alt Hacker News> Obviously what's aesthetically pleasing to some will not to aesthetically pleasing to someone else.
Yes, but it doesn't mean that:
> it seems so useless to talk about something like this.
What it means, that things become very complex to the point when sciences still can't take over the discourse and philosophy needs to fill the gap. All people are capable of understanding the idea of art. All people appreciate some kind or art. All societies, not just European or just developed countries, develop the idea of art. Some scientists argue that animals also have it, for example Frans de Waal believed that chimpanzee have some sort of art. It seems like an innate feature of Homo Sapience, but what is it? Why the ability to appreciate art was evolved in a first place? How it makes species more fit to select for their genes?
It just happens so biologists have not much to say about the topic. Anthropologists can describe a lot of kinds of arts from different cultures, but they are also can't answer the question. Psychologists tried to define art, but their answers do not look sufficient for me. To be frank, I've read just one psychological book[1] on the topic, and probably not the most influential, but I like the idea that art is based on the contradiction between form and content (and a kind of a cognitive dissonance triggered by it, though the idea of cognitive dissonance was after Vygotsky). I mean everywhere I look, at any piece of art, I see the contradiction. I'm not sure that it is contradiction between form and content in all cases, but some kind of a mismatch surfaces every single time. I'm not sure that this is a sufficient to have mismatch between form and content to become art.
But in any case, what I'm trying to say, sciences try to answer the question "what is art", it just happens that people are not content with the existing answers, and different scientific approaches to the question do not add up into a theory of art.
> So maybe the point of the useless sculptures was to annoy me that the government spends public money inadequately. I doubt that was the intention of the artists
I doubt it also, but the thing is: the artists did exactly that. Then you spend time thinking about it, and moreover you tell me about rocks in a cage. The sculpture touched you, it triggered your emotions and thoughts. This is the goal of a modern artist. Their goal not to annoy, but to trigger emotions. I laugh at such things, you become angry, we are both influenced by art.
> Like some kinds of fashion where you try to be unique and express your individualism but you end up looking the same as everyone else.
Yeah! When you try to look cool and not like others you are also become an artist, and if you end up looking the same as everyone, you are failed.
You remember the caged rocks, so they are not like the others, the artist succeeded. This argument doesn't feel right for me really, at least when we are talking about your reaction: you are annoyed at how public money are spent, not about some traits of the sculpture. But modern art use this argument, and I think it is not just plain non-sense, I just cant get my finger on the grain on truth there. I cant refine the argument and draw a line around it that will play the role of limits of applicability for the argument.
You see, the art should make people stop and think. You stopped and thought about the rocks. I'd guess... I cannot know obviously, but still I'd dare to guess, that you missed the opportunity to reflect on your feelings triggered by those caged rocks? Why you was annoyed? Maybe because people spend resources inefficiently, as you say, but maybe the inefficiency is just your rationalization hiding the real cause of annoyance? I dug into similar annoyance in myself, and I've found that I was annoyed because people do not share my understanding of art. I had some theories that people are mistaken because they do not try to think what is art and what is just plain crap, they just follow fashion. And for some reason it annoyed me a lot. What is this reason, I'm not sure, I think it has something to do with a social status or something like. Like, society I belong to ignores my opinion and goes into a direction I do not approve. It kinda make me a less important member of the society? I can't explain it clearly, because I do not understand it myself. But it is a very interesting observation, and I guess those rocks might become your opportunity to make this observation or maybe some to learn something else about yourself. Though I may be gravely mistaken of course. I can't just look into your head and explore your feelings and their causes, these things can be done only by you.
> You have Michelangelo's David where you can admire the Michelangelo's skills, the time and care he took to sculpt it...
Well... With Michelangelo I'm an example of what you said about the subjectivity of art. I don't see the point of drawing things on a canvas or shape rocks into a form of a muscular guy. I kinda can see the appeal of paintings before the photography was invented, but now they are useless.
[1] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D1%81%D0%B8%D1%85%D0%BE...
I don't think that the book was translated from Russian, I can't find no link to English description, and the Russian article in wikipedia I believe is not good, and the firefox's translation of it into English even worse. But I decided to add the link, because it would be strange to talk about an anonymous book.
Replies
I got a "That comment was too long" for the first time so I'll split it in 2.
1/2
First I'd like to say I enjoy communicating with you even if it seems like I'd disagreeing or being obtuse or combative. It's much easier to write about what I disagree with than what I agree with, besides "I agree" or "I get it" so the disagreeing portion is naturally longer.
> What it means, that things become very complex to the point when sciences still can't take over the discourse and philosophy needs to fill the gap.
> ...
> But in any case, what I'm trying to say, sciences try to answer the question "what is art", it just happens that people are not content with the existing answers, and different scientific approaches to the question do not add up into a theory of art.
I understand now, thanks. Although it appears we're much, much closer to solving this than ethics (especially meta-ethics), metaphysics and the hard problem of consciousness. It's solvable even if it's not solved. Are the other 3 examples even solvable? Who knows. We may never get a scientific answer for meta-ethics. Even if we "solve" physics, the underlying questions like "but why are these equations the way they are" or "is there anything besides our universe" or "are we in a simulation" may never have a satisfying answer from science. Even if we map the brain and understand it like we understand a Hello World! program, we may never have a satisfactory answer to what qualia are. There are many other examples of topics likely-unsolvable by science that are studied by philosophers. OTOH, there are many things that will likely take decades with or without AI until they get solved - lots of questions in biology (incl. neuroscience and psychology), in physics and in math. But we don't say "philosophy of $unanswered_problem" for many such problems that are almost surely going to be solved this century. Anyway, that was a question I turned into a small rant as I often see "philosophy of $relatively_easy_problem", not just "art" and get very confused about why it's still in the philosophical realm.
> I like the idea that art is based on the contradiction between form and content (and a kind of a cognitive dissonance triggered by it
Maybe "art" isn't 1 thing but many things. Take music as it's one type of "art" I consume the most. Maybe some of it is "entertainment" or "a way to focus", not "art". But I feel very different things when listening to soft rock or trance or glitchy electronic music ("IDM" which a lot of people dislike as a term) or rap or techno or metal or whatever. I imagine most people who listen to different genres do so for different reasons. They do so when they're in a different mood or when they want to get into a different mood. Some tracks I can listen carefully to 100s of times. Others I play as background noise and rarely focus on them. A lot of them can serve both purposes. Yada yada, you hopefully get the point I'm trying to make.
> The sculpture touched you, it triggered your emotions and thoughts. This is the goal of a modern artist. Their goal not to annoy, but to trigger emotions. I laugh at such things, you become angry, we are both influenced by art.
I get that, too. But a lot people might elicit laughter or anger from us that we'd have a hard time categorizing as art. Maybe someone broke a bench. A case of simple vandalism? You may laugh at the person who felt it necessary to destroy property, I might get angry about it. 30 Wordpress addons bought and turned into malware? Same reaction (although I laugh about this, too). We might witness someone kill someone else over a few bucks. Those were most likely not intended as art. So are they art if you laugh but I get annoyed?
The philosophers might argue further. I say it doesn't matter - "art" is ill-defined to begin with and we could never hope to say whether something is art definitively. Even a chair is not well-defined as I could sit on a rock and call it a chair, you may disagree. Yet we don't have "philosophy of chairs". We discuss the broad idea if what kind of definitions we can have and what properties they have in metaphysics and in other fields related to semantics. I haven't read much about this as it's obvious that there's no universal or definitive "chair" we can agree on. But I at least understand such broad fields, such as those that deal with what a definition is, what properties does it have an so on. But no with specific ones like "art" or "chair".
> You remember the caged rocks, so they are not like the others, the artist succeeded.
I literally saw them 2 days ago. There were other BS "art" installations/sculptures but the dumbest one IMHO were the rocks. I guess if someone had deliberately lumped several hundred people's shit in the middle of the park, I would remember that more. Future artists - people don't put a pile of shit in the middle of the park. A note with "imagine a ton of shit here" would be funnier.
> The sculpture touched you, it triggered your emotions and thoughts. This is the goal of a modern artist. Their goal not to annoy, but to trigger emotions. I laugh at such things, you become angry, we are both influenced by art.
If that's the goal, then it's relatively easy to achieve it, isn't it? What wouldn't trigger emotions if it was big enough? If I saw (rolls a mental dice) a blue Santa with GPUs for ears, wearing Geordi's VISOR sitting in a bathtub made of scrap electronics, I'd get annoyed. You might smirk like "wtf...?!" and so on.
2/2
> You see, the art should make people stop and think. You stopped and thought about the rocks. I'd guess... I cannot know obviously, but still I'd dare to guess, that you missed the opportunity to reflect on your feelings triggered by those caged rocks? Why you was annoyed? Maybe because people spend resources inefficiently, as you say, but maybe the inefficiency is just your rationalization hiding the real cause of annoyance?
I didn't even stop as there was nothing to look at. If I stopped, it was to see if there was something I've missed, but there wasn't - poorly made metal cage with random stones inside. But apart from being annoyed at how public resources are spent, I got annoyed at other things, too:
* at the priorities people have in general, how they're seemingly blissfully unaware of anything that's not in their field of vision,
* at the fact that some pretentious fuck graduated with this as one of their biggest achievements (compared to people who actually try to advance science (hard or soft) or math or try to become better teachers or movie directors or nurses,
* at how some other pretentious fuck is going to pretend they admire this,
* at all the obvious things missing in the park or around it (yes, the "public resources" annoyance, but more concrete) - the poor state of the sidewalks, the lack of public toilets (or the state the existing ones are in), how poorly parking is handled, how no one helps the homeless people or animals and so on. Even if you live in the best city in the world, I bet there are similar things you get annoyed at. My city is far from the best one.
And so on, and so on. But I get annoyed at these things whenever I see someone sick or poor on the street, whenever I see some idiot that parks their car and takes up the whole sidewalk, whenever I can't even safely walk on the sidewalk even if there are no cars because it's so uneven and hasn't been maintained for decades (imagine an old person or someone with a disibility or someone with a stroller trying to walk there) and because the municipality decides "we'll have a themed fest/gathering/show" that costs a few thousand $currency just to set up the lighting. So the stones in a cage weren't that special in that regard. Maybe I get annoyed too much, but I think most people get annoyed too little. They shrug off most things and sheepishly say "well, things are shitty, but whatchagonnado?". And they vote for the same people who did nothing during their previous term.
> I dug into similar annoyance in myself, and I've found that I was annoyed because people do not share my understanding of art. I had some theories that people are mistaken because they do not try to think what is art and what is just plain crap, they just follow fashion. And for some reason it annoyed me a lot. What is this reason, I'm not sure, I think it has something to do with a social status or something like. Like, society I belong to ignores my opinion and goes into a direction I do not approve. It kinda make me a less important member of the society? I can't explain it clearly, because I do not understand it myself. But it is a very interesting observation, and I guess those rocks might become your opportunity to make this observation or maybe some to learn something else about yourself. Though I may be gravely mistaken of course. I can't just look into your head and explore your feelings and their causes, these things can be done only by you.
I thought a few minutes about whether that could be it for me, but I doubt it. I don't mind people listening to generic radio top 20 pop music. I just feel a bit sorry for them as they've never really explored other genres, but I don't mind their tastes. I don't mind people reading or watching cheesy romantic stuff even though it's the farthest from what I like. I may get annoyed at someone intensely staring at a black square in a gallery but not because they genuinely like it - it's because they got the scarf and the glass of wine and they're trying to pretend to like it. I love it when someone goes to something I don't care about, like a toaster exhibit or a museum of 19th century bottle caps or something. Or if they genuinely like art I don't care for. I have a friend who could talk to you for hours about random painters from the past. Is he pretentious? Maybe a bit. But mostly he likes the styles, he likes reading about them, about the history of that art. I get that, I like it and respect it even though I couldn't care less about Monet or Manet or whatever myself.
> > You have Michelangelo's David where you can admire the Michelangelo's skills, the time and care he took to sculpt it...
> Well... With Michelangelo I'm an example of what you said about the subjectivity of art. I don't see the point of drawing things on a canvas or shape rocks into a form of a muscular guy. I kinda can see the appeal of paintings before the photography was invented, but now they are useless.
Definitely, realism is boring to me, too. I meant to compare the skill, the attention to detail and the time spent making David, not whether we can make better 3D models than David in seconds in whatever software. And even if the stones in a cage were to compare to David wrt skill and time spent, it would still be worse than dealing with infrastructure or poverty or animals or whatever. The counterargument is "we'll never fully deal with these" which is a valid one (it's been used against lots of things I support, such as space exploration or animal welfare) - we can't spend all our time on a few issues and neglect everything else. But art with public money on public property is a giant "FUCK YOU" when we haven't dealt with these things even in the slightest.
But maybe the stones in a cage and the train sonification sparked up this conversation and that's enough; they did what they were supposed to do. Probably not, but who knows.
Edit: That art is forced down on us like poetry and prose was in school. I always thought we could grasp the social issues better by just talking about them or seeing pictures of bad things instead of reading fiction or poetry. Maybe that's part of my dislike towards art I'm forced to interact with? I think Frank from Raymond (I watched it a loong time ago) said something like "Poetry? Get to the point!" which resonated with me.