fucking rectangles...other than the relative size of the rectangles and the choice of color, they're all the same.

As to how a painting can look like a particular piece of music, I don't know how to express it. The colors suggest the timbres, the patterns suggest the structure.

Interesting.

[davidm]

Originally Posted by Goliath

I literally am unable to comprehend how a painting can look like a song sounds.

Really? I can hear paintings all the time. Of course, maybe I have synesthesia.

How about what Vincent Van Gogh called his “high yellow note”? I can certainly hear that note in these paintings:









“Everything is yellow on yellow! I don’t know what painting is anymore!” an art critic at the time cried.

[Adam]

Originally Posted by Goliath

But it's just a bunch of fucking rectangles...other than the relative size of the rectangles and the choice of color, they're all the same.

Other than the relative size and position of shapes and the choice of color, any two randomly chosen paintings are the same, though.

[livius drusus]

Like the infomercial says, to draw anything all you need is to be able to draw a square, circle, triangle, oblong and oval.

Anyway, there's a lot of complexity to painting and coloring shapes and lines that may not be obvious from jpg versions of the piece. The brushstrokes, the thickness of the paint layers, multiple colors combined in a small space to look like one color from a distance, these kinds of elements add a lot of richness that Google Image results may not convey.

[mickthinks]

Originally Posted by davidm

Hence it follows, from their own narcissistic point of view, that anyone who talks about something outside their (limited) knowledge base is only “pretending” to knowledge, and hence is pretentious.

Originally Posted by davidm

I can hear paintings all the time.

[Adam]

Originally Posted by davidm

Really? I can hear paintings all the time. Of course, maybe I have synesthesia.

Originally Posted by mickthinks

Are you saying that his report of his own personal experience reflects pretension to knowledge outside his own limitations? How is that possible?

For the record, even if davidm is not clinically synesthesiac (is that the correct adjectival form?), it's not all that uncommon for one sort of sensory experience to evoke another. I wouldn't say that I hear paintings, but certain sounds, and certain smells, do evoke colors for me.

[davidm]

Originally Posted by mickthinks

Once again, you demonstrate what a useless, self-involved little idiot you are. Don't you think you should be bumping your narcissistic threads about your constant butt-hurt, rather than pretending to talk about subjects (anything other than yourself) of which you know nothing? Let the intelligent people discuss intelligent issues; you should confine your discussions to your own self-pitying pathetic little self.

Can anyone really not see the analogy between pictorial and musical forms? Just think about it. Is not yellow a high note? Is not deep blue and indigo a low note? What do we mean, what do we think of, when we hear music described as "the blues?" Is that description some sort of accident?

What does red sound like? Does red sound different when it is placed next to green, from what it sounds like when it is placed next to a different color? What do you think happens -- what do you experience -- when you place violet next to yellow, or blue next to orange?

There is an entire field of study known as color theory. Look into it.

The responses here from people like mickthinks and Sovereign are the responses of the know-nothings, the philistines, the slobs: People who know nothing about art, and therefore think there is nothing to know. This sort of respnse is endemic among such people: I know nothing about literature, therefore there is nothing to know; I know nothing about architecture, therefore there is nothing to know; I know nothing about the theory of evolution, therefore the theory is false; I know nothing about mathematics, therefore mathematicians are poseurs playing with numbers.

[davidm]

Broadway Boogie-Woogie, by Mondrian:



Is this not musical? Is this not boogie-woogie? Is this not perhaps the best painting ever made of the Broadway/Times Square area of New York?

Boogie-Woogie

If you can’t feel the boogie-woogie in Mondrian’s painting, if you can’t feel the electric heat and heart of New York, well, you’re missing something. All I can say.

[davidm]

Vincent Van Gogh once took piano lessons. As he banged down on the keys, depending on which sound he heard, he would cry out, “Chrome yellow! Prussian blue!”

His teacher decided he was a madman, and gave him no further lessons. Thus ended Vincent’s brief musical career.

[freemonkey]

Originally Posted by livius drusus

Like the infomercial says, to draw anything all you need is to be able to draw a square, circle, triangle, oblong and oval.

Anyway, there's a lot of complexity to painting and coloring shapes and lines that may not be obvious from jpg versions of the piece. The brushstrokes, the thickness of the paint layers, multiple colors combined in a small space to look like one color from a distance, these kinds of elements add a lot of richness that Google Image results may not convey.

True!! Look at any Mark Rothko painting. To some, they might look like wall paint swatches or something. But when you see the real thing, you see much subtlety.

I have had strong physical reactions to some art. Not to the pictures of the paintings, but to the paintings themselves when I've seen them in galleries and museums, for instance.

[davidm]

Just love Mark Rothko!

[davidm]

Originally Posted by Goliath

But it's just a bunch of fucking rectangles...

You're right. And math is just a bunch of fucking numbers.

[seebs]

Originally Posted by Goliath

But it's just a bunch of fucking rectangles...other than the relative size of the rectangles and the choice of color, they're all the same.

Sure, but the same is true of any question of composition. Composition matters in art, and good composition looks better than bad composition. Imagine that you take a bunch of very high-quality pictures of people, and stamp them onto an image. They're not all the same, but the layout and composition you choose in where you stamp them can make one picture with the same ten people in it look good, and another look bad.

That same difference exists between two paintings of a bunch of rectangles.

[seebs]

And yes, I'm mildly synaesthetic -- not up to clinical levels or anything, but e.g., most violins sound emerald green to me.

[Adam]

Huh...violins (any stringed instrument played with a bow, really) sound like warmer colors to me. Reds and oranges, mostly. Guitars and such don't really evoke a color.

ETA disclaimer: I'm obviously pretentious and full of shit for claiming that sounds evoke colors in my mind.

[seebs]

I think it's pretty clear that synaesthesia is personal, rather than completely objective.

[Kael]

Seeing as aesthetics in general and art in particular are very personal and subjective things...

I find plenty of idiotic pretension in both those that claim non-representational art is a load of crap and those that look down their noses at people who fail to be awed and inspired by it.

[davidm]

Originally Posted by Kael

Seeing as aesthetics in general and art in particular are very personal and subjective things...

I find plenty of idiotic pretension in both those that claim non-representational art is a load of crap and those that look down their noses at people who fail to be awed and inspired by it.

Except nobody is looking down their noses at people who fail to be awed and inspired by it. At least, nobody is doing any such thing in this thread. And, anyway, as much as I personally love such art, I don't necessarily feel "awed and inspired" by it; but then very little in life awes and inspires me.

Rather, I am "looking down my nose" only at those people who dogmatically claim that non-representational art is a piece of crap. I'm not looking down my nose at people who may not "get" such art. It's fine not to "get" stuff. But some people may "get" this art later, with a little more info. Goliath might be an example of this.

[davidm]

I also want to say that Seebs has made some very nice posts in this thread, and has said many things that I wanted to say. I also agree with him on the color of violin sounds.

[mickthinks]

Originally Posted by Adam

Are you saying that his report of his own personal experience reflects pretension to knowledge outside his own limitations?

No, I was just laughing at davidm. I think he is pretentious. "Of course, maybe I have synesthesia" — LOL