Jun
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Bad Horse
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Art is artifice. It's a means to an end. The particular end chosen is inessential.
Edit:
Let me try to put this into perspective. What if someone said:
I think this would be a parallel statement, one which misses the point to an equal degree. Art is not the same as the goal of the artist; art is the means by which the artist tries to achieve his goal.
Oh, boy. I wanted to list a whole bunch of edge cases (making a sculpture and sealing it in a concrete block forever, doodles in sand that the waves wash away before anyone else can see, the practice pieces that one attempts and destroys before commencing a work). And then I thought of the case of someone who makes art that connects with no one else in the world because the artist is such a social outlier that no true communication is possible. And then I got too depressed to continue.
Art without communication is static.
In both senses of the term.
3173007
ccso.tv/images/static.gif
If art is communication, then it implies an inability to communicate like all the rest of the people.
...art is a form of autism?
3173408
What? Your first sentence makes as much sense as saying the ability to smell implies an inability to see.
3173422
I've seen LOTS of art that doesn't make a lick of sense
3173435
Perhaps, but your first attempt at saying so shows a lack of skill in the area, yourself, appropriately enough.
The existence of one way of doing a thing does not imply inability to do it another way.
So self-expression is NOT communication?
To whom, pray tell, is that self being expressed?
3173515
I think that may be Carver's point. "Art" integrally involves the phase where it is experienced and processed. The examples that 3172952 lists are acts of creation, but not acts of "art" as Carver would define it.
The thing I hate about all discussions of what art is (What we Talk About When We Talk About Art?) is the unspoken screaming subtext "...AND ANYTHING ELSE IS NOT WORTH YOUR TIME!!!" Balls to that. I think if we're honest about what we do and realize that some things we create are part of an experience we share with others and some are for us alone, there is value in both. Masturbation, artistic and otherwise, is generally okay in my book. To extend the most favorable interpretation of Carver's words, I think he is chiding those creators not who engage in either practice specifically, but those who conflate the two.
3173549
In that case I think Carver's so terse that he's elided (hah! my new favorite word) an important condition out of his epigram.
I take it you read it as "A is not SOLELY B, because B is just a subset of C: A is, in fact, C."
And C, as we know, is for Cookie:
3173596
Hell, I don't know Carver's mind. I'm just spitballing.
That said, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" maybe gives us some insight; the discussion in that story touches on the idea that an abusive husband is expressing "Love" the only way he knows how, an idea that the author's mouthpiece character derides. Love is a cooperative act of mutual connection, not an individual intention fired off from the howitzer of the psyche into the surrounding atmosphere, and it is not difficult to assume that Carver feels the same way about art. I will stop short of claiming Carver believed love and art to be synonymous, because I am not a college Freshman writing an essay.
3173596
Also, that video has always been brilliant, and it was totally wasted on me back when I was the target audience,
3173642
Cookie is Truth; Truth, cookie. That all
On earth me know, or monster need to know.
But Modern Art is the corruption of our youth.
Why not both? I mean, artists are trying to communicate how they feel, expressing ideas and whatnot. They kinda happen at the same time.
Heh... or maybe art is about money. How many artists are hoping to get paid for what they do, be it writing, music making, painting, or sculpting? You do see Patreon popping and other things popping up all over Fimfiction, Deviantart, and Youtube. Not that I have anything against that. I do enjoy commissioning people to
do stupid crapexpress my ideas.You see those fancy billboards and ads on the road, tens of thousands of dollars spent to get you to buy a cell phone? There might be a bit if self-expression involved in the choice of including bunnies and cgi monkeys in the ad. But mostly it's trying to communicate to you to buy a new cell phone.
So perhaps self-expression and communication happen through art at the same time, other times it's just one or the other. It's kinda situational, I guess?
I find it easy to argue the inverse of your statement. Art is the *inability* to communicate specific ideas. Language was developed to communicate ideas. Art was developed to express emotions.
You will never⁽*⁾ find a piece of art enshrined in the constitution of a country, or their laws, although on many occasions you do find various well-dressed individuals waving around blocks of text that they claim other well-dressed individuals are interpreting incorrectly. You can have a meaningful discussion on the meaning of 'Shall not be infringed' far easier than you can over just why exactly Admiral Nelson is posed that way, or just why watches draped over abstract trees is in some way worth a few million dollars.
This is why Microsoft bugs me so much, I suppose. The designers of their Aero interface believe you want to see through the windows you just brought up, it should explode up onto the screen with a pretty animation and vanish away when minimized, and the icon that represents what you are working on is an abstract block of strange colors in the bottom of the screen that you have to actually put the mouse on in order to figure out what it means. It's very artistic. It's the first thing I turn off. I want my computer to communicate with me, not act pretty.
(*) Never as in 'A very low probability approaching zero, but Ghost, Bad Horse, or Horizon will still be able to provide at least one example to the contrary.'
3173653
Speaking of brilliant Cookie Monster bits that probably went largely over the target audience's head.
Cookie Monster explicitly points out it's a good thing the moon isn't made of cookie or he would destroy it in his all-consuming quest for more cookies and then he'd miss it because he'd never be able to look at the moon again. If that's not about how addiction can lead to destroying what you love, I don't know what is.
Not sure I agree with your quote. It needs more context, as it is it just seems provocative rather than clearly insightful.
Like, for example, if I'm looking for a picture idea, I might fire up al.chemy and throw scribbles at the screen and see if anything interesting comes out. If this is a communication process, it is only me-to-me, feeling out the feedback to move closer to something interesting. Well, IMO you-to-you communication could also be described as 'self-expression'. So is that experiment art? If not, what is it?
A more to the point comment might be: 'Do you mean this in the spirit of 'Real Artists Ship', as the late Steve Jobs said? .. or something else?'
3174615
"Art is the inability to express ideas."
"Language was developed to express ideas."
.. I take it that somehow you consider writing, diagramming, and storyboarding, to all not be art?
(I'm being conservative here. AFAICS defining art as the inability to express ideas would .. basically leave nothing that is conventionally viewed as art (writing, photos, drawings, paintings, sculptures, public speaking or 'performance art'...), classified as art.
They all convey a collection of ideas, hopefully strongly related -- and the best art masterfully guides the viewer through noticing first this part then the other, constructing a narrative which differs person-to-person but is, in a broad sense, the same. Storyboarding and composition are all about this.
The ability to communicate emotion is just an aspect of art that is unique to it, not the sole defining characteristic of art. If it were not so, then we could gibber random words with appropriately structured tonality and it would make a compelling, rather than interestingly funny, speech.)
* Unless they do, in which case self-expression is a thing the viewer might desire. Also, this is not a pipe, it's a redirect.
The quote, like most objectionable things, would probably have been better received in context.
Carver wasn't saying that art is nothing more than communication, he was saying that that art is more than just self-expression. Self-expression doesn't require any investment by the author, and it doesn't require any moral grounding. It is effectively well-edited noise.
Communication and noise are two halves of the same coin**, but they are not the same thing. Self-expression is output that originates from the artist, out of random variation. Art is output that originates from society, as refined through the artist. It's society that we want to understand through art. Nobody cares about the artist***.
** Get it? Because noise is 1-signal. Haha... ha... Sigmoid reference. It made more sense in my head.
*** <*
3176782
Thank you.
I guess that view is like.. art is like debate club, or something? "If you have nothing to say, say nothing."?
It seems fair enough. Challenging to relate to.
3176255
...huh. Never thought of it that way!
3174615
To say such a thing, Georg, is to discount just about every piece of art made in Europe from the 400's to 1870. Studying both Art Ed and Art History, having looked at thousands of works, either on my own or having them crammed down my craw, I can definitively say that the inscrutable works are the weakest ones, in my book. Art is (or used to be) a language, a shorthand that communicated Ideas from artist or commissioner to viewer. Current works are those folks that took up the equivalent of Esperanto, or Newspeak. Some of them are speaking it backwards, now, to make it completely unintelligible.
3178164 Leaving aside Modern Art and Postmodernism, as well as anything that Deconstructs anything else (because they are not Art or Language, but some other odd construction that defies logic), the Art that you describe is emotional in nature. It sweeps you away to a sunset glistening across the lake, or a tranquil grove of trees with a pair of skittish deer caught in their decision to flee, or even a weekend at the park with other people as you enjoy the spring morning air.
Contrast that with Government Regulation 407.96 on the Regulation of Radish Production in the Central River Valley.
True, they both elicit emotional responses, but the second lays out rules and qualifications which can be codified. Art does not need to be qualified into the same emotion for all viewers, and in fact is better if it doesn't. Laws and regulations should.
Now there is overlap, but in general the two elements occupy different zones.
3178208 Art is emotional in result, but since feelings are a result of thoughts, it seems to me that rem-dog's point that art is about communicating ideas remains perfectly valid.
Your distinction appears, in effect, to be one of degree ('how exacting is the content of the communication') and not one of type.
3178208
3179312
I take it, Georg, you don't regard illustration as art?
3174615
I have the advantage of having heard the entire interview that quote was an excerpt from. Carver wasn't contrasting communicating logical ideas with expressing emotions. He was contrasting communicating anything--ideas, emotions, intentions--versus "self-expression."
The best example I can think of is that if you're in a pentecostal church, and somebody falls down on the floor and starts speaking in tongues, they would say they're expressing the spirit of God, but they would admit they're not communicating.
A lot of artists "make art" in ways that's pretty much like speaking in tongues. They're very excited about it, and they're putting on a performance, but nobody else knows what they're saying.
3173549
Yeah, that's an important addendum. But as a practical matter, all views on art are in competition. We live in a time when art is dominated by scarcity. That's surprising, since there's more art than ever. But the distribution of rewards for artistic work is more uneven than ever. In the 19th century, no musicians made an enormous amount of money, because music couldn't be distributed--the only people who paid to hear it were the people who heard it live. But even small towns had many professional musicians. Today, maybe 1/100th as many people are professional musicians, yet the top 100 musicians might make more money than all the musicians in the world put together 100 years ago. Artists compete desperately for air space, gallery space, space in the pages of the New Yorker, reviews in the New York Times, professorships at Yale, etc., and there's more and more artists every year, and no more of that valuable real estate being created.
So it's inevitable that artists are at each others' throats over their competing artistic theories. If we lived in a state of nature, I wouldn't care that Grog was in the cave over the hill writing clop. When I have to compete with him for the featured box, or for a professorship, I do.
3190888
While what you say is generally true, I have found that on virtually every occasion the time I've spent musing on "what art is" would have been better spent creating art. If views on art are necessarily in competition, it seems more efficient to express your opinions about art by creating the art, rather than creating no art whatsoever as you tell your neighbor that he is also not creating art, and simultaneously telling other people that they shouldn't be enjoying the non-art your neighbor is creating.
3190922 That's because you're good at creating art. For most people, it's the other way around.
I do believe that, but I don't think you can legitimately claim to have determined that time spent creating art is more effective in the long run than time spent arguing about it. You aren't making a living making art. Small groups of people conspired in the 1920s to gain the levers of power over literature and poetry and dictate what was and was not good, and it made them successful, made their views dominant, and made them money. I mean Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and their cohorts in particular. They were waging a war of extinction on their competition, and they won.
The best example of somebody who tried to stand apart from the fray and just make art would be Robert Frost. I think if you read his interviews, you'll find he was often defending himself from attacks, and his acceptance as a great poet was a near thing for a long time, and could easily have been destroyed by the many people who tried to destroy him.
OTOH, what you say is probably true for genre and commercial art. There's no point arguing when consumers have the final say.
3190945
Thank you! I'm flattered.
3190952 I ninja-edited my comment while you were replying to it.
3190985
Noted. I guess it just boils down to what you think the word "better" means.
3190871 "... but nobody
elseknows what they're saying."Fixed it for ya.