Eytom Blog

What do *you* mean by art? I rarely use the term un-qualified, instead preferring human aesthetic expression, which your post constitutes.

Define art for this wayward soul, please.

I'm sorry but, as far as I am concerned, "art" and "human aesthetic expression" are NOT the same thing although there can be considerable overlap. To equate the two terms is to render the word "art" totally useless, devoid of any meaning or power. I understand your intention and appreciate that it is important to allow for the natural expansion of the concept of art so that it may continue to encompass the evolution of human expression but a fleck of shit on a piece of paper, a scribbled "W" and a store bought vase with flowers are NOT ART because they lack technical merit, aesthetic ingenuity and expressive integrity. It is bullshit, it is pretentious hucksterism, it is a bald ruse perpetrated by the craven upon the gullible and those grasping for a false sense of hipness. To produce and sell such nonsense is to participate in a cycle of unmitigated stupidity.

Well put, Mr. Rasafrasit.
As for defining art, I don't claim to be able to do so definitely. If it were easily or highly definable, it'd more of a science I think and less of, well, an art. There can be many reasonable and different opinions of what can be included in the realm of *art.* However, if this Friedman guy's scribblings and feces can be placed under the same heading as the Sistine Chapel then I submit that the heading is useless.
Friedman is simply producing goods for a market and hopefully laughs all the way to the bank instead of taking himself seriously.

:a fleck of shit on a piece of paper, a scribbled "W" and a store bought vase with flowers are NOT ART because they lack technical merit, aesthetic ingenuity and expressive integrity.

Thank you for providing a positive definition, rather than finding some nonsensical art, which you describe, and shouting, loudly, "THIS IS NOT ART!" This type of description is infinitly more valuable to the discussion that what art is in the same way it is better to describe the color yellow by its wave-lenght measurements than by showing the color purple and exclaiming, "It is not yellow!"

Your three criteria: technical merit, aesthetic ingenuity and expressive integrity are important components to good human aesthetic expression (hereafter, hae). However, these are your subjective criterea, which you seem to imply are objective and absolute. How do you presume to "visit my intentions" and know whether an experience has affected my aesthetic consciousness? Perhaps I have a different set of criteria than you.

I'm not visiting your intentions but I challenge you to honestly proclaim that a fleck of shit has the same aesthetic value as a Miro or a Calder or a Wayne Thiebaud.

I'll volley it right back at you because I think the burden is on you to defend the artistic merit of what to the rest of us is effctively a piece of toilet paper. I would love to know your criteria for defending this shit, as it were, as art. For the record, I totally reject your assertions that art is any thing the "affects your aesthetic consciousness." Every thing I perceive affects my aesthetic consciousness, bird poop on the carpet, the sound of traffic, the color green reflected in a puddle, where is the art? Once again, I will assert that if you insist on calling all "H.A.E." art then the word "art" has absolutely no meaning.

I think you are confusing *your* internal experience with the art itself and I say to hell with that Post-Modern/Deconstructionist tripe that art resides solely in the audience. It is, at minimum, an interplay between the piece and the observer. Simply calling it art does not make it so. You want a non-subjective definition of Art? I can't do it but I have, I think, effectively answered you challenge as to why I think this bullshit is NOT art. Specifically, it smacks of a wink and smirk; it took ZERO creative effort; it requires ZERO skill; it demands NO effort on the part of the audience; it lacks even the slightest aesthetic complexity.

Zen pottery involves surrendering the act of creation to chance but even therein there is an asethetic criteria-the interjection of the ego "destroys" the act and raku vases are rejected for seemingly arbitrary reasons. My point is that art does not have to include or be devoid of the ego but when it is nothing but ego (as is, I maintain, much of what constitutes modern "art") it is NOT art but simply H.A.E.-a pale pretender to art.

Inter-personal preferences are meaningless outside of the market process; such preferences are purely subjective when measured by anything other than price:

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/ae/jump/3233113

It seems we are at an impass due to definitions of terms. It echoes discussions I have had, as a market anarchist, with socialist anarchists. Terms like aggression and property, which each camp defines differently and will simply not accept the others' definition (the word liberal is another example).

My radical subjectivism is informed by the Austrian school of economics rather than the post-modernists, who will be a footnote in the history of art. The modernists (1863-1945) were much more cleaver than that po-mo junk.

Another sticking point is an insistence that all art be co-equal, that " fleck of shit has the same aesthetic value as a Miro or a Calder or a Wayne Thiebaud.", this would leave no room for bad art and if all art is co-equal, (according to one individual's subjective valuation), the cultural Marxists have won.

My aesthetic consciousness is a primary mode of interpreting the world around me, along with history and quantification; I wouldn't call it a part of my epistemology, because reason is not integral to my aesthetic interpretation. For millennia, elites have tried to restrict the definition of art and I have no desire to be a part of that tradition, instead prefering more cowbell:

http://mknx.com/v/cowbell.wmv

I'll respond to the last comment soon but it would appear that this topic is on the minds of others as well

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/6/19/143553/870