acquiring taste

[jim stone]

I've taught at both community colleges and four-year colleges, FWIW,
and I don't think one can generalize from one to the other.
I did take both music and art appreciation in college (real college)
and the teachers were fine. Learned a lot from the courses.
Don't know why you think they're not payed to be art critics.
Typically such courses are being taught (in four-year institutions)
by tenured or tenure track faculty in a department of music
or art and design. There really can be quite a difference from the
people you get in junior college (I taught poli sci in junior
college, without any background at all in poli sci), though
obviously there's no absolute guarantee against turkeys.

Cranberry, what in particular are they telling you
that's hogwash?

[Tyler]

I've taught at both community colleges and four-year colleges, FWIW,
and I don't think one can generalize from one to the other.
I did take both music and art appreciation in college (real college)
and the teachers were fine. Learned a lot from the courses.
Don't know why you think they're not payed to be art critics.
Typically such courses are being taught (in four-year institutions)
by tenured or tenure track faculty in a department of music
or art and design. There really can be quite a difference from the
people you get in junior college (I taught poli sci in junior
college, without any background at all in poli sci), though
obviously there's no absolute guarantee against turkeys.

That was the distinguishing difference I was trying to make, but whatever.
No one has ever acused me of being clear or anything .

[lilymaid]

I say like what you like.

"Good taste" is often just an excuse for snobbery. Taste is very personal, especially in the arts. I say people should like pieces that speak to them personally. Technique and such seem to pale beside how a piece makes me feel, whether I can relate to it. Art is about sharing things about the human experience, and if we get too caught up in other things, we lose the point.

If you're making art, it's different. If you're studying it's different too. You want to do it the best you possibly can, and technique can help you. I just think being overly concerned with technique when viewing other people's work, you lose a very simple, basic joy in those things.

Even educated people vastly disagree from one person to the other. One of my art history professors, for instance, hated the <a href="http://www.louvre.fr/llv/oeuvres/detail ... 4198">Mona Lisa</a> . He pointed out that the landscape above her head doesn't even match up from side to side and said he couldn't figure out why people like it so much. I tend to agree, but a lot of people must have their reasons for liking it. I think a lot of it is the ideas of their own people bring to the painting, and not the painting itself. (Which is a huge part of how art works, if you ask me, and not a bad thing.)

In my personal opinion, there are things that work aesthetically, and there are things that don't work aesthetically. However, an awful lot of people worrying about good taste is simply a more grown up way of trying to be cool. If it is beautiful, if it speaks to you, it has done its job. A piece can have all the technical proficiency in the world and still fail to do that.

[jim stone]

Picasso once said "Good taste is the enemy to great art".

Just sayin'.

Maybe good taste isn't all it's cracked up to be.

It makes sense to question good taste, IMO, but only after
one knows what it is and why it's considered so, as
Picasso certainly did. I think one finds, if one does this,
that typically there are interesting and intelligent reasons why the standards
are accepted, but it turns out that every
kind of sight is also a kind of blindness.

Successful revolutionaries understand from the inside out
what they overthrow. That takes hard work. The alternative
is just to bash around.

Good taste
is worth overthrowing, if it is, because it actually MEANS
something; it is what it's cracked up to be. So if you look
at the academic painting in the first three-quarters of
the 19th century, light was controlled under studio conditions,
so that the object was discerned very clearly and the
artist could get to IT, see it as it is, almost objectively.

The Impressionists understood this very well when they
took their easels outside and began painting, not the
object, but LIGHT itself. This is very different from the
attitude 'Well, it's all just subjective taste, it's meaningless
really, so what they hey, I'll do whatever i want.'

[jim stone]

Tyler, Lilymaid, I think we all agree.

[Tyler]

Tyler, Lilymaid, I think we all agree.

tomahto, tomayto...

[Jack]

I attend a small, private, Christian liberal arts college. It's not "prestigious" like Harvard or Yale, but it's also not a state college or community college (though I also attended a community college for a year).

Cranberry, what in particular are they telling you
that's hogwash?

They're telling me stuff about "proper" use of line and landscape and color and form and repetition and all that lovely stuff. I understand it completely, but I disagree and I think it's useless information.

[gonzo914]

I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like, and I like this --



Artist -- Nonja Schoenbrunn

Nonja is classically trained in the "proper" use of line and landscape and color and form and repetition, but she passionately flaunts her aversion to convention as she flouts the established "norms" of the artworld to evoke these primal images.

Here's what one critic says --

Her pastels are explosive and bright, but we much preferred the "food color" paintings, in which the artist mixes her colors and produces rich organic tints, especially a complex and rather melancholic brown (one thinks of the notorious sadness of confinement), which differs slightly from piece to piece, since Nonja produces it by mixing all available paints. The browns are set off by brighter colors. The lines are crisp and distinctive, not at all like "scribbles", strongly reminiscent of writing (rather like Japanese "grass-style" calligraphy): - quite formal, very elegant.
It's interesting to think of Nonja's canvases as 2-D representations of 3-D kinetics. The pastels appear more in this style than the paintings, however, which seem to demonstrate an appreciation of the flatness of the surface and the constraints of the square or rectangular canvas.

More of Nonja's work --

[jim stone]

I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like, and I like this --



Artist -- Nonja Schoenbrunn

Nonja is classically trained in the "proper" use of line and landscape and color and form and repetition, but she passionately flaunts her aversion to convention as she flouts the established "norms" of the artworld to evoke these primal images.

The point, if I may say so, is that I think this woman's lovely painting
wouldn't be half so good if she hadn't been classically trained,
didn't understand very well the point of the conventions she
passionately flouts (it's hard to flout passionately something
you don't understand pretty deeply).

Cranberry, disagreeing with this info is one thing, seeing it as 'useless'
another. It can't really be useless, it seems to me, if it explains
a good deal of what people are either doing or rebelling
against.

Are people actually telling you there is a 'proper' or 'correct' way
to go about these things, as in, stuff that doesn't do this
is ipso facto bad? The artistic version of political correctness?
It's hard to believe that any
knowledgeable person would believe such a thing, as
so many conventions were deliberately broken in
the last century by extraordinarily good artists.

It seems more realistic that artists, at certain periods,
arrived at a vision of what good paintings do, which had
something to do with perspective, color, composition, and
the attitude of the artist to the subject. This was used to
extraordinary effect by masters of the genre--until
new artists trained in it found it too confining and
rebelled by breaking the conventions, sometimes
in extraordinarily creative ways.

But few of these genuinely creative artists thought:
'It was all useless bulldung--anything goes!'

[Monster]

'It was all useless bulldung--anything goes!'

Good line Jim.

But maybe Cranberry's just saying the class is a bore!

[Jack]

I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like, and I like this --



Artist -- Nonja Schoenbrunn

Nonja is classically trained in the "proper" use of line and landscape and color and form and repetition, but she passionately flaunts her aversion to convention as she flouts the established "norms" of the artworld to evoke these primal images.

The point, if I may say so, is that I think this woman's lovely painting
wouldn't be half so good if she hadn't been classically trained,
didn't understand very well the point of the conventions she
passionately flouts (it's hard to flout passionately something
you don't understand pretty deeply).

Cranberry, disagreeing with this info is one thing, seeing it as 'useless'
another. It can't really be useless, it seems to me, if it explains
a good deal of what people are either doing or rebelling
against.

Are people actually telling you there is a 'proper' or 'correct' way
to go about these things, as in, stuff that doesn't do this
is ipso facto bad? The artistic version of political correctness?
It's hard to believe that any
knowledgeable person would believe such a thing, as
so many conventions were deliberately broken in
the last century by extraordinarily good artists.

It seems more realistic that artists, at certain periods,
arrived at a vision of what good paintings do, which had
something to do with perspective, color, composition, and
the attitude of the artist to the subject. This was used to
extraordinary effect by masters of the genre--until
new artists trained in it found it too confining and
rebelled by breaking the conventions, sometimes
in extraordinarily creative ways.

But few of these genuinely creative artists thought:
'It was all useless bulldung--anything goes!'

Darling, Nonja Schoenbrunn is an ape.

[Monster]

Darling, Nonja Schoenbrunn is an ape.

She's an orangutan!!

[Monster]

Pretty good artist though.

[Jack]

Darling, Nonja Schoenbrunn is an ape.

She's an orangutan!!

Orangutans are apes.

[Monster]

Darling, Nonja Schoenbrunn is an ape.

She's an orangutan!!

Orangutans are apes.

Orangutans are a specific type of ape.