I never had implied that to me, myself and I that it didn’t matter, I just didn’t care to say whether the presentation of was either “bad photo or good painting?” and the subsequent field of explaining why.
All we do when we say “good” or “bad” in context of paintings is critiquing the presentation of a work. Even in a void with our human body and the art piece itself being present, we would still critique what we see in it and not a hundred percent of it. If I were to materially ground us all, we would use the biases of others that came before us, a probable museum curator’s words and the knowledge of any given field to critique yet still the presentation of such, but in the broader scope of material reality.
For what serves as good or bad art, in the material world at this point of history, is dependent if it represents well its related field of art, and it also reflects the author and society in such in some capacity.
You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
Some people say that there is such a thing as "Objective" art - a work that conveys what the artist intended to convey rather than what each viewer experiences differently depending upon their subjective emotional reaction to it. Isn't "feng shui" predicated upon a similar concept? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_shui
Well if people define “Objective” art like that, they would by necessity of their definition must put “Subjective” right before it. That or rename it to (to steal a philosophical term from moral-ethics philosophy) “Target-centered” Art. Because even if there are objective elements like the scenery, shapes, lines or objects (hue), it’s still being heavily mediated in the Subjective realms of both society and the artist who’s labourint their ærses there. So better it be “Target-centered” Art in, say, the philosophy of Æsthetics than this misnomer of “Objective” art.
And so I wouldn’t prescribe to “Objective/Target-centered” Art since it does allow a paradox (can’t remember if this is a Veridical or Falsidical) in which the Artist is looking for a multiplicity, or even duplicity, of interpretations and yet it is at the same time what the artist intended to convey. (That being the discussion around the piece as the focal point of discussion.) Now that paradox varies in degrees, whether it is for a multiplicity of opinions/interpretations on a singular subject to all the way on what the actual peck a piece is supposed to be.
Hell, we don’t necessarily exactly, precisely and accurately know why the Mona Lisa was painted except it was a patronage art piece. Yet what did Leonardo Da Vinci and the patron agreed upon for the exact purpose for it, and what was Leonardo Da Vinci thinking when he hadn’t finished but was about to finish the Mona Lisa. We got the major concepts done of, as aforementioned, a portrait in some generic Italian landscape that served to glamorize Mona Lisa. Yet the question of why it wasn’t finished still remains (but that has been answered by now I bet). Let’s even look to Tamati Waka Nene, an art piece made of an Maori chief way after the Chief died and based upon folk description and an old black-n-white photo of the chief. We know it was a patron piece and it definitely highlighted the Maori culture, yet that’s about it when it comes to the historical record as that it could be it or we haven’t truly seen any other influential biases which could’ve went in to make this masterpiece artwork.
So I fall more in the camp of “Subjective-Objective” Art as to not only alleviate the paradox mentioned earlier but to also give some wide berth for Subjective interpretations along with the Objective Material World to creep in as well. Not for some grand, wholesome theory of everything but as a means to point out the very messy World we live in and how much of a soup it really is.
Otherwise, I never heard of Feng Shui, so I will admit ignorance here. But if the wiki article reports Feng Shui as it was, I don’t necessarily think the same predicates follow here in this discussion.
In a speech about art delivered to a group of students in Moscow in 1916, Gurdjieff broached an explanation of his aesthetic terminology and of his division of art into categories. The speech was delivered in Russian and translated into English by Ouspensky:
I do not call art all that you call art, which is simply mechanical reproduction, imitation of nature or of other people, or simply fantasy or an attempt to be original. Real art is something quite different.... In your art everything is subjective—the artist’s perception of this or that sensation, the forms in which he tries to express his sensation and the perception of these forms by other people.... In real art there is nothing accidental.... The artist knows and understands what he wants to convey, and his work cannot produce one impression on one man and one impression on another, presuming, or course, people on one level.2
Every aspect of the creation and impact of objective art is premeditated and definite.
https://www.gurdjieff.org/challenger2.htm
If I were to judge like a Pyrrhonian Skeptic while at the same time a Dialectical Materialist the "Objective" Art here based up Pon (Sir) Gurdjieff's own words, even "Real" Art can be collapse-able to Idealism and, at the same movement, is forsaken to even make Plato's Ideal Forms look like standard shapes.
To focus on the blurb before going into the article: of course there are no accidents but there is no determined fate. Things can be necessitated and those we can definitely account for, but how do we account for the unaccountable or at least ones we have yet to account for? We call them contingencies, the play-offs every necessity that matters to its creation. In this way, something is still necessity bound yet doesn't need to be have necessitated from one source nor fully from two sources. In this cheeky account of detailing, the artist who goes drunk but wants to paint themself drunk still has made "real" art just as if the artist were to imagine if they were drunk how they would paint themself. Even the post-modernist artists, the surrealists, abstract-expressionist and those before them.
Yet the real challenge isn't if we can prove that they know why and how they were doing it but the realms of conscious-unconscious activities and if we can make a clear-cut case for when someone was completely unconscious and completely conscious. Because there is no leeway for when the artist can dive into unconsciousness, because that entails not a "real" art piece. No leeway to suggest when an artist unconsciously becomes conscious of what they paint, because that still eliminates them from producing "real" art even if they subvert what they are painting. As we can technically say these are tainted by unconsciousness, so they ought not to be "real" art. But the biggest hypocrisy falls upon the example of "real" art in this category: Ancient Eastern art. As there's ton of ideological things we knew they were conscious off to paint, yet were they unconsciously reproducing society in the art they created or where they independent actors that so happen to form a collective around Neo-Confucian, Buddhist or Tengriist Ideals? This ambiguity cannot be properly resolved and clear-cut in this sense.
But if we were to abandon the conscious-unconscious dichotomy of art production, we are still left with another Subjective-Objective impossibility which cannot be fully delegated to pure Subjectivity or pure Objectivity. And that delegation of which belongs to "real" art is that the author's will can and should only create one impression. Yet impressionability is hard to manage even with individual agents who are spoiled by the biases of their society. What could be "The Mosaic of a Mural of Alexander the Great winning the war against Xerxes" to all Greeco-Roman people would be a great cause of celebration, to Iranian and pro-Iranian people a great cause of distress and to everyone not involved either a good piece depicting a scene of victory that is skewed in making the Greek-Macedonians heroic. Yet Greeco-Roman people can be wholly divided on this plain on impressionability: the military in clear favor, historians giving a slight chuckle on exaggeration, non-combatants at awe and slaves under such giving too wide range of impressions. So the only way for an impression to even be secure is if society where unchanging and collectively the same - of which we are not granted this guarantee from him.
Of which, this "Real" art is so Idealistically bound in the Philosophy of Æsthetics that it makes Plato's Ideal Forms like standard shapes. Of which it might possibly exist, yet of which we will have an impossibility to find in our current state of operations. One which after many exacting order of necessities playing themselves off for which we can see the mystical "Real" Art exacted upon the Ancient Eastern World into a World-wide phenomenon for which it shall be agreed that we can produce "Real" Art in accordance to Pon Gurdjieff's guidelines. Yet given the circumstances even looking into the question of whether the Ancient East can clearly classify for such, it may just be an Ideal for which we can be infinitely ever close to but never reach. Where we needn't debate the impressions but feel secure in the exact meaning of a work. Until that day comes, the World Spirit (Dialectical Idealism) has yet to see this actualized and the material conditions (Dialectical Materialism) has yet to give the ability for artisans to produce consciously their works upon the World.