/lit/ - Literature

>>10838902
Pic related

I've heard the defense of Modern Art be put something like "Art is the expression of creativity" and "If it's so easy why didn't you think of it?". But isn't this complete nonsense? When was mastery of skill, and (if you believe it exists) beauty, removed from visual art? It seems clear to me that, for now, literature still requires you to write coherent sentences, and music still for the most part requires you to produce something at least minimally music, but the world of visual art has been reduced to a self-masturbatory congratulating themselves over how smart they all are.

Why do Middlebrows refuse to acknowledge that Popular Art,
>science-fiction, photography, cinema, jazz/rock/electronic, comics, videogames..
is superior to Modernist Art,
>poetry, painting, sculpture, classical music..
hmm? Even the Mainstream (of our Human Psyche) reflects this shift:
>‘the Masses.. not an nadir, but the averaging effect’ —Nietzsche.

…
>The purpose of ART is to give PLEASURE, full stop.
>Forbidding evaluation in terms of PLEASURE, Modernists need another criteria: this is where MEANINGS (especially hidden, all-too-hidden meanings..) and MESSAGES (e.g. moral, political) come in; the goals of Art and Philosophy conflated.

>This inversion coincided with the rise of the Middle Class, henceforth the main source of artists, critics and viewers.
>Art before the French Revolution was the exclusive province of the Nobility.
>Given a highly restricted, discerning, demanding public: standards remained extremely high throughout centuries, ensuring only the most competent artists were promoted.
>This suddenly disappears once the Masses have been unleashed, (e.g. on the art of painting: Impressionism onwards) any bungler can make his name in front of uneducated half-peasants who don't know any better.

>Modernism: in painting with the gradual shift toward Abstraction, in poetry with the abandonment of rhythmic structure, in the plastic arts with the introduction of the ready-mades, in music the democratisation of tonality, and so on in every single artform; MEANING over PLEASURE; PRIMITIVISM over CONVENTIONS.
>In short, while older artists throughout entire millennia created, elevated and refined the arts, giving pleasure to innumerable human beings, indeed practically -inventing- entire new worlds of pleasure — modern ones seem hell-bent on remaining entangled in a debased, pretentious, hypocritical pseudo-artistic process of ‘creation’.

(Reply to >>9122827)

This essay makes sense of what happened to art following the dissolution of aristocratic societies (19th century), you can just skim-over any of the video-game specific jargon if you don't care for it:
http://culture.vg/features/art-theory/on-the-genealogy-of-art-games.html

tl;dr:
>art for nobles was entertainment: agonistic (technical virtuosity of the craft) pleasure.
>'meanings' and symbol-exploration were instead reserved for philosophy, since prosaic (compared to pure art, of course good aphorisms won't be dry) writing is the best tool for communicating these (art falsifies/beautifies/selects, philosophy objectifies and endures even the ugly truths).
>after slave/democratising revolutions these were compromised or even inverted: the technical bar to entry was lowered and ugliness was tolerated more, especially if it accompanied philosophical content such as moralising, politics, or 'the human condition'
>this culminated in modern art where being 'challenging' and having 'meaning' is important, and intuitive pleasures or an obvious hierarchy of technical-ability is absent
>however, the pleasure/technical-ability values of the nobles have resurfaced in popular-art: photography, cinema, popular-music (jazz, rock, electronic, minimalism), videogames, etc except now technical ability of a sole-craftsman has been replaced with the multi-disciplinary nature of these technologically-advanced products that require multiple craftsmen
>because of this nature, people who prefer the modern art consider these popular artforms to be crude, compared to the new single-craftsmen or symbolist/'meaning'-rich works of the modern art/avant garde.

>>8762864
see pic related. it's the most pure and true piece of art. if you don't appreciate it, you don't seem to understand art as a whole at all.

>>8762874
so did the main character in Notes from the underground, yet the novel has 100 times more substance

>>7044712
>You don't know what modern art is, so why are you trying to attack it ?

>>6269879
>Are you gonna put engineers in charge of museums
maybe we should...

>>6070792
Yea, shut the fuck up you shit eating jew.