Art

originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
"...in a way that no one since the Renaissance would assent to." Oh sure, it's not like they knew anything about art in the RENAISSANCE.

That sentence should be taken, as it usually would be, to include the Renaissance. As a matter of intellectual history, though, the Renaissance is well prior to the inception of modern aesthetics in the 18th century (the word didn't exist as referring to the theory of art prior to Alexander Baumgarten in 1735 nor were any of these kinds of questions addressed between Plato and Plotinus and his book, really), so even with regard to your reading of the sentence, it is a defensible time limit. Because the Renaissance did produce Vasari, though, and no discussion of Western art can really ignore him, I did mean to include the Renaissance. None of this, of course, is remotely germane to this argument.

(!)

"...any artifact no matter it's [sic] appearance needs to have been intended as an artwork to be correctly perceived as one..." Reasonable enough, but that just makes intent a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.
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You well know that I don't think intention is any more than one necessary condition since we have had this discussion with regard to meaning on another bored. I'll go over the argument here slowly once more:

1) In order for an artifact to be an artwork, one necessary condition is that it has to be intended to be an artwork.

2) In the example of the glasses on the floor, the thing missing that supposedly makes the satirical point is that intention since the glasses were left on the floor with the intention of fooling people into thinking it was an artwork. This kind of trick (which has been played before) is one conceptual art is more vulnerable to than representational art, but it isn't uniquely vulnerable to it (the point of my examples and thought experiments) and hence it doesn't remotely show that conceptual art isn't art, only that there is nothing inherent in some artifacts that will make them art, while others that look just like them, aren't, which is, after all part of the original point of conceptual art, though it rather takes that for granted now as old news.

Now you are free to disqualify much of what has gone on in art since 1964 as art because you don't like it (maybe you also don't think abstraction is art, thus disqualifying everything back through Kandinsky, since, after all, it doesn't take any particular technical skill to throw blotches of color on a canvas). But arguments such as these won't make your point since they beg one of the central questions posed by the works you want to disqualify.

I say "because you don't like it" by the way because you have never offered even an approximate definition of art by which the disqualification might take place so you can only be doing this by instinctive response. You might easily do this by simply arguing that in addition to be intended as an artwork, to be an artwork the artifact has to be formally pleasing (or satisfying, if you don't like the implications of pleasing) in the way it is intended to be. This is why others before you have wanted to disqualify Duchamp, Warhol, Koon, etc. But you won't make your case with examples like these, which only, as I say, beg the question.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
1) In order for an artifact to be an artwork, one necessary condition is that it has to be intended to be an artwork.
Click to expand...
Any other necessary conditions or is that the only one?

Can something be an artwork if it was never intended to be an artwork, but is falsely represented as one? If, say, a fraud like Warhol got a splotch of ketchup on his shirt, had a light bulb go over his head, and said, "Andy, my God, you can find a sucker to pay a million bucks for this if you put it in a frame!" Assume for purposes of this thought experiment that he has fraudulent intent. (i.e., whatever your own views on whether the ketchup stain constitutes artwork, the person proffering it as artwork neither intended it as art nor considers it as art, but is selling it because he imagines some other sucker will.)
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
1) In order for an artifact to be an artwork, one necessary condition is that it has to be intended to be an artwork.
Click to expand...
Any other necessary conditions or is that the only one?

Can something be an artwork if it was never intended to be an artwork, but is falsely represented as one?
Click to expand...
All fraudulent work falls into this category, right?

Dali tarnished his reputation by turning a blind eye to such.

SNL had a funny sketch, years ago, of Picasso signing cocktail napkins because he could...

I think, Keith, your dislike of this kind of art and your admiration of similar-looking non-art is insufficient grounds for dismissing the field of endeavor.

I laugh at some of this stuff, too, but I don't think it's all a sham. Just as with pictures of Madonna and Child there are good ones and there are not so good ones.
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
1) In order for an artifact to be an artwork, one necessary condition is that it has to be intended to be an artwork.
Click to expand...
Any other necessary conditions or is that the only one?

Can something be an artwork if it was never intended to be an artwork, but is falsely represented as one? If, say, a fraud like Warhol got a splotch of ketchup on his shirt, had a light bulb go over his head, and said, "Andy, my God, you can find a sucker to pay a million bucks for this if you put it in a frame!" Assume for purposes of this thought experiment that he has fraudulent intent. (i.e., whatever your own views on whether the ketchup stain constitutes artwork, the person proffering it as artwork neither intended it as art nor considers it as art, but is selling it because he imagines some other sucker will.)
Click to expand...

1. As I've said numbers of times before, I think art is a meaning bearing discourse, so it has to be about something. This is a necessary and not a sufficient condition because books of philosophy, ordinary sentences like this one and lots of other forms of discourse are also about things. It's also why I don't think wine can be art (though I recognize that Levi does believe wine to be meaning bearing and if you agree with him and the meaning you perceive is the one the winemaker meant the wine to have, it does fulfill this criterion). I don't want to hijack this thread back in this direction, though, since we have argued about it before. Just to complete my answer to this question, the sufficient condition is that art has to embody what it's about. And to give credit where credit is due, this definition, stated in more or less these terms, I take from Danto, by way of a whole line of thinkers going back to Plato (who defined beauty this way, though not art) but mostly reinaugurated by Hegel. No part of the definition is mine. I'm just persuaded that it does what a good definition should do, even at the cost of allowing a whole lot of artifacts to be art that some people consider on there face fraudulent.

2) The case you imagine really doesn't seem different to me than the glasses on the floor, and the answer is "no" up to a point. I say "up to a point" for two reasons. First, there are lots of historical examples of us taking things for artworks that we know weren't intended as artworks but we just decide to misconstrue: when I was a kid, for instance, there was a fad for exhibiting driftwood as art. We regularly take objects from other cultures that we know we can't be sure were intended as artworks (rather than as, say, objects in religious ritual or simply crafted objects whose form we like). Since we know what we are doing, these objects can be artworks for us. In the case of the Warhol stain, he might have meant it to be fraudulent, but dthe person who bought the shirt might have known it and still like it as art. Second, given the Warhol quote Florida Jim cites above (and about a scazzilion others like it), I'm not sure that Warhol could be fraudulent when he did this and its hard to imagine much of his audience thinking they were getting something they weren't. Do you really believe that the first audience who bought the original run of Brillo Box (they cost in that 1964 exhibit, I've read, about $2000 a pop, so, even in 1964, they were within in the reach of a less than 1% wealthy NY attendant of art exhibits)were somehow fooled into thinking that the thing they were buying wasn't just a brillo box, presented as art, in the full knowledge that it was a reproduced brillo box (though as a standard example of commercial art, brillo boxes are visually striking embodiments of suggestions about the cleaning capacities of the brillo they contain, so they were at least representations of kinds of artworks, unlike the urinal, the original of which no one ever bought)? The openness of what he did really made fraud impossible since you really can't defraud someone by saying, for instance, "hey, I just dropped some ketchup on my shirt, but given my status in the art world, I could claim this was art and sell it: you want to buy it?"
 
Oswaldo Costa
Look Ma, No Hands!
2016
Iron ball and cardboard tube
11 × 2" (28 × 5 cm)

DSCN4756-1.jpg
 
A.A. Gill owned a portrait of Stalin by an unknown artist. He brought it to Christie's to hopefully have it included in a mid-week auction. The portrait was denied with the house saying it did not deal in portraits of Stalin or Hitler for that matter.

Gill asked "How about if it was a Stalin by Hirst or Warhol?" "Well then, of course we would like to have it."

Gill gets on the phone to Hirst asks him to paint a red dot on the nose of Stalin. Hirst does this plus signs it. Christie's now accepts it and estimates £8,000 - 12. Ultimately hammers for £140,000.

While that is pretty great - I really enjoy that Hirst said this:

“The best person who ever painted spots for me was Rachel. She’s brilliant. Absolutely fucking brilliant. The best [Damien Hirst] spot painting you can have by me is one by Rachel.”
 
The professor is retired, but, Keith, you have a new baby plus meaningful work defending miscreant financial institutions so what's your excuse?
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
1) In order for an artifact to be an artwork, one necessary condition is that it has to be intended to be an artwork.
Click to expand...
Any other necessary conditions or is that the only one?

Can something be an artwork if...
Click to expand...

1. As I've said numbers of times before, I think art is a meaning bearing discourse... No part of the definition is mine. I'm just persuaded that it does what a good definition should do, even at the cost of allowing a whole lot of artifacts to be art that some people consider on there face fraudulent.

2) The case you imagine really doesn't seem different to me than the glasses on the floor...what he did really made fraud impossible since you really can't defraud someone by saying, for instance, "hey, I just dropped some ketchup on my shirt, but given my status in the art world, I could claim this was art and sell it: you want to buy it?"
Click to expand...

Maybe you could both settle for calling it bad art?

For me, the problem with a lot of conceptual or situational art (searching for the right word here) is that once I figure out or am told the point, it's like a moderately funny punchline, quickly forgotten. No particular reason or desire to see it again.
 
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