oh lord

[psocoptera]

O'ist art criticism. Ahahahahah. Stumbled upon while going through papers and finding some notes containing the interesting line "if a given work is challenging, experimental, seductive, disturbing, exploring, elevating, or quirky - it is not art. um??" Which of course could only refer to "What Art Is" and their appendix on "artworld buzzwords - one can safely infer that whenever these buzzwords are used in art criticism, the work in question is not art".

Also I had totally forgotten about the whole Randian photography-is-not-art thing. Heh. Apparently it's also not art if you compose a painting by projecting reference photos onto your canvas, as explained in here:

these paintings--as well as others for which Eakins used a "magic lantern" to project photographs onto primed canvas--do not, therefore, qualify as art (even though he noted color and atmosphere in detailed oil studies made on location), although they appear to the eye to be just that.

What an interesting problem it must be for orthodox O'ists if some painting they previously enjoyed is shown by new scholars to have employed tracing techniques. Their art has been de-arted! It would be like your patron saint being downgraded to fictional status. Where did the art go? If it was never there, what were you responding to?

(On the other hand, de-artification can be handy way to tidy up signs of homoeroticism in your favorite painter's work: in copying both the composition and the main details of a projected photograph, Eakins employed a mechanical procedure that belies the projection of such deep feelings as "longing," "desire," or "passion" on his part. Boy, it's sure a good thing you can't project passion or desire via a camera. Ahahahah.)

Comments

[thoroughbass.livejournal.com]

Poor things. Don't tell them that Vermeer probably used a camera obscura.

A very young and naïf philosophy student drove me home from a catering gig the other night and opined that Art could "of course" not be useful. Unless that purpose was to "communicate a message." I had him flummoxed over whether or not propaganda was art. Damn, I miss hanging around with art historians.

[aryky.livejournal.com]

I have to admit, this whole thing is amusing on every level. I'd never heard of the photography-is-not-art thing. . . from reading that article, I strongly suspect that the writer may believe that photography in fact captures a 360 degrees, three-spatial-dimensions plus time view of the world. Which would be kind of neat, but isn't my experience of the genre.

[irilyth]

I suppose that if you define "Art" narrowly enough, you can claim that anything you want thereby isn't "Art" -- it's just what most other people mean when they say "art". :^)