What can be done about contemporary art?

Ugliness has been the object of art for at least the past century.
How can we turn this boat around?
Or is it a lost cause?

you should look at art as earlier implementation of NSA and encryption. Sure it serves as tokens and financial instruments for cryptocurrency transactions. The human resources for such activity are not exactly made equally.

Say what? Wtf are you talking about

Art, like industrial society, is simply arriving at its end. Philosophers no longer even try to defend art. Cultural and intellectual stagnation comes part and parcel with the massification of all human experience. What do you expect?

I feel like you've made a few leaps here that I can't follow. Please elaborate.

It's a byproduct of a coddled generation that was told they don't need to try hard to be special, they just are.

We've erased the concept of working hard to achieve goals. We've been taught that physical/skilled work is all blue collar, ie beneath us(see treatment of craftsmen vs "artists").

Many other things can be explained by this, as well as the bubble-boy phenomenon.

t. artfag

Ugliness has been the object of GALLERY art.
Art no longer lives in a Gallery. It lives in a strong, competitive, and studious industry spanning countries and mediums.

Nothing. This is the textbook definition of the current era of post-modernism. Truth is relative to the individual.
This is the reason why fashion trends keep repeating every 20 years; the reason why we have a me-me-me culture where everyone is a victim, and everyone is special.
It won't end until we create the singularity, or maybe if another nuke gets dropped.

I doubt the pitiable state of art can be explained by a lack of effort and hardwork, there are probably more man hours being spent towards the creation of art objects now than ever before in history

Art is art. I'm tired if shits trying to politicize this it on both sides

If you to turn the boat around, go paint something. We are do for a classical revival anyway.

But what ia good or bad art is just a matter of personal taste

Traditional technique is coming back into fashion. Albeit, with a modern touch. Just take a look at Kehinde Wiley

> good or bad art is just a matter of personal taste

So a pile of dog shit has the same artistic merit as your favorite film or piece of music? you literally have no way to explain what works of art you like besides "random inexplicable personal taste" ?

if you cant see that the first and most important step is to get rid of the jews then you need to lurk more, faggot

>If you to turn the boat around, go paint something.
Believe me, I walk the walk much more than I talk the talk in this regard.
However, I don't think that saying
>its just a matter of personal taste
is satisfactory, nuanced, or true. If you take making art seriously, you realise eventually that it's not as "subjective" as most people think. You can't even make art (with any consistency) without soon necessitating a "theory" (even if just for yourself). It's complicated and challenging like any other discipline.

The 'subjective' argument is basically incoherent and a complete waste of time, that people always insist on making in any discussion about art, wasting everyone's time

he's saying, i think, that modern art is just cheap trash used to launder money before things like bitcoin were completed

I can't disagree with your point here.
Yet, here we are taking up the challenge of trying to defend art. At least, I have made this my mission.
It's hard for me to imagine something like Art coming to an end. I feel that as long as we are biologically what we are, the impulses which give rise to great Art will always occur.
I don't think that painting can ever be truly dead "dead". Certainly as a pursuit it is completely at odds with how most people live now - having a strongly aristocratic, hierarchical sensibility, and can become transcendental to the extreme. But this just goes to show it touches upon so much that is foundational to us and frankly Indo-European. But we're mired in a kind of stupor now.

I'm interested in that idea, is there more info about that?

Though I cant say i know of all the interpretations of modern art, I was made to understand that artists were trying to ask the observer to get at a definition of what art actually is or what makes something art with things like the "urinal" and the britta box.

also i think it was derrida with the idea of an art world that the work needs to participate in etc.

and this was not my initial interpretation when i looked at them.. so i can see why it is considered trash

also i dont know of what artists are trying to say today with their "art"

I don't know. I'm ashamed to call myself an artist at this point. In some ways I think modern art reflects how society views art. People appreciate garbage and give things of quality a "that's nice" evaluation because it's somehow better to pretend there's some deeper meaning to things lacking meaning entirely. To fix art you probably have to fix the audience into something resembling more than drones laughing at 5 year old memes and sharing them with all their faceberg "friends".

This certainly rings true of what I saw at art school. Marxist teachers said art has to just be "fun", and then dispensed some postmodernist fluff so that students could go out into the world and pretend to be intellectuals about their low-energy, ugly piles of trash they put in the gallery.
Who hired these irresponsible Marxists in the first place? How did they get into the institutions?

> It's hard for me to imagine something like Art coming to an end. I feel that as long as we are biologically what we are, the impulses which give rise to great Art will always occur.

I know what you mean, and I agree that it is hard to imagine the project of Art coming to its end. But more and more it is becoming clear that Art has arrived at a dead end and has nothing more to offer, and possibly only ever existed as a tool of indoctrination. It goes with every other feature of civilization, which indicates that we are in a twilight age. I think the most straight forward way I would characterize what is happening to Art: There is simply nothing more to talk about. And in retrospect we can see that Art and the urge to create and experience art isn't innate at all. To understand this, consider the fact that humans existed as conscious and intelligent entities for hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of years before the first works of art were produced.

dude you cant be serious, i figured this out when i was 9.

Did you never see the literal fucking blank canvas that sold for 70 mil? I think the guy who (((bought))) it was just shit testing us at that point

>I don't think that painting can ever be truly dead "dead". Certainly as a pursuit it is completely at odds with how most people live now - having a strongly aristocratic, hierarchical sensibility, and can become transcendental to the extreme. But this just goes to show it touches upon so much that is foundational to us and frankly Indo-European. But we're mired in a kind of stupor now.

I don't think the vast majority of painting can be characterized as 'aristocratic', and I also think your characterization of indo-european-ness is mostly a reflection of your own understanding of art history, and doesn't illuminate much about aesthetics broadly.

Yeah but how is it money laundering? For who?

This is true. And the reason why it is so ugly is because there is no incentive to take the time to make something beautiful since the artwork is only serving as the medium in a money-laundering scheme. It is easy to pass off something thrown together as a deconstruction of the notion of art itself rather than putting actual thought behind it.

Why don't you read about Suprematism first and then make judgments like that...?

More cherubs and gold Jesus paintings in 2017!!!
Abstraction is confusing for me!

I actually feel like I see the tide turning already. There are a lot of people just fed up and disgusted by modern art and returning to more sincere art principles.

The funny part is, when you look at the postmodernists and the modern artists fundamental theories, it's not like it doesn't make sense. I get where they're coming from.

That's what makes it so fucked up and dangerous.

>Truth is relative to the individual.

Like this. This is one of the fundamental principles and theories of postmodernists and modern artists. And they're not wrong.

The problem is that truth is relative to the individual but they always forget that truth is also relative to the collective. The collective is an individual body just as much as the individual is. I know that sounds strange at first but it is.

When something becomes popular, the collective body accepts it as beautiful or "true" to it just as much as the individual.

That's why society has become so disgusted by modern art. It's forced. Being forced on the collective. We're actively repelling it but, there's something or someone out there (we all know who), who is forcing it upon the collective. It's like getting sick over and over and over and your body fighting it off. It's a virus, really.

True art is first what the individual recognizes as beautiful, and then what the collective also accepts as beautiful.

Take a meme, as an example. Memes are art. A meme doesn't become popular unless that shit is fucking funny. And then it spreads worldwide, goes "viral," because the greater collective finds it to be "true." This is the same reason you hate forced memes and why this place is so great for weeding them out. There are no repercussions for calling a user out and saying, listen that's fucking retarded.

>True art is first what the individual recognizes as beautiful, and then what the collective also accepts as beautiful.

According to Kant, maybe, but that's not the only definition of "art" otherwise anything that's not pop and is too challenging wouldn't be.

You completely misunderstood what he typed -- as is common with many people.

Art is art is art is art. Bad art is art; good art is art; mediocre art is art. Art is always art.

This artistic "merit" you speak of is just another term for what you consider good art, i.e. art you appreciate has "merit", while art you dislike does not.

Art doesn't have to be beautiful; art doesn't have to have meaning; art doesn't have to be or do anything but fit the criteria of it being categorized into the medium of art -- which can be found through family resemblances.

A bad film is still a film; a bad pizza is still a pizza. Them being bad doesn't make it a not-film or a not-pizza.

This is very easy to understand and STILL people have issue with it.

If I understand your point of view correctly, you're saying that
> the fact that humans existed as conscious and intelligent entities for hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of years before the first works of art were produced.
correlates to Art not being something innate, is this then how you also regard
> every other feature of civilisation
as not being innate, because it too began at some point?
Putting that aside, what do you imagine (if you do) will come after this "twilight age"?
> There is simply nothing more to talk about
I don't agree. Perhaps it's not so much that there is nothing to talk about, but that there are not many who have the capacity to "talk" about what there is to talk about. I think in our current society, for most the frame of perception is confined to a largely mercantile role, leaving much of our potential for aesthetic vision atrophied.

>According to Kant, maybe, but that's not the only definition of "art" otherwise anything that's not pop and is too challenging wouldn't be.

I disagree otherwise the only art we'd have throughout the history of time would be unchallenging pop. I'm not saying that all great art is born and instantly appreciated as great art. That's silly. Sometimes, great art takes time to be appreciated and accepted by the larger collective. Sometimes the artist has to struggle to find his/her "voice."

I would then further argue that you shouldn't dismiss "pop" as bad and not art because you disagree with it. "Pop" is also a matter of the collective culture's taste. And just because something may seem like it has a pop veneer right now, doesn't mean it won't be recognized for it's greatness in the future.

Take Shakespeare, as an example. He was writing in a time when plays were the most popular form of art consumed in Elizabethan England. He was writing dick jokes, fart jokes, sex jokes, and wanted and expected his work to be played for the masses. He was ridiculed by fellow playwright's and members of the upper crust because of this, even in his own time. He was also the most popular public playwright of that era.

He didn't even become the great "Shakespeare" until years after he was dead. After a reevaluation of the quality of his work and people's tastes had changed/opened and allowed them to recognize the greatness of Shakespeare.

That's also why the postmodernists fundamental principles are not wrong, and I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am saying that we can find and know other artistic principles and why art works and apply that, where postmodernists actively rebel against that, which causes revulsion.

Im a bit confused here.. idk if true art is truth in the same vein...

If you can help me out.. maybe this goes back to and is refuted by bertrand russell.. but isnt math or physics atleast true and not relative so any individual or collective that doesn't see this as true is wrong?

If the term 'art' is meaningful in anyway, then there are criteria which determine whether or not something belongs in the set of 'art', or the set of 'not art'. These criteria determine something's merit as art.

If you use the term art in a way that is discriminatory among objects in this way, which you both have, you admit that there is a way to determine something's merit as art.

For example, you present the practically incoherent notion of "family resemblance" determining something's merit as art. Resemblance is a continuum, so we can conclude that you must believe certain art objects are more meritorious than others, insofar as they 'resemble' other things that are art. (this is retarded, by the way)

There is no doubt that the completely trivial ideas you have presented are easy to understand, but I would imagine the reason people take issue with them is because what you are saying is either meaningless or, again, completely trivial. All you have done is shoved the questions about "what is art? can art be good or bad? if so, what makes some art good and some art bad?" off by one degree, and instead made the conversation about resemblance. "What is resemble? ..." and so on

Math or Physics are not relative, though, because they're not life. They're the building blocks and the foundations of life, but they're not the breath. For example, you can build a house, but if it sits empty and no one ever lives there until it crumbles away, was it ever a home? Was it even a house?

That being said, when something does become a pop phenomenon, there's often a reason. People who dislike pop, to continue our example, and actively reject it no matter how popular it gets, doesn't mean there isn't some element of truth to it for the collective. They just actively reject it because they don't like it.

And they're free to do that. But, without it, we would never get "classics". This is the same for paintings, films, music, books, whatever.

If you go to read a book or watch a movie or listen to a song, if you are recommended it from a friend or see a review of 85% of people liked it, you're going to be more inclined to not only see it but understand why another person liked it from their perspective. You unconsciously think to yourself, "Whoa, 85% of people liked this..."

That still doesn't mean you'll like it or you're wrong for disliking it, but that also doesn't mean you should just dismiss it as not true because 85% of people did, indeed, like it. Maybe it's best for you to shelve it and come back to it later in your life? It's the same as how the collective things become popular, go away for a while, and then experience a resurgence. The "truth" is still there, it's just a little different and being viewed in a different lens or perspective.

> is this then how you also regard [every other feature of civilisation] as not being innate, because it too began at some point?

Yeah, arguably, I would say.

> Putting that aside, what do you imagine (if you do) will come after this "twilight age"?

No idea

> Perhaps it's not so much that there is nothing to talk about, but that there are not many who have the capacity to "talk" about what there is to talk about

You're certainly right that people's imaginations and aesthetic vision have atrophied. But this isn't because of some personal failing which has simultaneously befallen everyone. People still feel the creative impulse despite being relegated to societal roles which do not stimulate or even require creative intelligence. And again I would say that now more than ever, there are people with the technical skill, education, and resources to produce art in vast quantities. I really think the failure of art runs deeper than 'inadequate artists'. Its something like, the language of art itself has run out of possibilities (or is running out). The way art speaks to us has exhausted its possible configurations. And I reiterate that there is nothing more to talk about. Art functions as a repository of common cultural understanding, the fact that the topics art confronts have become more and more contrived and irrelevant is an embodiment of this fact. In their desperate search for something worth saying, artists mostly just talk about art itself now.

Youre asking me what makes a house a house... that pretty tough.

What is a house's essence. What is life's essence? surely math and physcis have some part to do with it. Or work as the language of the medium of it? idk

I just dont like the idea that truth is relative. It leads to some pretty contradictory stuff, or atleast some things that i cant believe are true regardless of relativity. So id like to find the line.

I would like to reject things on the basis of what it is that it could be representing... but that doesnt make it not art.

Im not quarreling with you about that.. more about truth is relative.

As it's getting late here I won't be able to continue posting. But thank you for sharing some of your perspective, it's given me plenty to think about, I appreciate it.