Too far off topic.

What is?

I should have addressed this more thoroughly:

They are not all pictures but can all count as pictures. — Banno

You are putting words in my mouth. I'm simply saying that all paintings can count as pictures on reasonable definitions of the terms. On more restrictive definitions all paintings may not count as pictures. I haven't anywhere said that not all paintings are pictures.

Ontology is usually understood to be concerned with what exists, and what exists is usually considered to be not a matter of opinion or interpretation. — Janus

I think you went off-topic. @Moliere simply asked why we have different concepts of painting. Since the painting of a wall to a piece of art painted in oil on canvas. Why is the first not considered art but the second is hung in the museums? I guess that's the main subject of discussion in this thread...

What does ontology have to do with that?

What does ontology have to do with that? — javi2541997

One of a couple of central questions @Moliere asked was what is the distinction between paintings and drawings. I originally simply pointed out that the usual distinction between paintings and drawings is one of the difference between pictures produced using wet or dry mediums.

I referred to paintings and drawings as pictures and then got drawn into a side issue as to whether all paintings and drawings can be thought of as pictures, and I pointed out that it would depend on definitions of the terms, not on some presence or lack of shared essential characteristics of paintings and pictures that make it necessary that they should be thought of as either in the same category or not.

I brought ontology into it to emphasize that it is a mistake to think that there are always some essential characteristics that make it necessary that something must be thought to belong to a particular category or identity.

That makes sense to me. Thanks for clarifying it. :up:

Is Rothko’s red rectangle a picture of a red rectangle? Or is it just… a red rectangle?

it is just a painted red-coloured rectangle.

And this?

Hmm... :chin:

Is it a painted red-coloured wall?

The main difference is that the first is intended to be 'art', but the second is just decoration.

"Painting" can be a noun or a verb. Rothko's red rectangle is a noun. The guy with the roller is performimg the verb.

the first is intended to be 'art', — javi2541997

Interesting. So is art "intended"? If that were so, then the intent of the chap with the roller is what decides if the wall is art or not... We would need to ask him his intent.

Rothko's red rectangle is a noun — LuckyR

Plainly, it isn't. A noun is a word. The red rectangle is not a word. You might argue coherently that "Rothko's red rectangle" (quotative) is a noun-phrase.

If that were so, then the intent of the chap with the roller is what decides if the wall is art or not... We would need to ask him his intent. — Banno

That's exactly what I personally think. We should ask the author if what he creates is art or not, apart from what we (spectators) may believe.

Obviously ... or maybe not to some?

Pieter Vermeersch’s (Kortrijk, 1973) artistic research of painting expands beyond the confinement of the canvas.
https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Pieter_Vermeersch/142#biography

Is that maybe a sculpture about a painting? Since it incorporates the room space to complete its portrayal?

Is that maybe a sculpture about a painting? Since it incorporates the room space to complete its portrayal? — Fire Ologist

As you are seeing it on your screen, the artwork could be a photograph, which just happens to be of a blue wall.

True.

I was imagining being in the whole room with the blue wall. The blue wall is not just a blue wall (or maybe not even a wall) - it is in a corner, highlighted, because the other wall is not blue. It could have been displayed otherwise, but was not.

I am sure a case could be made that I am not looking at things properly. And a case could be made that there is no such thing as looking at these things properly. And a case could be made that I was looking at things properly, (no matter what I said I saw, or because of what I said I saw, namely, a sculpture with a blue wall).

Is it still art if no one sees it that way (except the creator)? Should we say, "intentionally attempts to create art"? — J

This is one of those perhaps odd consequences of accepting the institutional theory of art -- Van Gogh's paintings that were not known but found later were not art before they were found, even though they were painted by Van Gogh!

I'm not sure it can be a red rectangle in a mathematical sense, at least -- but if all we mean is something we see that's roughly shaped like a rectangle then I could read it as a red rectangle.

I was just wondering yesterday if someone were to paint a three-dimensional shape as part of the painting would that still be a painting? I was beginning to wonder if part of what makes paintings and drawings paintings or drawings is that they are in 2-dimensional space. Even if we take a three dimensional object and paint it: would the painting be the object underneath the paint, or the paint itself? if just the paint itself then we could still see the surface as a 2-dimensional space where the artwork lies, but expressed on a three dimensional object to point out -- perhaps -- that canvas is not a necessary feature of paintings which are art.

Which I think helps me think through the example here: The object is the wall and the desire is to change the color of the wall for this or that non-artistic reason. While there's a certain technique to doing a good paintjob -- namely in getting an even coat, unlike our sample at the moment, which doesn't draw attention to itself and seals itself well to the walls so that the paint doesn't peal -- but even the painter wouldn't say it's art (unless it was a particularly good paint job, perhaps, that they're proud of)



*****


On the multiplicity of artworlds:

I can see the museum and the coffeeshop as having slightly different criteria -- namely to do with whether it's canonical or not -- but they share the common artworld of painting I think.

So not just locations, but even mediums can give rise to different artworlds.

Also, a general caution for family resemblance -- I like that concept a lot for tamping down the desire for universal and necessary conditions as a foolhardy quest.

But we can't just point to it in making a family resemblance theory as if the work is over. There's still the work of specifying that family resemblance, which is surely where the debate has been more focused if we're dealing with a phenomena better thought of as a family resemblance. (i.e. it was the philosophers who were wrong to seek out universal/sufficient conditions of painting, but there's still philosophy to be done)

From this perspective, it is natural to call Duchamp's Fountain non-art. It has deviated so far from the form of art, that it has lost all "art function": it isn't pretty or enjoyable to look at. It required no technical skill, anyone could have done that. It doesn't depict anything beyond what it literally is. — hypericin

This is a great exposition of how and why Fountain was first seen as non-art. Watching how the conversation has evolved on this thread, I want to add something: What turned it from a urinal to one of the most talked-about and influential artworks of the 20th century was not Duchamp's intention alone. By persuading a gallery to grant it what I'd call provisional status as art, he in turn offered Fountain to the larger artworld. This offering was meant to be provocative: I say this can be seen as art. If you disagree, explain why. And as we know, the argument was resolved in his favor. Conclusion: a "ready-made" can be an art object.

Here's a similar example, to reinforce the point I want to make. John Cage's "4' 33'' " makes a similar claim about what counts as music. Beyond the amusing set-up -- "can be performed by any combination of instruments" -- Cage was really asking his audience to reconsider what silence is supposed to be, musically. There's a lot of detail I could go into, but the idea is that silence in traditional music fulfills a structural function only: It's the place where, by agreement, there is no music, such as during a whole-note rest. We're not meant to consider what might in fact be audible in the so-called silence, because that doesn't fall under either the category of "music" or the category of "composer's intention." Cage asked the audience to spend 4 minutes and 33 seconds listening to ambient sound. Seventy years later, the consensus is fairly strong: Such sound, within that "frame," qualifies as art, though perhaps not music, just as Fountain qualifies as art, but perhaps not any previously known category of visual art.

Suppose this "provisional offering" of silence/ambient sound as art had been roundly rejected. And suppose Fountain was laughed out of the gallery. Some on this thread want to say that this would not have changed either work's status as art. Duchamp and Cage knew what they were doing, they considered themselves artists, so it's the artworld's loss if these works were not appreciated as art. I know that's an attractive position, because it privileges one of the traditional components of making art: that art is an individual thing, and expresses something about the maker, and we admire originality and vision. All true. But can art really be a private language, something that only the maker can speak?

How we answer that may depend on a related question: What is/are the purpose(s) of art? On the spectrum between self-expression (personal) and communication (collective), can it "go too far" in one or the other direction? If a poem falls in the forest and there's no one there to read it, is it still a poem?

I'll stop here before I die the death of a thousand profundities! :smile:

I went to the BBC's website and it seems that the lectures weren't being hosted anymore.

What is/are the purpose(s) of art? On the spectrum between self-expression (personal) and communication (collective), can it "go too far" in one or the other direction? If a poem falls in the forest and there's no one there to read it, is it still a poem? — J

I'm hesitant to justify art by its purposes. If anything I think it's entirely useless, and that's sort of the point. Rather than there being functions which art fulfills it can fulfill any function we want -- so a pot, though a useful item, can at the same time be a work of art. But in judging the pot as a work of art I am not concerned with its utility -- a pot in a museum from some ancient time is interesting because of when it was made and what it might mean for the history of art and ourselves, not because it's good at carrying water.

But that "what it might mean" is the sort of thing I think we're making up, and so it's not strictly some purpose which art serves but rather art is a human activity which we pursue for itself -- much like philosophy, and a good deal of science too.

I wouldn't want to put it in terms of self-expression(personal)/communication (collective) -- art being the sort of activity which emphasizes the importance of both in conjunct to the production of art. We're drawn to an individual artist, and we are able to talk about said individual artist due to collective understandings of the norms, which in turn serve as a basis for new creations as artists challenge those norms in interesting ways.

I read the wikipedia page on Duchamp's Fountain.

The final quote helps me to understand what he means by "conceptual" art because he contrasts it with "retinal" art:

Pop Art is a return to "conceptual" painting, virtually abandoned, except by the Surrealists, since Courbet, in favor of retinal painting... If you take a Campbell soup can and repeat it 50 times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is the concept that wants to put 50 Campbell soup cans on a canvas. — Duchamp, 1964

It seems to me that he wants interpretation -- so the story behind the artwork, the motivations around it, the whole context of the chosen/found artwork -- to offer the difference between art/not-art. So basically what we've been saying with respect to the idea of an artworld, though it seems to me that Duchamp places the "dubbing" not on the side of the committee's -- I was interested to read that Fountain wasn't displayed when it was originally submitted! -- but on the part of the artist making a choice that this is what art is: Not technique, but the act of choosing something as art to be submitted as art.

Something I wonder about this is how is retinal art not-conceptual? I'd say that he's just using different formal categories of evaluation in light of an artworld, not that the retinal painting is non-conceptual. I can ask why someone wants to put anything on an anything, and in fact must in order to speak about art at all.

It's that act of judgment that seems to me to differentiate art/not-art -- but, in being an act of judgment, it seems just as conceptual whether I'm asking "Why 50 campbell's soup cans?" or "What does Monet mean by his water lillies?"


****

I can sort of see how there can be a 'brain off" way of looking at paintings; but even then it seems we have to have some conceptual machinery to even want to look at something that is a painting different from the wall it sits upon.

:cool:

It is a painting on canvas that we might say depicts a red rectangle and is thus to be considered a picture or we might say it is just red paint on canvas in rectangular configuration. If something is just paint on some surface, and does not depict anything then it is just a painted surface.

There is nothing substantive in these kinds of questions― as I've said a few times now it's all in the interpretation.

This is one of those perhaps odd consequences of accepting the institutional theory of art -- Van Gogh's paintings that were not known but found later were not art before they were found, even though they were painted by Van Gogh! — Moliere

Not merely an "odd" consequence, but an absurd one. Van Gogh's works are rich, beautiful and intelligently composed images which are markedly different than anything created before.

I'm hesitant to justify art by its purposes. If anything I think it's entirely useless, and that's sort of the point. Rather than there being functions which art fulfills it can fulfill any function we want -- so a pot, though a useful item, can at the same time be a work of art. But in judging the pot as a work of art I am not concerned with its utility -- a pot in a museum from some ancient time is interesting because of when it was made and what it might mean for the history of art and ourselves, not because it's good at carrying water. — Moliere

Things like pottery and architecture may be considered to be art, and yet serve practical purposes. An American architect called Sullivan said in an essay that in architecture "form follows function". What I think all art has in common is that it attempts to bring an idea or vision into concrete being. We might say that some modern works embody an idea or vision which is quite trivial, aesthetically speaking and that their cultural value consists only in their reflective critical relationship with what had come to be considered "the canon" in an institutionalized monolithic, linear view of art history.

Ok. In your first post you said a paining was a picture. Now you say that a picture need not be a picture of something, and so avoid the difficulty posed by abstract art. that seems an odd usage, but is perhaps consistent.

I's just say that a picture is usually a representation of something, that a picture pictures something other than itself. And that art need not represent anything other than itself - as is the case for the red rectangle and so on. And that hence not all paintings are pictures.

I think this is a better approach than yours, which appears to me to collapse painting and pictures, and so lose some explanatory power.

As I've said I see there is always an ambiguity between what a painting represents, whether it is an abstract object such as a square, circle or rectangle or a painting that depicts a landscape, person, still life or whatever, and the formal aspect of all paintings which exists regardless of the subject and which consists in some pattern of tones, textures and colors on a surface and which constitutes a strong well-realized composition or does not.

Cezanne, the Cubists the abstract expressionist painters and others all self-consciously explored in various ways the ambiguity between paintings as patterned flat surfaces and paintings as representations of three dimension space. Your definition of picture is one, but not the only one, and not so useful as it is too restrictive in my view. But "each to their own" I guess.

We're engaged in forming an "ontology", no? That amounts to sorting out what we are talking about. It seems useful to be able to distinguish a thing from a representation of that thing - to differentiate between picture and thing pictured. It is useful to be able to point out that Black Square does not represent anything, but is a black square, and is a painting.



That appears to be what Kazimir Malevich had in mind... his intent.

But it seems we agree.

If you take a Campbell soup can and repeat it 50 times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is the concept that wants to put 50 Campbell soup cans on a canvas. — Duchamp, 1964

Yes, this is insightful on Duchamp's part.

the story behind the artwork, the motivations around it, the whole context of the chosen/found artwork -- [these] offer the difference between art/not-art. — Moliere

As you say, this sounds like a good expansion of the "artworld" idea. There's room to include the artist themselves, too. As long as we agree that what makes something art is a way of seeing, not a way of making, all these further interpretations can be on the table. (Clearly the main point of contention is: Whose seeing?) And we can further insist that "seeing" retain its metaphorical meaning, that it doesn't have to be retinal, but can instead be the kind of seeing we mean when we say, "Ah, now I see!"

It's that act of judgment that seems to me to differentiate art/not-art -- but, in being an act of judgment, it seems just as conceptual whether I'm asking "Why 50 campbell's soup cans?" or "What does Monet mean by his water lillies?" — Moliere

OK, let's call that special way of seeing an act of judgment. And let's agree that there's no "innocent eye," no "brain-off" way of looking at paintings. Still, we need to explain the important difference Duchamp is pointing to. If I understand him, he's saying that the Warhol exists in order to stimulate thought, whereas the Monet is an object of contemplation in its own right -- or something like that. Now we need a lot of conceptual apparatus to see either of these paintings in the right way; that's not in dispute. But conceptual art uses the image in a way that traditional painting does not. The soup cans have to function as a bridge to the concept, otherwise the artwork fails. Whereas the water lilies don't insist on this kind of move.

Maybe? Just thinking out loud . . .

The artist's intention to create "a piece of art" will not suffice - They might be rubbish at their supposed profession.

Being a piece of art is taking a certain place in a complicated game played with words, deeds and money.

The Murujuga rock carvings might be up to fifty thousand years old - far older than any art found in Europe.


There's no way we can enter into the intent of the artists; too long ago, too far removed from us, now...?

No frame, no museum.

It's ok, they are going to build gas export facilities over the top of them, so they won't annoy the anthropologists and art historians.

I'd say it may be said to be one possible representation of a black square, a picture of a black square, and that it also may be said to be just a black square because squares are abstract objects.

Just as a representational, in the traditional sense, paintings are pictures of whatever it is they depict, and at the same time are just painted shapes on a flat surface. I see an intractable ambiguity when it comes to visual representation.

The artist's intention to create "a piece of art" will not suffice - They might be rubbish at their supposed profession. — Banno

The first statement I agree with, but not the justification. If they make bad art they're still an artist, categorically -- it's just bad art, and they are, by that standard of "bad" at least, a bad artist.

It does have to be recognizably art in some sense -- part of what makes some of these examples poignant is that their creators have demonstrated their ability to follow technique, but they're wanting to say something about art as a whole after having demonstrated their ability in the traditional ways.

There's no way we can enter into the intent of the artists; too long ago, too far removed from us, now...? — Banno

Hrrm... it might depend upon further evidence, but I'm hesitant to say no way. It'd be a stretch, though, and take a lot of careful work and humility along the way (recognizing just how out there that is to try and determine the intent of someone so long ago without any evidence aside from the work itself). One thing we might say here is that we don't have a good clue what the intent was, but it seems like there was still an artist for all that -- some person a long time ago tried to do something like what we call art. What their artistic concerns were is hard to say, I'll admit, but I'd say that's more of an interpretative device that we can use rather than something which is part of what makes the painting a painting. I'd rather say it requires a creator. And perhaps an audience of 1, the artist, is enough, but I do think there being an audience is important.

But by that criteria I'd say this still fits, and is a good example of art not curated within a museum. But here we're very much left wondering much more than other artworks, of course.

It's ok, they are going to build gas export facilities over the top of them, so they won't annoy the anthropologists and art historians. — Banno

Seriously? That's terrible.