Abstract Art - Is it Art?
Is Abstract Art Art?
Yesterday my boys were drawing and my youngest brought me his latest work (shown below). I looked at it with his random scribbles and color spots created by smashing his markers into the paper and I thought to myself,
"Hey, this is pretty cool looking!"
This got me thinking about abstract art and whether or not it is art.
If you Google the question, "Is abstract art art", you will find a heated debate regarding the subject.
On the NO side people say abstract art is easy and requires little technical skill, thus it cannot be art. I think that there is some validity to this claim. Afterall, if my son (a toddler of only 24 months) can create something I find visually appealing then technical skill clearly is not a prerequisite for creating abstract art. I even created the cover image for this post in 3 minutes using Photoshop by randomly selecting colors and paint splatter brushes. If abstract art is so easy to create... Maybe it is not art?
Unfortunately, a rebuttal to the question is difficult to form because appreciating art often requires that the viewer abandon logic and reason.
Additionally, most viewers of art do not have a very close relationship to the visual arts, thus it is simpler to discuss the question using music - a form of art most individuals are quite familiar with.
Regardless of the technical abilities of the musician, I think most people would agree that music is a form of art and this is why we refer to them as artists. Heck! If I wait another 3 months I bet my 2 year old son could acquire enough knowledge of the guitar to play every Ramones song ever written. Does this mean the Ramones and other simplistic styles of music are not art? Not in my opinion.
Technical skill, while a valuable tool for creating art, is only a part of the equation. We often like to think of artists as having some special technical abilities that us non-artists do not possess, but sometimes it is just being original or doing the right thing at the right moment in time.
Setting my ramblings aside, I wrote this post because I am really interested to hear what the Steemit community thinks about abstract art.
Is it Art? Or is it just some idiot randomly pushing paint around on the canvas?
I leave you with some peices created by Aelita Andre, an Australian artist who is only...
Yes, because Art isa reflection of life, expression of emotion, manifests what words can't describe, or portrays the symbolic themes in totality, often it's philosophical
Abstract Art has caused so much philosphical debate that would put it up there with Classics of the Renaissance and Greek Tragedy. It's post-modern and individualistic, and Abstract art came about when those concepts entered our history.
Great question :)
I like that. Thanks for the response.
Abstract expressionist value expression over perfection, vitality over finish, fluctuation over repose, the unknown over the known, the veiled over the clear, the individual over society and the inner over the outer.
— William C. Seitz, American artist and Art historian.
Ok, here is my point of view. Don't mind the art movement. What it is important are the innovative reinventions, the breakthroughs in the way of conceive the art, so the value of a canvas is in its capacity to implement expression, vitality, fluctuation and in these processes break against the mainstream ideas of the working style: For me, It is not about expressionism but the artist and the process in wich he become -from unknow, veiled and individual- to something know, unveiled and mine as spectator. And that is why there are only one Pollock or Kooning, only one Hofmann or Gorky: Only one Kandinsky or Klee.
As Lyotard says: "The establishment, if only yesterday's , should be considered suspect. Which space does Cézanne mock? The impressionist one. What do Picasso and Braque? Object to Cézanne. What prejudice does Duchamp break in 1912? The prejudice that painting should be created, albeit Cubism. And Buren doubts the other prejudice, he believes to have emerged unscathed from Duchamp's work: the place where the work should be exhibited. A remarkable catalyst, the 'generations' strumbling over each other..."
Does this girl , Ailita Andre, respect the forms and style of abstract expressionism? Yes, for sure she is exceptional, she has the technique! Does she is an artist? I don't think so, she is a copycat.
I sometimes spend hours on a digital canvas attempting to produce the images you'll find on my blog. I've never understood why people think it's only a matter of pushing paint by accident and somehow a magic picture appears.
When you take it over to a real canvas, there could be hours of waiting and staring, watching paint dry... only to add another layer and do it all again.
To contribute more to the topic; a Randian view on modern art. This is from @the-ego-is-you
Rand liked to keep strict definitions, as she valued logical coherence.
She thus didn’t accept the concept of the so called “modern art” as any kind of real art, even if she recognized that there could still be a smaller artistic aspect to a piece or its creation.
Leonard Peikoff did a very brief and informative show where he defined and discussed the subject together with a fellow objectivist art historian. (The below video clip is actually the last out of 4 parts)
https://www.quora.com/What-did-Ayn-Rand-think-of-modern-art/answer/Thomas-H%C3%A4gg