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Notes -
Contra Scott on Taste
Recently, Scott posted an exploration of various conceptions of artistic taste on ACX:
We've discussed some of Scott's other recent posts on art here previously, but we've yet to discuss this one in particular.
Most of the possible conceptions of taste (taste as an arbitrary system of religious rituals, taste as fashion, taste as linguistic grammar) outlined in the post rely on the implicit assumption that the principle goal of "taste" is to sort artistic works into two buckets: those that pass the test, and those that don't. It is assumed that what distinguishes the man of good taste, if there is such a thing, is his ability to discern the genuine masterpieces from the kitschy frauds. My goal here is to challenge this assumption.
Scott dismisses a Platonist account of aesthetic quality due to concerns about the observed variance in aesthetic preferences across individuals. But I would go further and suggest that, independent of concerns about its coherence, strict Platonism is not even a desirable model for aesthetic quality; it is not something that I wish to be true. I'm not in the business of policing what works others are allowed to enjoy or appreciate, and I don't think that such business is proper to the faculty of taste. I'm reminded of the following passage, excerpted from a discussion about the feasibility of an account of reality that includes fundamentally, ontologically distinct levels of emergence:
That is indeed the exact word I would use! It feels "imperious" to think that we could ever draw up a table of all the good and bad works of art, once and for all. I too am a lover of all things "counter, original, spare, and strange". Let a thousand flowers bloom, and see what grows.
In spite of all this, the concept of superior and inferior works remains indispensable. We must ultimately pass judgement on a work, by means of reference to specific properties of the work. But these judgements are always held in indefinite suspension; they are part of the patchwork of an ongoing emerging narrative that we author, and are not intended to be "the last word".
To Scott's list of models for taste in his original post, I would add "Taste Is Like A Method": a method of thoughtfully and critically engaging with a work. Or, more poetically, "Taste Is Like An Invitation": an invitation to feel a certain way, to perceive things in a certain way, to be a certain type of person.
To give a paradigmatic example of the exercise of the faculty of taste as I conceive of it, this passage from Barthes' Mythologies does nicely:
What makes this an act of tasteful discernment is not the particular judgement that was rendered; there is no "law of taste" that says that one must prefer wood to metal. Rather, the "taste" here consists in the process of perception and reflection itself; the ability to take an object that would normally be overlooked in the course of "sensible" work and draw qualities out of it that were previously unperceived.
You're allowed to like anything you want... if you can tell a good story about it (and I suppose we would need meta-taste in order to evaluate someone else's tasteful appreciations; and meta-meta-taste, and so on. This leads to either circularity or infinite regress, but so be it. There is no knowledge anyway without at least one of circularity, infinite regress, or the bald assertion of truth). If you like a Kinkade because it "looks pretty", then obviously you haven't put in much effort. There's no indication of an authentic aesthetic experience there; we are right to demand more of you. But equally, you have to tell a good story before you condemn something as well. The sophomoric art student who dismisses Kinkade because it's "plebeian kitsch" is just as unthinking and mired in unexamined prejudice as the philistines he criticizes. Taste, if it is anything, is a cultivated habit of mind; not a list of correct answers.
In light of my preferred conception of taste, most of Scott's discussion of the alternative conceptions is obviated. However, I wanted to additionally respond to a few points made near the end of the post:
Certainly taste does vary across time and place, although I think the degree to which it varies is at least somewhat exaggerated. People still like Mozart, and Shakespeare, and da Vinci, despite us being separated from them by hundreds of years.
There is truth to this, but it's not entirely a bad thing. Art is intimately bound up with politics, and that is as it should be. Art is a domain where we should be exploring messy human problems that don't have clear, universal answers.
This is certainly correct. But once you accept a conception of taste that isn't predicated upon being able to distinguish "genuine" from "kitschy" works, then the relevance of these experiments is lessened.
Scattered thoughts that I might as well dump here where few may see it:
I think there's an unconscious secondary purpose to too-large houses like McMansions as discussed in the standalone thread: having multiple bedrooms makes it piss-easy to host your extended family for a holiday occasion.
Re: Kinkade: I think there needs to be a happy medium, where art can be something more than overwrought, mass-produced kitsch like Kinkade's Christmas scenes, but also not be products of an uncontrolled spiral of elitist bullshit that's better at making money than making memorable impressions. Thankfully, there's legions of online artists on places like Pixiv and Twitter that make things like well-rendered fanart of anime and video games, or original pieces that truly stand out on aesthetics and subject matter in a way that modern high art doesn't.
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I think my comment on the original post is relevant here without editing:
I think a big part of this is that visual art is increasingly interpreted like narrative art. Narrative doesnt necessarily aim to be beautiful, and can be popular anyway. We wouldnt normally describe a novel as beautiful - its "good". Other narratives like are clearly not beautiful, like fairytales used to be brutal, but can still be good. We find the same in many artforms that contain a good bit of narrative: tragic plays, raunchy tavern songs, etc. In the West, this extends unusually far. I would guess that even for Scott, its normal to dress "cool" rather than "beautiful", where most societies would have only done that for certain occasions. Apple Inc design is... propably pretentious if youre super into it, but normies dont really object like they do with architecture. Etc.
The "higher" you get, the more everything becomes like this. That is why modern painting or architecture is often explained as references to earlier works, why it fells like "this should have been an essay", and also why it changes a lot. There is certainly an aspect of initiation to it, but its not just some snobs making stuff up for themselves - they are in fact "ahead of us" on a path we also go down collectively.
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I'm going to return a theory of Fashion I've forwarded before, which I formed about clothing but is generally applicable to almost anything.
What we normally label as aesthetics is actually two entirely different things. One half is Appearances, the other half is Associations. Appearances are the actual physical appearance of the garments on your body. This is the realm of geometry, color theory, trump l'oeil. "Skinny jeans make your legs appear longer because they have a streamlined silhouette." Appearances are what you look like. Associations are the opposite, who you look like. Associations are about how a garment codes socially, who else is wearing it. Skinny jeans make you look like a fag, or an emo kid, or a trendy guy in the city, or a lame-o millenial dad, or nowadays in some quarters a conservative. Associations vary, depending on the viewer.
The trouble is that most people don't make those distinctions in fashion, they mix them together. Fashion writers put them all together at once. Generally where they talk about the associations, they treat them as universal results of the appearances. Skinny jeans will ALWAYS be classic and masculine, because of the way they drape on the body. Or vice versa, skinny jeans will ALWAYS be faggy and effeminate.
A lot of things make more sense when you frame them in this way. Taste for art is better when framed this way. Taste for architecture is better when framed this way. Taste for ideas is mostly better when framed this way.
Part of distaste for McMansions is about their architecture, but much of it is based in what kind of person lives there. Part of people liking art is about the actual art, and part of it is liking the kind of art that the person you want to be would like.
This extends into taste for ideas, taste for political positions. I saw so many Pro-Russian takes throughout the Ukrainian war in which it was clear that they started with an aesthetic of being a hard nosed realist, and tried to imagine what the hard nosed realist would say, and then reasoned from there. And the result often had little to do with reality.
Yes I agree with this, I normally think of it as authentic and cerebral preferences. For example, I like oatmeal, because it is simple, and I like the aesthetics of simple living and simple things. I also like steak, because when I bite into a good piece of steak the fatty juices that wash over my tongue make my brain explode.
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I think taste in art is simply an acquired intuition of which experiences of art are ultimately beneficial to experience. I don’t like the idea of a “story” because this denies us from understanding art which includes wordless intuition, like music and architecture. There’s no need to develop a story about St Mark’s Square as it contains biologically determined indicators of beauty in the form of symmetry and motifs. I have no understanding of Chinese history and stories, and yet I can intuitively find beauty in Chinese architecture. No storytelling necessary. This is because of its innate visual beauty as determined by biological responses to visual stimuli. I am not Persian, but Persian rug patterns are beautiful.
Really, the judgment of art is objective according to subjectively-determined social values, with the addition of biologically-determined beneficial stimuli. A war-like culture enjoys art which speaks to the qualities which produce good warriors. Art in a communal culture will be different from art in a raw individualist capitalist culture. And so on. But a Soviet socialist can still find beauty in Norman Rockwell, just might conclude that in the whole the art is bad because of its consequences. I am especially dubious of “taste as telling stories” because our culture has an overproduction of bad storytellers who justify their salaries by word count: most humanities professors, most fiction writers, most journalists. In their little cannibalistic and solipsistic micro-culture, art that is bad for normal people is good for them, because by pontificating on it they can justify their class position. I truly hate these people.
Kinkade is an interesting case. This is art for lower and lower-middle Americans, who want to buy art when they go to the mall. It is visually easily to consume and it portrays scenes of happy domesticity. 2. In viewing this art, someone who works all day and tends to familial obligations in his down time can remember why he is doing this: for the rare moments of celebrations and joy which are experienced as a family in lower income America. This may occur on the toilet, and at an age when one’s eyes have decayed from overuse. (The oversaturation reminds me of World of Warcraft; likely optimizing for visual engagement and ease of visual differentiation). Before we criticize this art, we should consider which art would be more beneficial for these people to experience. I would say with confidence: nothing that the parisitic class produces in modern art galleries, modernist music, or modern literary circles. And actually, very little art in normal art galleries. Okay, they see something beautiful by Caravaggio, but unless they are religious then that fleeting animalistic noveltyslop feeling of “ooh interesting” is lost on them. Norman Rockwell? Sure! Rockwell is probably better than Kinkade at expressing moments of domestic American bliss. “They should be challenged” might say a pretentious person, but this class has genuinely no benefit to being challenged, and in facts need less stress, fewer challenges, more optimism and simple joy.
To understand Kinkade you have to understand how the art world actually works in terms of tastemaking. In today's visual age, where images are easily reproduced in books and magazines, on television, on the internet, and everywhere else it's possible to reproduce images, we tend to forget that the kind of familiarity we have with art is a new phenomenon. For most of human history, the only way you knew what a painting looked like was if you actually saw it in person. And even that is an easier proposition than it once was, since public museums that hold the great works are a relatively recent phenomenon. In our world, it's easy to ignore art precisely because we're bombarded with it, whether we like it or not. Yet it is he who pays the piper who calls the tune. Every man is entitled to his opinion, but unless you're actually a bona fide art consumer your opinion doesn't count for anything.
To be a bona fide art consumer, you have to be the kind of person who is willing to peruse galleries in your area with the intention of dropping hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a painting, not because it will make a good investment, but purely because you like it. The gallery is an essential part of the system. I have a friend who has the rare distinction of being an art history major who actually works in her field. She worked on the staff of the Andy Warhol Museum and owned a gallery in Pittsburgh for a few years before moving to Texas (and managing a gallery there). The gallery is an essential middleman. With art schools graduating thousands every year, and many more than that selling paintings, it's hard for someone looking to buy art who's not fully ensconced within the art world to know where to start. The gallery owner thus acts as an intermediary, able to identify pieces of sufficient value that she can recommend them to customers without hesitation, yet also in touch with economics and the taste of the customer base that she won't alienate them.
It's worth pointing out that there's no barrier to entering the world of an art consumer other than money and the willingness to use it. The whole concept of a gallery opening is to generate buzz that gets people in off the street. They're essentially parties with free booze and light appetizers, and the people throwing them don't care whether you're actually interested in buying anything or have any pull in the art world (though you should dress appropriately and be willing to mingle with the crowd). I tried to attend as many of my friend's openings as I could, and she was always appreciative, as a full house with no buyers is always better than a sparse turnout. Anyway, this is the way the system is. If you're an artist, you try to get noticed by a gallery owner who agrees to display your work and hopefully sell it. If you make enough sales, you'll get a one-man show, have your work displayed in better galleries, get overseas exposure, and eventually reach the rarefied air of having your work sell on Southeby's for tens of thousands of dollars.
There are some artists, though, who can't cut it in this system. Most artists, in fact. Most of them just keep their day jobs and do art on the side and make an occasional sale; nothing wrong with that. But some of them want to get in so desperately that they open their own galleries. These are called "vanity galleries" and are frowned upon. An artist selling his own work through his own gallery is a tacit admission that you're trying to bypass a world where you couldn't make it by buying your way in. From an economic perspective, Thomas Kinkade's work didn't appeal to bona fide art consumers who bought paintings through galleries. It did, however, appeal to the kind of unsophisticated consumer who was willing to pay 40 bucks for a print and didn't even care if the nameplate artist actually did the underlying painting. Kinkade took the vanity gallery to its logical conclusion by opening a chain of stores where you could buy reproductions of his work in between buying jeans and grabbing an Orange Julius.
Buying real art is an intimate act. You attend a gallery opening where you peruse what's available and probably talk to the artist. If you're interested in buying something you call to make an appointment to conduct business during the week. You get an original work that nobody else will have, that the artist put hours into. And you pay a price that demonstrates your appreciation for those efforts. Kinkade reduced it to a commodity that was as disposable as any other. Of course, some respected artists thought that art should be a commodity, most notably Andy Warhol. This would at first seem to absolve Kinkade, but two things need to be taken into consideration. The first is that Warhol only gets respect for this revelation because it was novel at the time. Other pop artists existed before him, but he was the first to take the ball and run with it, while still straddling the line of whether he was serious or not. Some thought his work was criticism of consumer culture; he insisted that he was dead serious that it was not, but his aloof public persona suggested a hint of irony.
Which leads into the second point about Warhol. By the 1980s it was clear that he indeed was serious, and his stature started to fade. The endless screen prints and commissioned portraits of celebrities may have caused his image to soar among the public, but he fell off with critics. Furthermore, a new generation of artists raised on Warhol took his beliefs seriously and began equating garishness with quality. He died unexpectedly after gall bladder surgery in 1987 which was bad for him but good for his image, as he couldn't spend the next twenty years sullying it even further. While the pop art of the 1980s was mass-produced and kitschy, it was at least popular kitsch. Art may be fashion, but fashion is at least contemporary. Kinkade was just as kitschy, but he didn't even try to be cool. He produced art for the kind of people who collect Precious Moments figurines. And as he got older and more famous his strategy became even more crass. If one goes to his website today, the entire first page is licensed work. If his work wasn't kitschy enough already, you can always add a few Disney characters. What makes this especially egregious is that some of the characters, like Moana, didn't exist until after Kinkade's death, further emphasizing the fact that none of his alleged work has anything to do with him personally.
Years ago, before his popular revival, I told my gallery-owning friend that I wanted to write a critical defense of Bob Ross. When I was in high school, art teachers hated Bob Ross, so I thought I was being edgy. She told me that Ross wasn't controversial and that if I really wanted to ruffle some feathers I should defend Thomas Kinkade. I knew little of his work, but, having since looked... I just can't. It's not even good in a technical sense since he obviously doesn't understand color theory. Everything looks garish. There is no sense of proportion. Robert Hughes of Time magazine was highly critical of contemporary art in the wake of Warhol, and he complained that everything seemed designed to make the biggest immediate impact but had no staying power. Kinkade is no exception; his paintings hit you like a dish where you just threw in a dash of every spice in your cupboard. And this is all in pursuit of nothing more than cloying sentimentality. His works don't have anything to say about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. At least Norman Rockwell led one to consider the meaning of the American Dream, and Warhol sparked discussion of consumer culture and celebrity. But what does Kinkade do? Are his paintings meditations on false nostalgia? Maybe, but I doubt he would have agreed. Gallery owners recognized the vapidity of his work, so he had no credibility. He had commercial success but it was due more to marketing than craftsmanship. One can argue that millions of people find his work visually appealing, but millions more find pornography visually appealing. I'm not trying to argue that Kinkade isn't art, but I'm not trying to argue that pornography isn't, either.
I'm gonna tl;dr your post down to an analogy: the art world is solely composed of high-class restaurants with Very Serious chefs trying to Make A Statement with their food, and then Thomas Kinkade came along and invented McDonald's.
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To me a lot of this has nothing to do with whether a piece of art is actually good on not. To me, things like craftsmanship, form, balance in colors and shapes. I’m not opposed to “starting conversations” or “having a viewpoint”, but on the other hand it’s not essential to whether a piece has the qualities of good art. If you look at ancient and medieval art, it’s not making odd statements about society, it’s creating something beautiful to tell familiar stories. An icon of a Bible story painted in the year 1000 says nothing more or less than “this is a familiar cultural story.” The art is in the craftsmanship the balance of the characters in the frame, they’re definitely beautiful. The same can be said of ancient Indian images of Shiva dancing, or the Laughing Buddhas, or Japanese prints. The form and the balance of structure and color, the workmanship, the materials, etc. are what make these things beautiful.
Art galleries don’t really care that much about beauty, or quality. A banana duct taped to a wall, a canvas painted in one shade of green, a crucifix in urine, a pile of candy in a corner, etc. these are things that are famous art pieces. But they also are pieces that have no thought behind them, no craftsmanship, no serious effort to produce anything interesting. It’s actually a crass attempt at juvenile humor and quite often is only notable because of its ridiculous nature. Were these artists unknowns, nobody would care about the art. It’s possible it’s sparking a conversation, but how deep of a conversation can one have about a banana taped to a wall, bought by a rich guy with money to burn and who promptly ate the banana? Gee, I hope the banana was tasty, I guess. And I hope the green canvas matches the couch.
Modern visual art has a lot of thought behind it, but it's not the thought about beauty or quality. It's a self-referential thought, the one that interacts with the history and the modern understanding of art. And it's not a novel thing. Suprematism is more than a century old.
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The best and most charitable way of defending Kinkade (or indeed Ross) is that he allowed people to yearn for beauty that he didn’t deliver, but came close enough to to be appealing to people’s base aesthetic sensibilities.
It reminds me of @orthoxerox ‘s suggestion that McMansions look weird because they’re a collection of room that have historic / classical architectural elements like ornate gables and columns and decorative elements draped over them in a garish and jarring way. They lack the symmetricity and sense(s) of scale, proportion and place that the classical architects, aspects of whose styles they copy, had.
The same is true about Kinkade. He is a poor artist, independently of style. His proportions are off, his raw technical ability lacking, his understanding of color nonsensical or zero (pick one). But in his images his customers found something pleasing to their base instincts. Sure, they could buy a print of a romantic landscape made with technical skill, but that wasn’t as easily found and marketed in the mall. Kinkade was there, nobody else was.
It reminds me of architectural critics’ mockery of really ugly and misproportioned attempts at “modern classical” architecture, like Poundbury or a lot of Robert Stern stuff. And sure, most of their criticisms of kitschiness and an absolute lack of understanding of a lot of classical proportionality are valid. But by God, they’re trying. The criticism is, in almost all cases, aimed at the idea rather than the outcome, when what the customer really desires is a better classical (or in the case of Kinkade, idyllic / quasi-realistic / pastoral scenes) product.
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Not only is his art exquisite, but by cutting out the middlemen art galleries, like tesla, he has revolutionized the industry with his efficient way of doing business.
The ‘no staying power’ critique is revealing. It’s up to you if you’re going to keep thinking of a piece of art. When those critics get hit with the raw emotion of a Kincade, they immediately try to forget it.
I’m even more anti-taste than scott, in that I’ve decided that nothing you or anyone else could say is allowed to affect my tastes in any way, because that could reduce my enjoyment of mass-produced accessible art. There’s no upside to discriminating between good and bad art, unlike good and bad science or policy. So I consider this discussion pure edgy cocktail party bullshit without any stakes.
Yeah I have never seen anyone complain about Thomas Kinkade who wasn't being an insufferable snob about it. I get it, I'm snobbish about some things too. But I don't care what the "art community" says: Thomas Kinkade makes better art than most of the rest of them put together, because fuck man at least he understands that people want art to be beautiful. Beauty is subjective and all that, but modern "artists" are so busy sniffing their own farts that they have completely lost touch with what the profession is supposed to be about.
Also while I'm at it: Bob Ross was the greatest visual artist of the 20th century and the fact that we don't have his stuff in a museum instead of literal garbage like bananas duct taped to walls is an utter travesty.
This is just indefensible snobbery.
Obviously I haven't seen every artist's work (who can, there's only so many hours in the day). But I have not seen anyone else whose work I liked more.
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There's a LOT better art being made than Kinkade produced. But the gallerists that Rov Scam refers to generally don't want good art; they want the stuff the common people hate. And people who just want pretty something to put on the wall generally aren't going to go to galleries anyway; they're going to buy a poster print or something equally cheap. Whether that started with galleries carrying only the inaccessible (or worse, ugly-but-fashionable.. there's a LOT of terrible political art, for instance) or people abandoned galleries so the galleries went to more niche stuff, I don't know, but it's true now.
(My wife is an artist, and I have several pieces -- not hers -- we purchased in galleries, so I'm not completely ignorant here.)
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I don't know about this idea of 'storytelling' as far as defining which art is best either, but I do think you need way more context than just some imagined innate sense of 'beautiful colours and patterns' to realise that a Persian rug is nice. The rug also happens:
-to belong to an old tradition
-to be made of natural materials
-to have had care lavished upon it
If you take these aspects away you could end up with something resembling a plastic play mat, with an AI generated pattern printed on it, that was created in five minutes. This would not be nearly as pleasing. You need some sense of wider context to appreciate what is in fact lovely and what is not.
Scott's essay also seemed to miss this, which is why I think he seems to really like imitative architecture and McMansions. In fact he likes them as much or more than the original old architecture they are copying, which is very strange to me.
I don’t think “old tradition” is a requirement. If I’m looking for a rug and I see one like this, it doesn’t matter to me whether it’s traditional or brand new in style. It is innately pleasing to the eye. Similarly, it doesn’t matter whether it was made by some amazing machine or by human hands.
Re: “natural materials”, this is because rugs are a multisensory functionable object. Natural fibers are preferred by humans in terms of texture and smell and sound. So, natural fibers simply align with the most beneficial possible experience I can have with a rug. But if this design were placed on a storefront, it would still be beautiful even if the sign were made of plastic. (Though, humans actually enjoy natural materials more, probably for biological reasons, like the mood-enhancing effects of wood phytochemicals)
In a more complicated analysis, every object is socialized: our purchase can benefit another living being, which winds up benefitting ourselves. I think this is why humans usually prioritize “crafted” items. But this is simply part of the object’s experience: provenance is part of the product. And I mean, okay, same with stories…. But telling a story is different from an authentic story.
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I'd like to respond to your take on the undesirability of Platonist aesthetic theory, but probably won't. It seems hard and I'm detecting a lot of places where we don't see eye to eye.
But I don't understand Scott's brief dismissal of the idea (and yes I read TFA). I adhere to what we can probably call a Platonist view, and to me the solution is simple: mankind is in the process of developing attunement to 'true' beauty etc. Just as at one point we had an ancestor which could not see at all, then eventually one which could see dimly, then one fairly well, then one in color, and so on.
It can be simultaneously the case that Beauty is universal and that people will disagree on what it looks like. Also, I find that a lot of the 'disagreement' goes away once we factor in fashion, signaling, obvious reaction and inversion, etc. And a lot of disagreement about aesthetics seems to come down to trained nostalgia and association, e.g., houses built like my grandparents' soothe and please me even though I don't think they're necessarily objectively better.
Still I hold that there is such a thing as objectively better. We just can't see it perfectly yet. The interesting question is whether advancements in such perception are adaptive. Does a people which perceives and cultivates True Beauty(tm) outcompete one which does not?
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I think there is such a thing as good taste. It’s not that you are somehow not allowed to like “poor taste”. The value of taste is that it recognizes things like skillful workmanship, balance and harmony in the form, timelessness, among other things. A cheap mass produced item quickly churned out is simply not as tasteful as a well crafted piece built to last. A brutalist skyscraper is not as tasteful as a basilica.
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Someone's never gotten a splinter from wooden furniture eh?
Only outdoor wooden furniture that has been frost-damaged, like benches in Alpine resorts.
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Is that actually a thing?
I don't think I've ever seen a piece of finished wooden furniture which hadn't been sanded and usually lacquered such that splinters just weren't a thing unless you literally broke it.
Right, but contrary to what Prima said that has to do with the finish applied to the wood. The form of the wood isn't causing the lack of splinters.
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It's definitely worse with cheap furniture that uses plywood, but I've seen some run down pieces that can get you if you're not careful.
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A slight tangent, but the discussion on art and taste has reminded me of an observation that has stuck with me for years.
I dont recall the exact source but it was a podcast or video essay discussing the decline of the Oscars and "the Telos" of going to the movies. The observation was that the current critical and academic consensus is that in order to be a "good" movie it must challenge its audience and deconstruct its subject/genre and that by extension that the "best" movies are ones that are difficult for the lay-person to enjoy/appreciate. It was then pointed out that this consensus is a historical aberration as from Ancient Greece up through the mid 20th century it was widely understood that the whole purpose of art and the mark of a truly "great" artist was to construct a complex idea or emotion and be able to communicate it to as wide an audience as possible.
I think with movies it has gotten bad. Look at best pictures today. Largely unappealing to the masses. But in the 90s Braveheart won best picture.
The "Best Picture" winner typically will be Oscar-bait over a crowd-pleaser, though often the winner appeals to both. Famously, "Annie Hall" won in 1977. Sure, Braveheart won in 1995, but in 1998, Shakespeare in Love beat out Saving Private Ryan. In 1982 Gandhi beat out E.T..
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Of course I am not an art critic, theorist or philosopher but I hate this idea of the art necessarily having a purpose. I see it all the time on reddit, variations like "the purpose of art is to [challenge your beliefs/critique society/promote justice/make you think]". However when I think of some of the most regarded artistic masterpieces of the past oftentimes I can discern no higher ideal in them than "this is beautiful" Did this perhaps have some more legible "message" originally? Perhaps, but today there is almost nothing left and it is beloved solely for its beauty. Of course with effort any sufficiently intelligent person can spin out from that various "purposes", for example the all-powerful leftist idea that all art is political and any art that appears apolitical is really just a resounding endorsement of the status-quo in every way, it goes without saying I think this is BS.
The whole idea of a "purpose" being essential in art strikes me as an English-classism. Where we would learn the 5 paragraph "hamburger" style essay and we were instructed to have our entire essay based on a single-sentence thesis about the "message" of the book. I see this high school style approach echoed in Banksy type shit, things that are extremely popular on /r/pics and can generally be summarized with a single-sentence social message like "war is bad" or "capitalism is destroying the environment"
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Although I think this is somewhat of an oversimplification - people have been making weird shit for a long time, and I doubt that an author like say, John Donne, would have conceived of his project as "communicating complex ideas to as wide an audience as possible" - I do agree that the self-conscious elitism of early 20th century modernism, and the degree to which it stressed art's own self-consciousness, were genuinely historically novel. In spite of modernism's alleged "overcoming" by "postmodernism" (more and more people are beginning to question if the two are really distinct at all), these tenets have permeated culture and continue to influence art today.
I would never admit this on any left-wing site, but of the two great art exhibitions of 1937, I aesthetically prefer the "German art" to the "degenerate art". And I don't think that ipso facto makes me a fascist.
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The only true artform left, then: memes and poasting.
There is already a museum of memes, where a PWC manager is immortalized for all to see. More people have seen this disappointed pakistani man than any religious icon. By kb of digital space, that man is a god alongside dicaprio and harold.
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It’s where my artistry flourishes. And I truly think it’s an art form.
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The scary thing is that you might not be wrong.
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