Posted by pseudolus 3/31/2025
I'll rephrase my question: How many of those 8 billion people care about and/or are aware of Rene's art?
Blue was one of the most expensive colours because the ultramarine dye was derived from lapus lazuli, a rock imported from Afghanistan and ground with a labour-intensive process. Medieval European art typically depicted the Virgin Mary in blue. The expense indicated devotion.
Someone living in that time period would know anything in ultramarine is important.
Except Vermeer used it for whatever he wanted, including a blue turban on The Girl With the Pearl Earring (originally called Girl with a Turban). The pearl is expensive in the world of the painting, but the blue turban was expensive to create in real life. That is the central mystery of the painting.
But we literally cannot appreciate that because we did not grow up in a world where ultramarine blue was as expensive as gold, because synthetic ultramarine was invented in 1826. That's why you care about visual interest and aesthetics instead of reacting with "Holy shit! Why is this blue?"
Our descendants will likely feel the same about the art we create today, and ignore whatever aspects of it are trivialized by AI.
Of course, the expensive paint is a part of the history of the period, and paintings like this one become a symbol of the period as a whole. Appreciation for the period is certainly part of the appreciation for the painting.
There are still non-modernist artists who focus on technique and sincerity, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_Nerdrum
All the pretensions are maxed to legitimize the BS.
Then the talent-less, listless, bored children of the ultra rich have mommy and daddy force museums to put their kindergarten macaroni art on the walls of places that great artists used to be. (Aka banana taped to wall literally the same as macaroni child projects). The mental gymnastics to pretend it is more than that requires the irrational love for your untalented child.
Rich people have destroyed the global art community.
The exploration of philosophy through art has its own beauty, it's not an easily digestible beauty but it's a kind of. What you show is just a complete lack of perception to other ways to appreciate art, and for that your soul is a bit more empty than it could be.
Instead of looking at art from this productivity view try to be more curious, challenge yourself on what is even the notion of art and what it can give to us that is ineffable in other forms... Right now you are just too miopic to even be able to appreciate art as a whole, you just want the product of art, not the process, meaning, and philosophical questions it can spark in you.
To understand art takes effort, it tells me a lot about people when they show how uncurious and set in their ways they are about art, they just simply aren't free people.
This gets repeated a lot, but the reality is to many people, including philosophers, artists and appreciators of both, aesthetic beauty is a fundamental property of art without which it cannot survive.
The fact that contemporary art circles handwave away that relevance while arrogantly mumbling "you're just miopic, ignorant and misguided, learn more" doesn't really change that fact.
From the outside, it just shows that you too have been co-opted into the cult. You're free to subscribe to that view, but you don't get to gatekeep the meaning of art, no matter how many members that cult may have.
> From the outside, it just shows that you too have been co-opted into the cult. You're free to subscribe to that view, but you don't get to gatekeep the meaning of art, no matter how many members that cult may have.
Isn't beauty in the eyes of the beholder though? I do see beauty in a lot of art deemed "part of the cult", how do you even attempt to objectively judge aesthetic beauty in a vacuum? Beauty exists in contexts, there is stuff that without the context just looks weird, with context it becomes beautiful, how do you assess the objective aesthetic beauty of such without delving into philosophical discussions?
You are all free to create an art movement that aspires to do what you believe art should be: aesthetically beautiful, devoid of philosophical meaning as pursuit of beauty, beauty for its own sake, etc., it will be included, admired, rejected, judged as misguided, so on and so forth, just like you are doing with contemporary art that you do not agree with.
Isn't that all art anyway?
This is a truism, and I don't even think it's that accurate. There are some universal aspects to our perception of beauty such as symmetry, balance, tension-and-release, contrast, recursion... whatever it may be. We don't need to know what it is to tell that it's there.
I wouldn't say that people who do not see this as art are wrong, that's the beauty of art isn't it? It's in the eye of the beholder. To me this recital sparks some hope or in any case makes me stop for a second and wonder about greater things than just my day to day.
https://vimeo.com/groups/832551/videos/549715999
Unfortunately I think too many people are still falling for that nonsense
"Fake intellectuals" is just... Sad, devaluing whole bodies of work simply because you cannot understand them, instead of attempting to curiously explore that you prefer to use a thought-terminating cliché and embrace your ignorance as supreme... All the while you live during a time where all information and knowledge in the world is there for you to access for free.
It's just... Sad to live that way but ignorance is bliss since it's just so much easier to reject anything that challenges you.
I'm not missing on absolutely anything by not appreciating a banana glued to a wall. In fact, nobody really appreciates that, it's just a bunch of sycophants pretending they have some artistic knowledge the rest of us, the poor populace, lack, that go on pretending with the charade.
The rest of the world, are just willing to tell you that the emperor has no clothes.
When exactly did art not need financial support from the State, or rich patrons, to be able to be made?
You are moving the discussion into a completely different territory now, and again showing how your view of art is principled in some kind of "productivity" measurement, which is so absurd that is not even wrong.
> I'm not missing on absolutely anything by not appreciating a banana glued to a wall. In fact, nobody really appreciates that, it's just a bunch of sycophants pretending they have some artistic knowledge the rest of us, the poor populace, lack, that go on pretending with the charade.
The banana glued to a wall is one work of art (and polemic for a reason), and you are using that to paint a broad stroke over all contemporary art as if there is nothing being told there... You don't know what you are missing exactly because you don't know what it is, you wouldn't know the colours you'd be missing if you were born with black-and-white sight, nor would know you are missing music if you were born deaf. The difference is that you are not born with an unchangeable characteristic to not appreciate art in different ways, you can work on that, you just choose not to.
There's no charade, the actual charade is why are you so vitriolic opposed to something you do not even understand, lol. It reeks of some sort of insecurity, since you do not understand you feel it's beneath you because makes you feel lesser that others might "get it" and you are out of the club? I don't know, look inside you to find an answer because the passionate rage about something you do not understand has deeper roots.
Maybe to you, but to me that's speech, not art. Calling me ignorant doesn't make your viewpoint more valid.
It’s not clear what’s making you angry about one obscure performance of an obscure piece of music, but you might have more in common with Cage than you imagine. Cage described himself as an anarchist, and pieces like 4’33” are, in part, a commentary on the rules of music that make fun of establishment. Maybe he’s saying the same thing you are about the emperor’s clothes.
I think it managed to hold off a bit more, we still have Bizet, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, even Stravinsky and others composing great (fantastic, in some cases) pieces in the first half of the 20th century.
But then, a bunch of Jonh Cages came along...
- the Emperor
I find the subject mildly interesting, but the paywalled internet is just another sign of end stage capitalism...
The art community is no longer about celebrating humanity or beauty or inspiring people, it's instead about proving its intellectual / class superiority, that they don't have to work all day in the fields and worry about other people's problems like the common folk do, but instead can pontificate about nonsense with the best of them.