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What IS "Real Art" ? Honestly?
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Message
Posted
Oh dear, I fear I am putting my foot, no, FEET , in it here. but a bit of controversy never goes amiss and can be fun, so here goes... .
What IS Real Art?
Is it...
art which has a universal appeal to the senses ,
art which people can understand and relate to,
art which inspires a strong response ?
OR is it art which will SELL?
Your opinions on this.....?
Posted
RuthDolan (11/09/2016)Real art is that which has an appeal to the senses and the emotion. It doesnt have to be beautiful or in the case of abstracts understood. it ceratainly does not have to be explained ,which is an all too common accompanyment to some artistic offering.No matter how it is produced it is art in some form or other but that does not mean it is all what can be described as real art. IMO real art is done by human hand with paint and brushes pens pastels pencils crayons charcoal etc.on various supports,and needs no further enhancement or manipulation to improve it by non artistic means.But again all this is only an opinion by one of the many who hope that all they produce is real art however it is received by the viewers.
Oh dear, I fear I am putting my foot, no, FEET , in it here. but a bit of controversy never goes amiss and can be fun, so here goes... . What IS Real Art? Is it... art which has a universal appeal to the senses , art which people can understand and relate to, art which inspires a strong response ? OR is it art which will SELL? Your opinions on this.....?
Posted
The expression "Real", when interpreted, is 'that which EXISTS in reality,' ie; that which has a positive, visible, tangible existence . (Which one can see, touch, hear, feel etc.,) Therefore ALL such creative work is 'Real' to that extent. But there has always been a fine subtlety which exists in the realm of graphic art, and I would like to know what others perceive it to be, hence my topic. I suspect it has its roots in the perception of the work of the Great Masters, and a gut feeling as to whether any present day artist can come up to those standards. Are we overshadowed / intimidated by it? I am struggling here with these feelings. What, I wonder, will be considered the outstanding ART and whom the GREAT ARTISTS of the future when we are gone? Will we leave beauty behind us as our contribution to posterity and inspiration ? I can think of a few artists who may achieve that, but will it be the coming of the second age of excellence? And coming full circle, what is excellence perceived to be, anyway? And beyond that....Is beauty art, and is art beauty?
Posted
Well I remain convinced that REAL art is the result of a synergy between artist and medium. When the artist works the medium something, not sure what, happens which could not be expected or prdicted and which is quite unique. One of the features of this something is that it is unfathomable to the viewer although it intrigues them. It has layers of ineffable meaning and interpretation.
David
Posted
There's good art and bad art, and even that tends to come down to individual perception - I don't know of any way of defining "real" art; you can usually tell meretricious junk from the attempt to make actual art - or at least, so I supposed. But then I saw some of the stuff which is collected, praised, and raises large amounts of cash, and had to think again.
There was once a view that art had to arrive on the wings of the Muse .... any idea of making it for monetary gain, or as the result of some plan, was decried. Then Anthony Trollope revealed his writing schedule, and implied that it was really about making money (though it plainly wasn't his primary motive) and the aesthetes took against him in horror: how could an Artist (capital letter essential) write to a plan, and for -- ooh, I feel faint! ---- money?
Then there was Ian Lee, a usually perceptive critic, who went on the BBC's spectacularly daft Dragon's Den for Artists - I forget the title, but Monet came into somewhere in what some fathead producer thought would be a clever play on words.. Monet/Money: oh how witty; he told one contributor, whose main problem was that actually he couldn't paint to save himself, that "real artists don't paint elephants": I suppose he was trying to be kind, avoiding telling this artist that actually, the average elephant could paint a damn' sight better than he could. But if that was what he was trying to do, he made an ass of himself (do real painters paint asses, I wonder..? Well, in the US sense of the word, they obviously do...).
Tracey Emin, whose work in passing I dislike almost uniformly and totally but that's beside the point, was asked if she was a real artist and replied, in so many words, that she was an artist because she said she was. Well, whatever I think of her work that's good enough for me. Real art is made by real artists, and real artists are those who seriously practise art. That still leaves you with plenty of room to like, love, or loathe their work. The word "real" doesn't, er, really mean much in this context - now if you'd asked "what makes a good artist", we'd be in real trouble. Thank goodness you didn't .....
Waits; nervously.....
http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net
http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk
Posted
In a recent topic about "The Greatest Living Artist", Pat drew attention to a very convincing video which does a lot to answer your enquiry Ruth. I would really urge you to go and view it.
"I wonder what Robert Florczak would say about that?
https://realistart.wordpress.com/2016/08/10/is-modern-art-really-so-bad/"
John
Edited
by johnk7
Posted
Yers, well - I hadn't seen that until just now; he's sort of half-way got it, in my opinion. He played a fairly cheap trick on his students by showing them a picture of his painting apron and pretending it was a Pollock, but it still doesn't say anything about Pollock; and as images go, it was quite attractive. He jumps on the Rudy Giuliani bandwaggon by describing Chris Ofili's work as - I forget the words he used, but he meant ugly, scatalogical (because of the elephant dung: in which, I confess, I see no point), disrespectful, possible sacrilegious.
The snag is, I heard a distinct thud and whimper, as the baby got turfed out with the bathwater.
http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net
http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk
Posted
An intersting article from 2014...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30495258
Posted
Thanks for the link to Scruton's article - I've read another one he wrote on the same theme, or perhaps heard him talk on it, a while ago.
There's a snag with it so far as I'm concerned - I don't think he has told the whole story; he emphasizes beauty; he refers to redemption - which is not a concept with which I'm at all happy: I don't think that beauty redeems suffering. But if I were to write at the length I'd need on this, I'd want paying for it! And I don't notice anyone offering. (Of course, if anyone would like to....)
He takes two artists, one a painter, the other a composer, to explain his belief that good art needs form - and I agree with him on one: I can't tolerate Harrison Birtwhistle's music, though the fault may lie in me (and just about everyone else I know who has ever heard it); but not on the other. Jackson Pollock has been denigrated here by some before, and of course in many other places, and Scruton does so again because he doesn't offer, to his eye, beauty, or form, and thus provides no redemption - not least for the suffering that those who know something of his life story will know he endured.
But I do see form in Pollock's work - and I always have, it's not just the cataract.... So if I don't agree with Scruton on his assessment of Pollock, that leaves me questioning his whole thesis: not least because while I can see form, I struggle at times - not always - to find the beauty. I don't know what beauty you would find in Monch's The Scream; or Picasso's Weeping Woman, or Guernica - beauty of design, perhaps; there is certainly little beauty in some of the work of Goya, depicting the horrors of war, though there's certainly form. But if you demand all three - beauty, form, redemption - some of the key works of the 20th century don't get through the filter: and neither do much earlier works.
His piece is illustrated by, among other things, a particularly beautiful Corot - which serves to make his point. But he's decided what to choose in order to make his argument - I don't think that actually tells us much, or anything, about good art because he's excluding that which doesn't support his viewpoint.
Along the way, he makes some useful points about the reasons why we respond to works of art, in paint, music, poetry, and prose. But - granted Scruton is a right-wing philosopher (of sorts) with whom I've rarely agreed about anything else either - I don't think this works, even though I do agree with him that much with which we're presented in the name of art is fakery, dishonest, lazy, and, in the words one of us applied to Hockney (entirely mistakenly in my opinion), tat. . But I don't think reading Scruton is going to help anyone determine the difference between that and good art: the best you can hope for is a case-by-case analysis - you can call on certain principles to underpin it, but they're a lot wider and more complex than this attempt to define them allows.
http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net
http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk
Posted
It's all in the eye of the beholder isn't it ? We humans are all wired differently regarding our tastes in everything and art is no different as can be seen by the many different opinions on what real art is .
I personally never liked Van Gogh or Cezanne and yet I've been told they were the epitome of artistic brilliance ,I've always thought Van Goghs later pencil sketches were superb but his paintings truly dreadful , also I've always thought Cezanne vastly overrated but this is merely my opinion ; and basically that's what's it's down to its all personal choice as real art is in the eye of the beholder .
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