Rosencrantz2
2d ago
Hmmm. Very difficult. Most people seem to approach artworks as they do flowers. They know which ones are pretty, how they're supposed to look, and they like having them in the room. Maybe that's 90% of people. But off the dome I'd go with 5% of people more than very occasionally having big emotional responses as they look at individual paintings. Good question though, on reflection I don't feel I have a good handle on this.
Rosencrantz2
2d ago
Basically Hitler wanted to ban modernist experimentation and for artists to stick with existing, perfectly good thank you styles. Klee wanted to experiment with things like colour theory. This is not the kind of transgression I would consider capable of being morally bad.
I mean you can see the painting by Klee that was in the Degenerate Art exhibition. It's a picture of a fish, painted in a cool style. I struggle to see this as having any political or moral valence at all, but yes, that's because the water I swim in is tolerant of different styles as a very basic value. I guess this is controversial now.
For his role in the art industry, and the art industry often being pretty insufferable, sure, it's reasonable to give Klee a little blame. But it's a homeopathic dose.
Rosencrantz2
2d ago
I grant you that your examples are degenerate and at least some of them are kinds of art. But they aren't what the Nazis called "degnerate art", which was, broadly, all modern and abstract art, as well as art done by Jews, people with mental illnesses, Communists etc. This art was deemed evil largely independently of its content or intention, but because of who did it and the fact it was in styles other than the approved realist style. I don't think this was a coherent concept, and the elision of aesthetically displeasing with morally bad was all kinds of fucked up.
I realise I should have used my words more here instead of saying degenerate art wasn't a thing, as I have caused you to write quite a lot of stuff I fully agree with. Art is vitally important and has moral valence. It can be powerful in bad ways as well as good. That just doesn't apply (at all) to Klee, and a new term needs to be found for art with a clearly pernicious effects as with some of your examples. The Nazis have claimed "degenerate art".
Rosencrantz2
3d ago
Lots of it may not have been good but probably none of it was degenerate, and probably degenerate art isn't really a thing.
Rosencrantz2
3d ago
I think the traits that are stable throughout life are often at a higher level than what we think of as taste. You discover when young that you like it when a movie surprises you, and you like the twist in movie x. A year later you've seen a lot of movies, and movies like x no longer surprise you at all. You've learned the structures and tropes. You're still you. You like being surprised. But your knowledge of film and your expectations have grown and your responses are different. It takes more subversion to surprise you. Your taste has changed.
Now if you have no taste for novelty, learning new perspectives or gaining new insights from the art you consume, then you may go ahead and like the same thing throughout your life. That's not wrong, you can like what you like. But I think most people do change their tastes as a result of their understanding and expectations changing. And even if they have very fixed tastes, on some level they do require novelty. They need more slightly different romance novels for example. Why would they crave that, if their response to the stimuli of the story is unchanged each time they read it?
Rosencrantz2
3d ago
I saw it as a teenager in reproduction. I was very interested in how someone who was really into making drawings, philosophy and music and ceaselessly inventing new styles was villified by the Nazis as creating 'degenerate art' despite the inquisitiveness and sometimes humour of his overall project.
Did I gain from viewing that individual image by itself? Not really. It's not my favourite or anything. I'm arguing against the position it is harmful.
Rosencrantz2
3d ago
I don't think it is weird – we've all been massively oversaturated by visual imagery and it's phenomenally hard for an image alone to have an emotional impact outside of a great deal of surrounding narrative. For example, I was just now pushed to a heightened level of emotion by a shot in the show DTF St Louis (this is probably weird of me) of just David Harbour dancing, but the shot isn't inherently that special, it's just lent its power by the story (and yet the story without that image would not have half the impact). Images in stories are powerful because we allow ourselves to view them as component parts of something bigger. Life isn't a story, it's too fragmented, but every experience e.g. of food, is either good or bad, but only really gets value by being part of a whole moment. I agree food isn't that emotional, but I can't say I don't value a certain piece of fatty tuna sushi I had emotionally, because of the moment of my life it recalls.
A lot of this conversation is just people trying to experience atomic sensations and rate them. You can't do this, they're rarely that special. You have to give in to the right brain and experience wholes all at once.
Rosencrantz2
3d ago
I think there are still visual combos of technique and modern subject matter/point of view to explore, even in traditional figurative painting. See for example Dana Schutz, someone who is making exceptional, critically acclaimed paintings that are stylised but not abstract.
I like the idea of artists coming up with generative AI btw. I wonder what they'd have done with it? Probably they would have tried to monetised the output instead of the mechanism.
Rosencrantz2
3d ago
I read this post with something close to physical revulsion. (It is the culture wars thread so perhaps that's par for the course.) Not because I dislike those older pictures, I love them. I don't even like Novus Angelus that much. But Klee is a for-real artist who devoted his life to his work and if you look across his oeuvre, you can't deny he was pursuing his interests and exploring interesting themes with craft and intensity and a deep aesthetic sense. To think that an example of his work would be corrupting to teenagers, 'evil' or 'filth' is offensive in its own right. He was great artist even if you don't like the work. And you certainly don't have to find it beautiful. But "filth"? "Evilness"? Absolutely, disqualifyingly, ridiculous.
Rosencrantz2
3d ago
But a restaurant critic certainly could do a double blinded taste test to judge how good the food is,
Could they though? I am imagining a blindfolded critic being spooned with two mouthfuls, not knowing what they are going to be. With classic dishes I suppose it might work. They could say 'This tastes like lasagna. I preferred forkful A over forkful B as it tasted cheesier'. With unique dishes I don't even know what the test is supposed to look like as there will not be an obvious control dish to serve alongside it.
Rosencrantz2
3d ago
the background of the work cannot modify the experience of a blind sampler
You'd have to do an analysis of what counts as 'the background of the work' to determine if this is true. If I am recruited as a blind sampler in a trial but not mind-wiped first, my experience of other art or the subject of the novel is still going to have massive impact on whether I like it or not. I may not enjoy certain historical novels if I start from zero knowledge of the relevant bit of history, but is that really an indictment of the novels? If I were a caveman I expect I'd be totally bowled over by the most rudimentary drawings, but so what?
Ultimately the question is who is a blind sampler? I feel like Scott is imagining a child with uncultivated tastes, and supposing that such a child lives inside all of us. I guess this is what you are talking about above when you mention 'a bare, brute fact of sensory pleasure'. To me that seems obviously falsified by facts such as e.g. I liked very sweet desserts once and now I find them sickly. It seems to imply an 'accumulative' model of how people grow (each layer of the self stays the same but we add on layers as we gain experience) that is very contrary to my intuitive sense of myself or others.
Then again it's the strength of intuitions here that makes it such a debated topic.
Rosencrantz2
3d ago
I suspect you're 90% wrong. If it were this taste-centered, you'd see all the tables at fancy restaurants filled with people on their own and you'd see very fast service geared to deliver as many delicious tastes as quickly as possible (i.e. you'd get McDonald's). The vast majority of people going to a good restaurant go for a social experience shared with the people at their table, the others in their restaurant, the city they're in, the culinary tradition they're participating in etc. The taste is really important but you can't even decompose it as an individual factor as delicious food in a shitty, antisocial environment doesn't bring that much pleasure, and shitty food in a beautiful environment ruins everything.
This is true and probably could make a successful novelty restaurant concept as well. Context really is all.
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