Group items tagged

Peter Schjeldahl, for example, calls Warhol a “genius” and a “great artist” and even says that “the gold standard of Warhol exposes every inflated value in other currencies.”

  If Warhol is a great artist and these boxes are among his most important works, what am I missing?

Appreciations of Warhol’s boxes typically emphasize their effects rather than their appearance.  These appreciations take two quite different forms.

Nietzsche, who wrote in Human, All Too Human, under the rubric “Art dangerous for the artist,” about the particular ill-suitedness of the artist to flourishing in a modern scientific age: When art seizes an individual powerfully, it draws him back to the views of those times when art flowered most vigorously.... The artist comes more and more to revere sudden excitements, believes in gods and demons, imbues nature with a soul, hates science, becomes unchangeable in his moods like the men of antiquity, and desires the overthrow of all conditions that are not favorable to art.... Thus between him and the other men of his period who are the same age a vehement antagonism is finally generated, and a sad end

What is modern is the sense of the superiority of the artist’s inferiority, which is only possible when the artist and the intellectual come to see the values of ordinary life—prosperity, family, worldly success, and happiness—as inherently contemptible.

Art, according to a modern understanding that has not wholly vanished today, is meant to be a criticism of life, especially of life in a materialist, positivist civilization such as our own. If this means the artist does not share in civilization’s boons, then his suffering will be a badge of honor.

I think this is one of the most burning issues around art – how do we tell if something is good? And who tells us that it’s good?

many of the methods of judging are very problematic and many of the criteria used to assess art are conflicting. We have financial value, popularity, art historical significance, or aesthetic sophistication. All these things could be at odds with each other.

A visitor to an exhibition like the Hockney one, if they were judging the quality of the art, might use a word like “beauty”. Now, if you use that kind of word in the art world, be very careful. There will be sucking of teeth and mournful shaking of heads because their hero, the artist Marcel Duchamp, of “urinal” fame, he said, “Aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided.” In the art world sometimes it can feel as if to judge something on its beauty, on its aesthetic merits, is as if you’re buying into something politically incorrect, into sexism, into racism, colonialism, class privilege. It almost feels it’s loaded, because where does our idea of beauty come from?

The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Tuesday, February 8, 2011Tuesday, February 8, 2011 Go Follow the Atlantic » Politics Presented by When Ronald Reagan Endorsed Ron Paul Joshua Green Epitaph for the DLC Marc Ambinder A Hard Time Raising Concerns About Egypt Chris Good Business Presented by Could a Hybrid Mortgage System Work? Daniel Indiviglio Fighting Bias in Academia Megan McArdle The Tech Revolution For Seniors Derek Thompson Culture Presented By 'Tiger Mother' Creates a New World Order James Fallows Justin Bieber: Daydream Believer James Parker <!-- /li

these questions tend to overlook the way IQ tests are designed. As a neuropsychologist who has administered hundreds of these measures, I can tell you that their structures reflect a deeply embedded bias toward intelligence as a function of reading skills

A formal claim was made in the mid-20th century that the goal of art conservation is to present the artwork as the artist intended it to be seen.

Dispute over this claim among conservators and art historians involved differences of perspective on the relative roles of science and art history in the interpretation of artist's intention.

The author finds that the interpretation and application of artist's intention is an interdisciplinary task and that its evaluation in conservation contexts is limited to consideration of distinctive stylistic characteristics that demonstrate the correlated individuality of artists and their work

Legally, it appears as though LAION was able to scour what seems like the entire internet because it deems itself a nonprofit organization engaging in academic research. While it was funded at least in part by Stability AI, the company that created Stable Diffusion, it is technically a separate entity. Stability AI then used its nonprofit research arm to create A.I. generators first via Stable Diffusion and then commercialized in a new model called DreamStudio.

hat makes up these data sets? Well, pretty much everything. For artists, many of us had what amounted to our entire portfolios fed into the data set without our consent. This means that A.I. generators were built on the backs of our copyrighted work, and through a legal loophole, they were able to produce copies of varying levels of sophistication.

eing able to imitate a living artist has obvious implications for our careers, and some artists are already dealing with real challenges to their livelihood.

So what’s the actual reason for the gap between audiences and critics? Simply put, it’s that audiences tend to be easier to please because they’re merely looking for movies to be entertainment while critics are trying to judge them artistically.

one of the things W. David Marx discusses is how art receives acclaim as art. “Invention requires ‘answering’ the works of previous artists,” Marx writes. So the creation of photography led to artists trying to “solve” the problem of a new form capable of capturing perfect representations of reality; hence the rise of cubism and abstract art

“There are perhaps an infinite number of potential problems in art, but to gain artist status, artists must solve the agreed-upon problems of the current moment,” he writes.

5 Things Art is Not

in over two decades of study through my work as a curator, college professor, and critic, art has become more mysterious, eluding my attempts to pin it down, to fully understand it, becoming so much more and other than I had expected.

But what I have learned are a few things about what art is not, things that I have believed about art over the years that I have gradually had to abandon.

Their cultural acumen is entirely the product of technology — in particular, being introduced to new artists through Spotify, the world’s largest subscription music-streaming service. According to executives at Spotify, my children offer a peek at the future of music consumption.

On average, the company said, the service exposes each of these listeners to one new artist every day. That is making listeners less beholden to music of certain styles and eras. Instead, many of us will try anything, just because we can easily sample it online.

Spotify is betting that fixed musical genres will fade away. In its new version rolling out to iPhone users, the company has expanded its effort to program for moods and activities rather than merely certain kinds of musical tastes.

Leonardo Da Vinci lived in a time of cultural transition known as the Renaissance, an era of philosophical, scientific and religious "rebirth," where the masses no longer accepted beliefs at face value and questioned the reasoning behind given theories. This new mindset gave rise to a curiosity about the origins of science and how art could demonstrate them.

"perception is the origin of all knowledge" and that "science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past."

He was the first of his kind to combine the keen eye of an artist to study the detail of his findings, and the curiosity of a scientist to approach his subjects with an open mind.

T Magazine had a very good idea. They gathered some artists and museum curators and asked them to name the artworks that define the contemporary age — pieces created anywhere in the world since 1970.

of the 25 works they chose, very few are paintings or sculptures.

Most of the pieces selected are intellectual concepts or political attitudes expressed through video, photographs, installations or words.

I don’t think it is algorithms per se that have killed hipsters so much as the all-encompassing imperative of poptimism.

At its core, poptimism is the idea that because a thing is popular, that means that it is good and should be celebrated.

Poptimism has spread beyond music and is at least part of the reason why, for instance, you see constant demands that comic book movies get best picture nominations.

The best explanation I’ve read for our current cultural malaise comes at the end of W. David Marx’s forthcoming “Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change,” a book that is not at all boring and that subtly altered how I see the world.

Marx posits cultural evolution as a sort of perpetual motion machine driven by people’s desire to ascend the social hierarchy. Artists innovate to gain status, and people unconsciously adjust their tastes to either signal their status tier or move up to a new one.

“Status struggles fuel cultural creativity in three important realms: competition between socioeconomic classes, the formation of subcultures and countercultures, and artists’ internecine battles.”

Amussen, 33, is the editor of Burnaway, which focuses on criticism in the American South and often features young Black artists. (The magazine started in 2008 in response to layoffs at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s culture section and now runs as a nonprofit with four full-time employees and a budget that mostly consists of grants.)

Efforts to revive AICA-USA are continuing. In January, Jasmine Amussen joined the organization’s board to help rethink the meaning of criticism for a younger generation.

The organization has yearly dues of $115 and provides free access to many museums. But some members complained that the fee was too expensive for young critics, yet not enough to support significant programming.

In 2001 the Studio Museum in Harlem opened a group exhibition called “Freestyle,” the first in what would be a series intended to introduce freshly minted African-American talent.

She referred to the group of artists she’d chosen, most of them then in their 20s, as “post-black.”

For her it meant artists who were adamant about not being confined to the category of “black,” though, as she wrote, “their work was deeply interested in redefining complex notions of blackness. Post-black,” she added with a wry twist, “was the new black.”

One of the underdiscussed aspects of literary taste is the principle of exclusion: Not what is welcomed in a work, but what is disallowed.

In the world of contemporary fiction, one of the biggest no-no’s is what goes by the name “sentimentality.” It’s hard to perceive it for what it is, when you’re on the inside, but this is actually an arbitrary allergy on our part; it’s analogous to the Victorian one against “immorality” in literature.

You can’t assert on a factual basis that sentimentality is wrong or false, that it somehow misrepresents the human experience—because mushy-gushy moments are an actual part of real lived life

Judith, "barely clothed and fresh from the seduction and slaying of Holofernes, glows in her voluptuousness. Her hair is a dark sky between the golden branches of Assyrian trees, fertility symbols that represent her eroticism. This young, ecstatic, extravagantly made-up woman confronts the viewer through half-closed eyes in what appears to be a reverie of orgasmic rapture," writes Eric Kandel in his new book, The Age of Insight. Wait a minute. Writes who? Eric Kandel, the Nobel-winning neuroscientist who's spent most of his career fixated on the generously sized neurons of sea snails

Kandel goes on to speculate, in a bravura paragraph a few hundred pages later, on the exact neurochemical cognitive circuitry of the painting's viewer:

"At a base level, the aesthetics of the image's luminous gold surface, the soft rendering of the body, and the overall harmonious combination of colors could activate the pleasure circuits, triggering the release of dopamine. If Judith's smooth skin and exposed breast trigger the release of endorphins, oxytocin, and vasopressin, one might feel sexual excitement. The latent violence of Holofernes's decapitated head, as well as Judith's own sadistic gaze and upturned lip, could cause the release of norepinephrine, resulting in increased heart rate and blood pressure and triggering the fight-or-flight response. In contrast, the soft brushwork and repetitive, almost meditative, patterning may stimulate the release of serotonin. As the beholder takes in the image and its multifaceted emotional content, the release of acetylcholine to the hippocampus contributes to the storing of the image in the viewer's memory. What ultimately makes an image like Klimt's 'Judith' so irresistible and dynamic is its complexity, the way it activates a number of distinct and often conflicting emotional signals in the brain and combines them to produce a staggeringly complex and fascinating swirl of emotions."

ere’s another kind of influence, not typically associated with writing, that works in a different fashion. Here, you don’t try to make people think or feel in any particular way. Instead, you try to get them to be themselves.

Could a writer have an indirect influence of this kind, getting readers to think about themselves anew?

in several studies over the past few years, we have found evidence that such influence is characteristic of literary art.