Comment by HelloMcFly

Comment by HelloMcFly 9 days ago

I get the frustration with art discourse that it can feel exclusionary or pretentious. There are definitely versions of that discussion that are more about gatekeeping than appreciation.

I think the original, parent comment was coming from a much more generous place. Like that top parent commenter, to me the Halberstadt organ piece isn’t about being highbrow or obscure; it’s about a kind of radical optimism—committing to something weird, beautiful, and long-term in a world that often feels very short-sighted. I don’t think you need to read Derrida or listen to Stockhausen to find meaning in that. Just as you don’t need to love AI or NFTs to appreciate innovation.

Many may think that's stupid or useless because it lacks utility (or any other reason) or seems arbitrary. Reasonable people can disagree, but I think such reactions are truly missing the point; that is simultaneously completely OK, but also personally dispiriting at times. There’s room for a lot of perspectives in how we engage with art, and I think it’s more interesting when we try to understand what someone finds meaningful before writing it off.

ryandrake 9 days ago

Art Appreciation is such a mystical skill! I would have never even remotely thought of OP's take upon reading a description of this art piece. I'm just not wired to come up with takeaways like that. When I hear about "weird" art project, my mind usually just thinks "Well, I guess that's just how this guy wanks" and I just don't seem to have the brain to divine the kind of stuff that OP wrote about!

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HelloMcFly 8 days ago

I think you do have the brain, but maybe you're framing it wrong! When you come across art that seems unapproachable or strange to you, the last question you should ask is "What did the artist mean by this?" Instead, first think "What does this make me feel?" The answer may often be nothing, but then in the spirit of curiosity follow it up with "What might others who love this art be responding to?"
Sometimes for me, I need to take myself out of trying to "solve" the art piece and be intentional about viewing it with a different, less literal mindset. It's still me doing the thinking, but it kind of short-circuits my normal interaction with the world.
Or maybe that's just a bunch of blowhard bullshit, I don't know, but it is what I do.

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BoingBoomTschak 9 days ago

You should mind that old saying about not being so open-minded that your brain falls out.

While the questions "what is art" and "what is beauty" are indeed interesting, this doesn't help in any way.

There's no substance, it wouldn't get a thousandth of this attention if it was made by a nobody and isn't even fit to be called a meme: it's something between outrage bait and an insipid conversation piece, a transparent (thus vulgar) case of "muddying the water to make it seem deep". But the whole intellectual "class" being so devoid of people upright enough to call out the naked emperor is much less benign than that: a clear symptom of decadence.

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HelloMcFly 9 days ago

I think it’s possible to critique art, institutions, or trends without assuming everyone who finds meaning in something is deluded or complicit in cultural decline. Dismissing curiosity or optimism as decadence seems like its own kind of absolutism. Reasonable people can still find value in things even when you don’t, which is kind of my main point. Your comment makes me a little sad, but not for me.

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dogleash 9 days ago

> I think the original, parent comment was coming from a much more generous place.

I don't. Equating questioning a piece with willful ignorance and a safe-to-hate caricature all smell of bile to me.

"nerds too nerd to art" (more specifically in this case "hustler too hustle for art") is just a grade school putdown we use as artists to perpetuate the inaccessibility of art conversations and keep our cool mystique up.

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HelloMcFly 9 days ago

Sorry, you've got me wrong: I'm referring to the original, OP parent comment of this full thread. So, three comments up from mine in the tree. The one that begins "Some art-haters in the comments, so to defend..."

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