this is a thing i’ve been thinking about and so i am going to post my Thinking onto my substack web site. i’m expanding upon the note pictured above. this is a work-in-progress thought and i am open to criticism..… this is really more for me to understand how i engage with art and isn’t some sort of universal law, or maybe it is I don’t know. maybe i’m onto something HUGE. you are a SOLDIER this is your ROE CARD you are going to WAR for the purpose of KILLING. when you look at a painting you must decide WHERE am i going to shoot this painting to make its death as PAINFUL and as SLOW as possible. dirty kills, they called them in ‘nam. liver shots
EXCLUSIVE EXCLUSIVE ART RELIEF OPERATION GROUND FORCES RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
NOTHING IN THESE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT LIMITS YOUR RIGHT TO TAKE APPROPRIATE ACTION TO DEFEND YOURSELF AND YOUR UNIT
A. ART, once declared ART, becomes ART, and the quality of the ART cannot be used to refute the perdurable quiddity of the ART's ARTness. - i see this really often. people say that something "isn't art" when they really mean to say that it's "bad art." Bad art is still art. I do believe that anything can be art if the artist intends it to be. Duchamp's urinal is art, regardless of whether it's good or bad, i am fucking tired of hearing about Duchamp's urinal, it's been literally over 100 years. shut the fuck up about Duchamp's urinal. that banana taped to the wall, remember that? it's art. it's dogshit, its trite and bad, but it's art. sorry, i don't make the rules! (i do) B. The popularity of the ART must not leverage your opinion of the ART. - there are actual reasons to be cautious about mainstream art. i'm not saying avoid it. this isn't about being some contrarian hipster. human brains are designed to think differently when presented with things that are popular. some sources for you: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amity–enmity_complex https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagon_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_contagion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_behaviour https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lollapalooza_effect you cannot let public opinion sway your feelings about art. you're lying when you do that. you should learn to catch yourself when you do these sorts of things. nobody's really at fault for succumbing to this stuff, it's just how brains work i guess. don't take pride in it just be careful. C. You cannot separate the ART from the ARTist. - it doesn't work! and i don't think it's as big of a deal as people make it out to be. you cannot deny that it adds to a painting when you learn that Hitler painted it. i don't really know what it adds, but it does add something. context for me is basically seasoning for art. too much and it tastes like shit. i don't want every facet of an artists life splayed out like a corpse in front of me. i also think it's lame to scroll past some anonymous artwork on instagram. my point is that if there's information available to you about an artist that you're ignoring while you're looking at their artwork, you're denying yourself a certain experience, maybe a good experience. D. The consequences of the ART must always be considered. - there's a lot of performance art that involves animal abuse for some reason. Marco Evaristti, with the goldfish in the blenders and the piglets starving to death, as an example. you cannot disregard the suffering of the animals and view the piece only as "performance art." the suffering is core to the artwork, and that should affect the way you feel about it. art is a bad excuse. morality is a constraint! if you shoot somebody in the head and call it theatre, sure, it's theatre, but it's also shooting somebody in the head. that's bad art i think! it doesn't just apply to moral consequences either. everything. keep it in mind!
i can’t think of anything else rn lol but i think i’ve covered the stuff i care about. short post but whatever. this isn’t really how i critique art1 but how i think about critiquing art. i would call it “meta-critiquing” if i was some sort of queer homo, but i shan’t! 再见!
i don’t even really think there’s objective criteria for this anyway. i think it really is just about your feelings lol. clive bell, aesthetic emotion. "criticism should be partial, impassioned, political— that is to say, formed from an exclusive point of view, but also from a point of view that opens up the greatest number of horizons" - baudelaire
If I may bloviate a bit:
Few things annoy me like the obfuscatory intellectual baggage art has accumulated over time. At bottom, art is predicated on a way of attending to reality which everyone is capable of: it's a simple* matter of intentional perceptual framing. It's bio-psycho-sociological in nature and has always been a thoroughly participatory phenomenon. As such, both human societies and human perceptual systems are the infrastructure/apparatus for the apprehension and creation of art. Humans, embodied organisms embedded in a conext, make art based off of their interactions with the world as they see it and these either resonate with other humans or they do not. This resonance, or lack thereof, has downstream effects. This is what art "is" functionally.
Matters become more complex when one begins to weigh the effects of financial, academic, and wider socio-cultural influences modulating the reception and resonance of any piece of art (which I might add is not static, but recursive and hermeneutic), but economic valuations and high-brow criticisms are not particularly fruitful additions to artistic experience itself, to say the least. The worst aspect of all this is that people begin to think of art as an arcane territory, navigable only by an anointed curatorial class and not an innate faculty residing in themselves. We in the West needn't have such a neurotic relationship with our own art-ifacts, but our collective cognitive style and incentive structures tend to make it so. A cultural shift towards the re-cognition of the predominance of context could perhap offset this, but as I say, this is against the trend and neural grain of Western society, especially in an increasingly-polarized America.
*in an intuitive sense
I only looked up the words quiddity and perdurable for my friend who’s with me rn. *I* totally knew them already…for sure.:.i’m not dumb if you thinking that…i’m not….