05-13-2016, 10:34 PM
(05-13-2016, 06:54 PM)TnT Wrote: Art, as hard as it is to adequately define, appears to be something that is a core feature of our species. The stuff, both "good" and "bad", whatever that means just keeps coming.
My thought is that "art" probably comes about when the artist achieves some level of self-actualization. The product itself is simply an expression. In the case of charlatans in the field, which I agree should include hacks like Kincade, they're simply in it for the money and are taking advantage of folks who don't want to spend any effort on studying or understanding artisitc expression.
Tara is probably right. This topic is likely only bait designed to satisfy your delight in simply arguing with people!
...The old art is better than the new art -- to no small extent because the bad art of times long past has long disappeared from sight. How much Renaissance art went into the bonfires of the vanities? Probably few bona fide masterpieces. Recent oily canvases that people cared little to preserve went up in smoke. Mediocre canvases -- like student works -- typically got painted over because canvas wasn't cheap.
Neoclassical painting is likely spent as a means of lively expression. Going beyond the achievements of classical artists is practically impossible. Most genuine achievements in performance, creativity, and academic achievement require about 10K hours (Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers) of preparatory work in childhood and adolescence before one achieves mastery enough to assure that one can churn out masterpieces easily. Beyond 10K one may have questions of possibility. Starting later gets one quickly to a brick wall (people quit developing intellectual power around age 20, so there is no "growing into" some achievement after age 25). I'd guess that the preparation needed for one of the most difficult problems in mathematics, a proof of Fermat's last theorem, takes much more than 10K hours.
(that for non-zero integers a, b, c, and n,
a^n + b^n = c^n
is possible only for n=1 or n=2).
The proof is extremely complex and indirect, depending heavily upon some arcane number theory and not some advanced algebra to prove.
Going beyond classical models of art probably takes well over 10K hours of preparation. Couldn't it be more obvious? Few people can get much out of the last half of the 10K hours of preparation and know it. But a few do. Just imagine how difficult it would be to find the opportunity to get the practice as a violinist that one needs to be Itzhak Perlman.
But much beyond 10K? One may be discussing achievements beyond the possible. That is where neoclassical art is, and that is why few people do it except as an exercise in learning the conventions that modern artists typically violate, at best knowing why they do so and why they can get away with such.
So does one want to paint in the style of Michelangelo or Cezanne and rival their achievements? Such is not going to happen. Painting some canvases suitable as Christmas presents? This year, perhaps.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
