inebemm

[this post has been updated 060710; scroll down.]

Can pollocking your own sketch be art? are Jackson Pollock's paintings crap? Those questions were tentatively asked in the previous post's comment thread.

Now, this is something that puts the question of what is art squarely:

London, June 17: One of Britain`s most prestigious art galleries put a block of slate on display, topped by a small piece of wood, in the mistaken belief it was a work of art.

The Royal Academy included the chunk of stone and the small bone-shaped wooden stick in its summer exhibition in London.

But the slate was actually a plinth -- a slab on which a pedestal is placed -- and the stick was designed to prop up a sculpture. The sculpture itself -- of a human head -- was nowhere to be seen. [more]

It's hard to think of a question that has been so controversial for so long ago than what is and what ain't art. Indeed, probably nothing has been so disputed so much since modern man first appeared. That, true love between man and woman, and how to best kill your enemies.

-And what's that?

-It's the two warriors fighting for the possesion of the ox, and...

-No, I mean, why did you draw it with three horns? even my three-year old daughter knows an ox has two horns.

-It's a symbolic representation of...

-Yeah, like people are gonna call this "art" if they see this 50,000 years in the future, more like they'll believe it was my daughter or someone like your cousin since that failed trepanation; you draw like shit, about as good as a near-sighted mammoth humping a...

-[sound of skull critically crushed by Aurignacian flint axe].

There are beautiful things in the world. Some say they are inherent in nature, some say it they are interpretations of our minds. I believe that nothing, no object or phenomenon is entirely devoid of beauty, as none is entirly devoid of ugliness.

Beauty can also be found in stuff we make, anything we create. There's just more or less of it in a given thing according to each and one of us.

Art, artisan, artefact, artificial. Those words reflect, to me, something fundamental in human nature. Suddenly, 50 000 to 100 000 years ago, humans started to paint caves, make statues and jewellry, invent things like the bow, the boat, the sewing needle, the fishing net and spread all over the world from Africa, a cultural and technological revolution perhaps bigger than anything ever since, including the one that's been going on in the western world the last few centuries.

I think what happened then is one of the most important devolpment in homo sapiens. Some anthropologists believe it makes people born since merit to be classified in a new sub-species, homo sapiens sapiens.
I don't know. Many have called the "sapiens" a humongous misnommer for legions of reasons, and I pretty much agree it's among other things hubristic, arrogant, naïve, preposterous and pathetic.

I think it'd be better with homo arti[-whatever pig Latin suffix]x2. Man the artisan, working to make artefacts, some of which might be called art, that transform his environment into something artificial.

So, what's your take on this? Art or crap*?

* I got 11 out of 16 on that quiz, fwiw

Update 060710: Damien Hirst has been at it duchamping again; this time it's a shark pickled in formaldhyde: links (via MetaFilter). I also found there a link about my favourite Hirst piece, the one trashed as rubbish by a museum cleaner.

And in the comments thread is the percfect illustration for this post:

Via BoingBoing:

In 2003, Miltos Manetas created used someone else's work to make a site with this fun Flash tool to create your own Jackson Pollock-esque "painting."

I like Pollock.

Im think my first creation, called unimaginately enough "pollockasketch #1", is not that bad: