Art Has Officially Disappeared Up It's Own ARSE

I just caught the tail end of the local news, and some DICKHEAD has won an award for his latest 'groundbreaking' project - locking people in a shipping container to 'experience true darkness'.

I mourn for mankind, I really do.

 

Stockhausen already did this. Sort of.

 

Nothing spectacular. Immigrant smugglers have been performing similar experiences for decades.

 

Wait wait.....I thought art was and has ALWAYS been up its own fucking arse.

 

Tel, art used to be about, you know, actual ART. Sculptures and paintings and things that were beautiful and thought provoking. Now it's just completely lost it. I sometimes wonder if this is all some kind of massive fucking joke played by art critics everywhere.

 

I think it's been on the decline for a while now. Either that or I simply lack the artistic vision to see that photos of people with objects rammed into every orifice or buckets of paint haphazardly thrown onto canvas as art.

 

I'm sorry, but the works of Jackson Pollock are quite universally accepted as art.

My personal view on the matter is that if the creator calls it art, it is art. Art is simply creations with a purpose. Whether a given work of art is "good" or of "high quality" however would seem to be up to the audience.

A piece doesn't have to be aesthetically pleasing to be considered art.

I would like to add that the mentioned project - that of locking people up in a container - seems to me quite pointless. I would not consider it "good" art. However, if the creator feels that he is delivering some message or other, I would not hesitate to consider it "art".

 

Art hasn't lost it, it still does what it's supposed to: it provokes people. You're provoked by this, am I right? So then, technically, it still does what it's supposed to.

Then again, that hasn't got to be a good thing.

 

I don't believe naked 13 year olds is pornography, I believe its art.

 

I'm sure you didn't mean it as such, but that makes virtually everything a work of art and defeats the purpose of even having a specific term for that which can be categorized into it. However, that would mean the moron that put a goldfish in a blender and called it "art" was incorrect in his assessment, which I agree.

And the laws. Some places you can get away with calling it art, other places you'll be charged with child pornography.

 

But seriously I think its pretty wrong, I think people only perceive this stuff as art if it shocks them, just an excuse for kiddy fiddlers to get their kicks probably.

 

I'd say that this particular piece has done its job, considering it got people talking. The purpose the artist was going for was to make people think about the conditions illegal immigrants go through when they travel across the ocean, packed in a shipping crate, to be semi-slaves in North America. It was certainly the first thing I thought of, and the first thing Orintil seems to have thought of. My guess at the deepest meaning of this particular display was that it was supposed to make the viewer (and even the participants) sympathize a little more with the cheap labourers who are "stealing American jobs". After all, they stuffed themselves in an oil tanker so they could scrub toilets for $3.00 an hour. What did the people who were born in the West do?

I rather like it. It's a powerful experience, if mainly for the participants in the artwork, and it speaks with a stronger message than a bowl of fruit or a landscape with some rocks & trees; things people used to get awards for (the latter of which had an entire organization based around it).

In short, I concur with Wolfsbane. Though, as a supporter of free speech, I'd say that if the guy is allowed to express his beliefs without hurting anybody (I'm assuming he didn't kidnap the people and lock them in there: they would have to be volunteers. And I didn't like the starving dog art because it was inhumane and hypocritical, though it was still art nonetheless), I'd say this is definitely a good thing.

 

In all seriousness, the Artist Himself said that it was so people could experience 'True Darkness'. Nothing confronting, nothing about the desperation of people who try to escape their hell-hole countries in the damn things, he wants to make people afraid of the dark. And then he goes and fucks the whole thing up by standing in there with a torch in case someone gets a bit freaked out.

*exasperated sigh*

 

...damn.

That's not art. That's not even porn. Not even by the standards of Rule 34...

...well, with the torch, there's enough shadows that someone might think Lasombra...

 

It is not the artist's job to spell out the meaning of the artform. Imagine how shitty the Louvre would be if Leonardo da Vinci was right next to the Mona Lisa, explaining to you what it means.

Also, standing in the cargo crate with a flashlight is probably due to ethical considerations. The Stanford Prison Experiment made it incredibly difficult to do any interesting social experiments because everybody involved ended up snapping.

 

The first thing that came to mind was how it was not in fact "groundbreaking" and the immigrant aspect of it came from a memory of watching Lethal Weapon 4 rather than any 'thought provoking' qualities of the act of locking people in a cargo container.

You don't even need that. They have to provide translators for you at tax payer expense. But I agree. People whining about legal immigrants taking jobs needs to look at what jobs most immigrants "steal". They're usually jobs noone else is willing to do, so be grateful I say. Better them cleaning up the shit in public toilets than you. Illegal immigrants are a different story, but that's about legality rather than morality.

 

I've just spend some time reading about a few incredibly interesting social experiments, gaining some precious knowledge as a result. A sincere "thank you" to you, Grakelin, for that comment of yours was the stimulus that made me do so.

 

Well, yes, that sentence wasn't a try to define art, just describe it. I'll put it another way: If you create something and want it to be art, it is art.

I can make a chair that isn't art.

I can make a chair that is art.

It's all in what I mean it to be. Whether I communicate that meaning to others in any way is another matter.

If someone create something with the sole purpose of being art, without any actually "message", "meaning" or aesthetical purpose, that is what I would call bad art, but art nonetheless.