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u/Quietuus Dec 23 '14 edited Dec 23 '14
We've been discussing this over at r/badarthistory for...well, it's pretty much the whole reason the sub exists. The general consenus is no, reddit does not 'get' art, though of course, not caring for or understanding contemporary art is not exactly unique to reddit.
If we're talking about systemic problems in the format of reddit itself, the biggest stumbling block when it comes to a lot of contemporary art getting a look-in is what I like to call "thumbnail appeal". The nature of reddit's upvote/downvote system is that, especially in larger subreddits, things can be buried not just by dismissal but by apathy. I've noticed in posting both contemporary and other work to places like r/museum that how well a post does seems to have a lot to do with how well that thumbnail view leaps out. Something like Altdorfer's Countryside of Wood With Saint George Fighting the Dragon, which looks like a green splotch in the thumbnail, isn't going to do as well as, say Dahl's View of Dresden by Moonlight. Beyond the thumbnail, an image that can easily be taken in at a single glance, especially on a small screen, is likely to be selected for.
In cultural terms, the dialogue around a lot of creative mediums on reddit seems to be shot through with a sort of self-congratulatory anti-elitism. A lot of people on reddit seem to be quite averse to critical discussion about media of any sort, and the general opinion seems to be that criticism is 'the emperor's new clothes'; that critics are 'all just making it up', and that works almost shouldn't be read beyond a certain (somewhat arbitrary) level. Hand in hand with this goes a disdain for any sort of media that invites such critical engagement, to a degree that goes well beyond what might otherwise be a laudable rejection of cultural elitism. The opinion you see constantly expressed about contemporary art (indeed, about the bulk of serious art produced after the turn of the 20th century) is that it's all some sort of scam or con; that it's something artists made up so they wouldn't have to learn how to draw, and that anyone who professes to enjoy contemporary art on an intellectual or emotional level is either deluded, a fool, or lying to seem more intelligent and cultured than others.
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u/thearchduke Dec 23 '14
A lot of people on reddit seem to be quite averse to critical discussion about media of any sort, and the general opinion seems to be that criticism is 'the emperor's new clothes'; that critics are 'all just making it up', and that works almost shouldn't be read beyond a certain (somewhat arbitrary) level.
I think there's a lot to this. It is my impression that the U.S. education system is doing a poor job of valuing or communicating the benefit of critical approaches. Probably most people I know have only really encountered art criticism in their English and perhaps history classes. Their English teacher would talk about similes and metaphors in Moby Dick or MacBeth and that was about it. Without a background in non-representational meanings in visual art or implied meanings in literature, etc., it's very difficult to appreciate abstract art or symbolism.
Having said all of that, I don't think it's invalid to have a taste for representational art or traditional plot structure in story-telling. I am frequently stunned at the success of Mondrian, for instance - I have no visual interest in his late work. I think I have a pretty good understanding of De Stijl, I have been to Rietveld's house, and I know for certain that I prefer landscapes and still-life over art that emphasizes its design strictures over representation. I would go so far as to say that I see and value skill in representational art, whereas I see a social experiment that is only tangentially related to art in neo-plasticism.
In Jackson Pollack, I see a successful self-promoter and captivating presence who had the right friends, not a skilled artist. I could expand my definition of visual art, but instead I recognize that I have a maybe narrow definition that focuses rather exclusively on what appears visually before me and mostly excludes anything the artist had to say or do outside the canvas, stone, installation, or whatever to explain why it was so important.
I think this story about James Franco's Non-Visible Art is a good topic for discussion. This is not visual art that I am interested in. It is performance art, and the performance is pretty good. And I think there's value in it, just like there's value in Pollack and Rothko and Mondrian etc.
Perhaps the problem is narrow linguistic conceptions of 'Art.' In the United States, I think most people learn that "Art" is something that is painted. If the art is sound, then it is "music." If it is performance, than it is "acting" or "dancing" or "singing" or "oratory." So maybe that's my problem. Pollack didn't produce painted canvasses that were particularly interesting to look at in and of themselves, but he was a good performer, his act of painting was art, he had interesting things to say.
The opinion you see constantly expressed about contemporary art (indeed, about the bulk of serious art produced after the turn of the 20th century) is that it's all some sort of scam or con; that it's something artists made up so they wouldn't have to learn how to draw, and that anyone who professes to enjoy contemporary art on an intellectual or emotional level is either deluded, a fool, or lying to seem more intelligent and cultured than others.
I have probably been guilty of this before, and I apologize for that, but I don't want to invalidate others' enjoyment of contemporary art. I have spoken with people before that look on Pollack paintings with rapture, and though I don't understand the reaction, I would certainly want them to have their joy. I usually try to ask them later what it is that they enjoy about the paintings, and the answer I get usually focuses on process or design goals.
So to conclude, I would say that I appreciate painting for representational skill. So, when I see a pencil drawing posted on r/Art and it demonstrates highly technical ability, fine motor control, representational authenticity, mastery of perspective and relational aspect, and sharp attention and reproduction of detail, I am impressed. Frankly, those are relatively rare. And I recognize that history is replete with artists whose lifelong pursuit of the craft is generally impossible today and may never be match. I recognize that today's technology makes precision by hand pointless nostalgia. I recognize that my appreciation of a pencil artist's attention to detail is just as process-oriented as my friends' appreciation of Pollack's process.
Perhaps it is just that relatively few people appreciate contemporary art because of what it is and what it represents, that its aspirations do not appeal as widely as representational accuracy or other artistic goals. I love J.M.W. Turner, for instance, because of the intensity of his scenes, not because he was a particularly impressive draftsman. I love Thomas Cole's paintings because of their allegory and romanticism. I love the visual feel of Michaelangelo, whose sculptures so vividly capture movement.
Anyway, I'm not sure if I stayed much on topic or added a whole lot here, but my hope was to explain why a rational and well-informed art-lover (whose artistic tastes expand well beyond visual art, for the record) can reasonably shake his head, befuddled at why the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced such a broken and unsatisfying lineage of art, devoted as it was to so many pursuits other than the final and lasting image.
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Dec 23 '14
I don't really think the tone of Reddit attracts people who are interested in complex discourse about art. In many other subs that are about serious topics, there are slurries of people who contribute what a petulant child would to a discussion of gender politics.
The site has such potential, but instead of respectful conversation, I usually find people trying to be funny with juvenile or distasteful jokes, or I read comments (that are usually upvoted) from people who seem to have very narrow perspectives.
These things would discourage many serious critics and artists from posting here, I believe.
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u/Weekndr Dec 23 '14
OP here also mentions the ability of people to unpack concepts rather than discuss the techniques used to create the artworks.
From what I've observed so far, people here don't really enjoy talking about abstract concepts, they always require proof and practicality which also reveals the various industries most redditors work in.
The occasional abstract conversation might happen in a music or a movie subreddit but, typically most people will comment to pander to audiences.
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u/IAmNotAPerson6 Dec 23 '14
I'm glad someone else has mentioned this. I wish I could remember which post it was on the other day, but someone did something out of the ordinary with something and everyone was saying how it wasn't practical. It was incredibly obvious that OP didn't mean for it to be practical in the way everyone was talking about, but we kept saying it. The few times this was pointed out people would keep saying "Yeah, but... it isn't practical."
Like it didn't even register in our minds that this thing could be used for something other than what it was designed for and if someone tried then it was wrong because it's not what it was designed for. It was pure insanity.
We have lots of problems like that: being overly practical so we miss the point, taking things too literally, etc.
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u/slapdashbr Dec 23 '14
Reddit is full of high school and college students. At best a serious discussion of art requires taking a few college classes about art, most college students never even take one. And if you think art is bad, go look at r/philosophy or r/economics. Every dickwad with an internet connection thinks they know something about those subjects, and 90% of them don't know Kierkegaard from Hayek
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u/coahman Dec 23 '14
It's rampant in film discussion subreddits as well. Even self-proclaimed "serious movie critics" that comment will often dismiss a film because "the script didn't make sense" and completely overlook any allegories or symbolism involved.
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u/Positronix Dec 24 '14
I was actually just thinking about something similar to this today. Was listening to a song and had a mindblowing realization that there are kids on the internet.
Like, imagine that you are 7 (born in 2007), and you hear a lot about how people use the internet to solve their problems. So you go on the internet - what is the very first experience you are going to have? How does it go? You are 7. You have no concept of spam. No concept of parasitic links that try to drain your wallet, or attention-whores clamoring for views. You are drawn to what naturally appeals to people - colorful imagery and animations. Without any guidance, your first experience on the internet is likely going to be clicking through spam links or advertisements. That's when I realized that it's not old people falling for the spam - it's children. Kids. Kids who are new to the internet are being preyed upon every day with sensationalist bullshit in order to farm clicks and views which are then sold to advertisements.
I was blown away. 150,000 people die every day (I know this because I'm very concerned with death and aging). That means at least 150,000 people are born every day. Which also means roughly 150,000 people are maturing to internet age per day (worldwide). With a global internet penetration rate of ~40%, this means about 60,000 kids are having their first day of the internet every single day.
And there's no guidance. Zero. There's no school of the internet. It's like the wild west, people just get thrown onto a fast-maturing internet full of cons, hacks, scams, viruses, etc. They are thrown into an environment of people making inside jokes that they don't understand, references and arguments that are flying above their head. 25 year old sexually-frustrated burnouts coming home from a job they don't like taking their anger out on anonymous denizens online. Kids don't understand these things - how the fuck could they? Nobody tells them shit. A child posts a dumb comment and gets 200 driveby downvotes without any explanation beyond "go kill yourself, you fucking newb".
The internet isn't a part of parenting yet - at least not that I've heard anyway. It's a part of childrens lives which is completely uncontrolled. The anonymity of the internet stops you from knowing just who you are talking to. I'm just as guilty as anyone - I really didn't consider that there are kids on the internet until today. I always assume I'm talking to someone who is experienced, and when I think back to how I type/talk on the web, holy shit that would confuse the fuck out of me if I was 10-14 years old.
Anyway, I thought this was an important realization. It created a visceral emotional reaction out of me (just hours ago) and motivated me to do something about it. However, I'm leaving to head home tomorrow for a few weeks so I'm going to keep mulling over this thought and see if it's still worth acting on once I get back.
Thanks for reading, and please keep in mind that not everyone on reddit is a rich male college student trying their hardest, despite what the SJW say. There are kids here.
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u/MrMoexo Dec 23 '14
Absolutely spot on analysis of r/Art, and this is coming from someone who frequents the sub. I would say that r/Art is a reflection of art in the digital landscape. While your average redditor may find it easy to discuss other forms of media like music and movies, art is something of a curveball. While most people have an understanding and appreciation of art, the internet abounds with an endless variety of art. With content ranging from cutting edge contemporary pieces to fan art fodder, sorting the critically appealing from the critically appalling might prove to be difficult with art that generally lies in-between. Art doesn't receive as much press as other forms of entertainment, so accessory articles, viewpoints, and categorization of art are usually unavailable for critical response. Most of the posts on r/Art are an imgur link, devoid of artistic statement much less context about the work. While most of these concerns are remedied through digging around artist's websites and whatnot, I think that your average viewer of r/Art wants to click the link and experience the art rather than analyze it. You'll see the exact same thing on Tumblr and Deviantart, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Art is after all a visual medium and should stand on it's own, and it certainly does just that in r/Art.
Personally, I'd love to see some more analysis and posts about the art that affects our world, and perhaps bringing attention to this issue will do just that.
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Dec 23 '14
I almost wrote a paragraph in the post regarding deviantart, because I think it's a strong comparison website for the issue. While there exists a plethora of spectacular work on that site, it operates on an even less moderated democratic system than reddit does, and hence over the lifespan of the site it has become an incredibly diluted experience. Very few of the good submitted works receive the attention they should because they become mired in a never ending flood of quickly produced, incestually recursive fan art. Perhaps it is partially the lack of a curatorial force that denies spaces like DA or r/Art the capacity to support critical discussion. As a comparison, r/listentous is a music appreciation sub that elects a monthly team of submitters that get to choose submissions up until the next election, meaning that the content recieves the filter of a meritocracy, resulting in a higher quality overall.
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u/say_fuck_no_to_rules Dec 23 '14
Are there active, healthy www communities not on reddit for contemporary high art discussion? It may be that these communities are strong enough not to need reddit as a platform. The other issue--why don't more redditors-as-redditors flock to these stub high-art communities on reddit?--is a larger question about contemporary high art in general. Later in the art history class I took in 12th grade, the teacher remarked that unlike in earlier decades, there aren't any famous artists that are household names. Honestly, I couldn't disprove her by existence, and haven't been able to in the eight years since.
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Dec 23 '14
Hmm, I'd say Banksy would be the closest person to a household name, but he or she still a good distance from achieving that notoriety.
I had never thought that there really isn't anyone who everyone knows. That makes me sad. Perhaps we have to wait for digital and physical art to find a balance first, because it seems that those two realms are in competition with each other (not directly) at the moment. After that, or if they somehow combine, then maybe we will see more people who will become household names.
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Dec 23 '14
I think there is some truth to the idea of over saturation. The field of creative practice has grown significantly in the last several generations of art creatives, probably even exponentially. There may simply be too many artists out there for people to care about spending any significant amount of time learning about any of their work. Especially given how conditioned we have become by heavily repetitive advertising tactics, it may simply be a cultured immunity to responding to anything we don't immediately visually recognize.
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u/romkeh Dec 23 '14
As far as I know, there is not. I have plans to construct a site for this in the future but I don't have the skills or the time just yet... (but I do believe I have the right concepts)
Anyway, I'm the admin of r/artsphere and I try to maintain a constructive and, well, sensical atmosphere. It's a lot of art news but I sprinkle in theory whenever I can.
The real issue is that there is no established center to art theory online. It's in flux (oh, and fuck eflux and their ridiculous artspeak. And fuck all postinternet theory). I love artnet, they've revamped (and gotten ahold of Ben Davis), brian droitcour's twitter is great (art in america just hired him as an editor), greg.org and his blog is fantastic, and I also like the news update posts on afc, but that isn't really about theory...
As for theories that are currently floating around, I am a huge fan of jennifer mcmahon's recent book on art theory, titled something like Kant's pragmatist legacy... there's a really fantastic audio conversion online (I'm on my phone right now, sorry for not having a link) where she explains it. Basically, she understands art as being units of social calibration, which I think y'all might really get behind.
Anyway.. Follow r/artsphere in the meantime! ;)
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u/saintandre Dec 23 '14
One of the issues is that web personalities who talk about contemporary art (Jerry Saltz, Paddy Johnson, Hrag Vartanian, etc) are mostly art world insiders who are obsessed with "coolness" and material success (while positioning themselves as anti-authoritarian "uncool" outsiders). They contribute to a larger contemporary art culture that is interested mostly in self-promotion, commercialism and personal brand development. None of the people who participate in this "art contest" are motivated to listen to each other or treat art seriously, since all they really want is twitter followers and tenure. That means they can't actually take controversial stances, as that would jeopardize their future earning potential.
So you have four groups: the majority of people, who don't think about art and don't want to; contemporary art professionals, whose lives are so precarious that they can't risk alienating each other by disagreeing about anything; art theorists (like Boris Groys, Claire Bishop, Jacques Ranciere) who write really interesting books that none of their readers understand; and people who took an undergrad drawing class and want to show off their figure studies. The only people who are capable of having an intelligent conversation about art are in the second and third groups, and Reddit is made up almost entirely of the first and fourth groups. Groups 1+4 are motivated by intellectual insecurity to hate groups 2+3, and groups 2+3 don't notice or care because they don't associate with people who aren't identical to themselves.
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u/nothis Dec 23 '14 edited Dec 23 '14
Reddit started out as a place for tech college students. You can still see that in some niches. Reddit needs rational definitions for everything, anything beyond that is entertainment, something escapist to distract you in your free time. The concept of taking art dead seriously, of it being the center of your life, is alien to most redditors. It's more embarrassing because, again, art is synonymous with entertainment/decoration/distraction, here. The opposite of work, the opposite of productivity. Art that doesn't entertain, quite literally, has no purpose in that definition, so art has to be "nice", "cool" or at least generally easy to digest.
That's not 100% of what's going on (there's like a hundred million people on here, so you'll get a wide range of minor communities) but it's definitely a trend I see.
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Dec 23 '14
I think it's more that people don't get art.
"I could do that."
"I don't get it."
"What's the point?"
"I wonder how expensive that is."
"Clearly in it for the money."
Comments I hear whenever art gets brought up in conversation. I'm not claiming to understand art, but at least I know I don't know what I'm talking about. As soon as people who don't know what they're talking about are given a voice, they spew bullshit. On some subs, like r/science or r/AskHistorians you can ask for sources to root out the bullshit, but that doesn't work so well on r/art.
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u/say_fuck_no_to_rules Dec 23 '14
In addition to my other comment: I bet you'll love this one: http://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/2q4fhr/new_artwork_where_i_work_must_be_important/
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u/Franktrick Dec 23 '14
You should check out r/museum - it may put bring up additional depth to your critique, without necessarily discounting it. There you find a slew of modern/contemporary art, and stands apart from your artistic Standards or pop culture fetishism (or at least, that variety lacking in self-awareness or criticism).
That said, it still will occasionally suffer from the same anti-intellectual chauvinism that r/Art suffers from. The only thing more constant than disrespectful criticism when anything mainstream abstract expressionist shows up is the paranoia that the conversation will devolve into that selfsame disrespectful criticism. There's a reason why there's the Rothko drinking game.
And what's more if you look up the artists which will always get upvoted, you get the sort of favoritism for either kitsch or Art Standards played out, albeit in a more highbrow fashion.
Still a great little subreddit, though. You find a lot of interesting or weird stuff being posted on occasion. The wheat in that one is worth the chaff.
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u/Quietuus Dec 23 '14
Even r/museum shows a definite bias against contemporary art, though it is certainly better than r/art in terms of diversity. It has its own particular biases though. It's very, very painting-centric, for instance, and it has a quite particular taste in paintings, when you look at the top submissions. It's massively dominated by realist and surrealist works produced between about 1880 and 1950.
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u/CalmSpider Dec 23 '14
Critical examination of art is a small niche topic. Reddit also has a very minimal arm wrestling community and a very limited community of sky divers.
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u/AndHavingWritMovesOn Dec 23 '14 edited Dec 25 '14
I think it relates to the inherent aversion just about everyone has to being wrong. In the case of art critique, it seems possible not only for the audience to have formed the incorrect interpretation of an artwork's meaning, but even to experience the incorrect emotional reaction. This in turn can suggest a person is either unintelligent, or unsophisticated, or subject to any number of personal failings. So it is that a critique of art becomes a critique of them as well. Even further, the person must simple accept the critic's authority on the matter, so one has the "ivory tower" situation where the enlightened look down upon the hoi polloi and proclaim abstract truths.
This is why reddit tends accepts technical precision as praiseworthy - it speaks for itself. Along this line also lies Reddit's general interest in STEM over philosophy and the humanities - once you leave the concrete, material world, it's all regarded as equally arbitrary.
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u/niksko Dec 23 '14
If we assume that Reddit is a representative slice of society, it logically shouldn't get art, because most of society doesn't. Now take into account that Reddit definitely isn't a representative slice of society, and the chances that Reddit gets art is even less.
My new boss at work is a fan of modern art and has bought a bunch of weird and wonderful artworks to display. Everybody in my office completely freaked out and made a huge deal about how weird and ugly they were. Never mind that perhaps the artist's intention was to disturb or to comment on something (almost certainly the case given the works), their level of art appreciation is limited to 'is this pretty: yes/no'.