ilykadamen:

nyarlathotep: overrated:…Good question! “Art is the process or product of…

this whole fake art debate reminds me of the fake feminism debate from two weeks ago.  anytime i see a someone make a strong declaration of what isn’t art i immediately start questioning motives.

there’s a gigantic metal sculpture across the street from powells.  i don’t know what it means.  i don’t think anybody does, from the artist who made it to the city that bought it.  but if an abstract mass of metal can be considered art, so too can the way we live, the way we move.

if a bowl of fruit becomes art when painted by a renaissance master, so too can it become art when i place it on my kitchen table.

is it good art?  probably not, but that’s an entirely different question.

Well.  Since Vonnegut came up earlier:

That’s the most delightful part of the game, of course: the pretense that everybody who comes to a writers’ conference is a writer. Other forms of innocent summer recreation immediately suggest themselves: a doctors’ conference, where everybody gets to pretend to be a doctor; a lawyer’ conference, where everybody gets to pretend to be a lawyer; and so on—and maybe even a Kennedy conference, where everybody pretends to be somehow associated with the Kennedys.

Yes, his position on the conferences was that “they’re harmless.”  Didn’t stop him gently poking fun at them, though.

It’s a perception of writer, artist, composer, what have you being titles one earns.  I don’t think it’s unfair of someone who’s put a lot of agony into a creative endeavor to feel defensive at remarks like “oh, well, everything is art, you know.  How you tie your shoes, how you comb your hair, how you floss … .”

The question I’m mulling over is, can what anyone else does or says or thinks ever really devalue what you yourself do?  I don’t think it can, and yeah probably this Photoshop should have been graciously ignored like a belch at the table, but I can see how it might get up the rear of an artist to see it all the same.

I’ve got this friend locally who refers to herself as an artist, fairly, I think.  She has had gallery shows, people have admired and purchased her work, she has been working at what she does ever since childhood, and to support what she considers her “real” art she also makes handmade purses to sell.  But she’s got a couple of friends who don’t actually make anything, who laze around a lot, who also call themselves artists, and who lob snide remarks her way because, see, she “sold out” by making handbags.  Thing is, these friends would also insist that everything is art—provided one never makes a sordid dime doing any of it.  Ew, filthy lucre!

So their dippy idea that everything is art does effectively become “nothing is,” or at least nothing that can be assigned monetary value.  I think that notion is understandably threatening to someone trying to make a living as an artist.

But even there, maybe ”good” and “art” are being implicitly coupled so that a thing being “art” implies its goodness, which I think is what you suggest above?  That the question “is it art” is actually asking, “is it good art?”

i’ve seen entire websites dedicated to ‘calling out’ terrible webcomics, on the argument that these webcomics are bad, and therefore do not deserve the popularity they have achieved.

you can maybe make the argument that the audience has been hoodwinked?  but a fool and his money, and also, no.  hell no.  if the audience is dumb enough to fall for whatever comes along first, it’s not the bad artist’s responsibility to show up late.  and if the audience is not dumb?  then maybe these terrible comics have some value after all, even if the critic can’t see it.

the internet has done a great deal to democratize the ability to share our creations and find an audience well outside our hometowns.  but it’s also made it easier for people to share their biases with impunity.  the old axiom that an artist needs to develop a thick skin and learn to deal with criticism was, i’m pretty sure, not talking about youtube comments.

i certainly wouldn’t call someone doing art-for-hire on the side a sell-out?  but i also wouldn’t call the person doing only art-for-hire a hack.  i’ve seen advertising campaigns that spoke to me more meaningfully than ‘real’ art, and there are plenty of traditionally respected artforms that i think are complete bunk.

one could argue that there are in fact multiple legitimate definitions of art, and that the only people doing art a disservice are the ones who try to trumpet their own narrow ideal as the Only True Art.  i don’t even entirely agree with the .jpeg in question, being myself someone who has put no small effort into my own craft?

the trick, and this is why i have such a knee jerk reaction to this kind of thing, is that i know far too many people my age (almost 29) who were convinced in middle school that they had no particular talent, and put down their pencils, and did not write or draw or compose for ten years, and are only now realizing that they’ve been had.

everyone is terrible and overconfident when they start out, whether they’re fourteen or forty.  i’d much rather softball legitimate criticism and have bad artists blow it off than discourage someone who’s already lacking confidence to the point that they never improve, and we never get to see what they might have come up with.

if devaluing the definition of art means more people have the confidence to try their hand at creative endeavors, however trivial, i call that a win.