We always been asking "bad foto (photo) or good painting" in these ages, but we've never been asking:
- "How is the set of pixels asked as a bad foto or good painting feeling like today?"
- "Why is it the way it is?"
- "Is it either actually a photoshopped set of items rearranged to look like this to where we can ask if it is x or y, or it is actually a set of pixels meant to fool us and really it is spaghetti?"
- "What are the categories of which we can determine if something is good or bad, and whether a blurry-pixelated picture really is bad or an mock-impressionist painting really is good?"
Come on. Let's just start with "bad photo or good painting". Once we get our sea legs on that, we can go on to the important stuff (ie. "what's for dinner?")
Hmm, well how can we figure out if it really is a painting or photo to begin with. For all we know, the creator of the item displayed may have been at one point a picture that lead up to a painting and then a picture turned into a frame. So we got all this mess to deal with.
But if it is a photo, doesn't seem bad but unfocused and blurry - there's no way I can say it's good or bad without knowing if the camera was taken while still or a running boat, vehicle, bicycle. Even then, we haven't a clue of when the camera was made or the model used - further complicating the hard and fast lines of good and bad photography. But to simplify: if used by a modern camera while still, it's an unfocused bad picture; if it's an old camera while still, get a new camera; if modern but on the move, good that it can even capture the detail caught; if an old but on the move, well that camera certainly is beefy.
If a painting, I must say the artistry for the impression is certainly really there; going so far as to even capture the reflection which usually impressionistic art cares not that much for. In terms of impressionist arts, it is good for sure; yet for things like realism, they certainly could've had a smaller brush for more refined details. As for things like post-impressionism it has a certain too much realism for such, then again it certainly wouldn't falter by a huge much and would still be a good post-impressionist piece. But categories be damned.
(Now in, let's get our sea legs dipped further and let's ask if Socrates was the one taking the photo or it was Sun Tzu riding on horseback taking the picture or some other stranger.)
So it seems that it does matter to you whether it is a photograph or a painting. Hence "good" or "bad" as a piece of art are not determinable without further information beyond just viewing the piece itself?
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.
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