Actually I like the execution. The perspective bringing the genitals to eye level, the Leninesque pose, the political poster style and the red and black colour scheme all contribute to a very intimidating sexual/political portrayal. Zapiro is an excellent artist in his own right, but with an emphasis on ridicule rather than intimidation.
Brian, I don’t think an illustration where the draftsman merely aims to inform should qualify as art, however skillfully executed. The intent to convey emotion is lacking. Its sort of like the difference between manslaughter and murder isn’t it? 
Rigil
Go tell that to illustrators. 
See no reason why they should mind, as there is nothing that necessarily makes an artistic drawing superior to a technical one. They serve different purposes, and are good at totally different things. A technical drawing of, say, a bird in a field guide must obviously be more accurate than it’s possibly more whimsical artistically rendered counterpart.
There is yet another possibility, namely that of decoration or craft, such as a bird motif embroidered on a scatter cushion or a napkin.
Rigil
It seems to me that just about any category, whether it be art, music or horses, will have somewhat fuzzy borders. Some things will definitely fall within the category, other things will definitely be outside of it, but on the borderline there will always be things that are debatable. Is a zebra a horse? How about Eohippus?
Thus endless debate about what art is, is probably pointless, because the debate mostly concerns the fuzzy borders. I had this discussion the other day with a guy who is vehemently opposed to modern art, and he disagreed with me, but I think he was just very much disturbed by the possibility that fuzzy borders would keep on shifting until everything he hates about modern art ends up being dignified with the term “art.” Thus he accused me of being a postmodernist relativist etc., even though my tastes in art are actually quite conservative.
There was a time not too long ago when there was no clear distinction between illustration and fine art. What is Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes other than a series of illustrations of bits and pieces from the Bible? Many of them would actually not at all look out of place in a modern graphic novel:
The Pope would have had him strung up had he simply pushed his unmade bed into the chapel, methinks. I think the distinction between the two originated partly when illustrated books became widely available, but also because artists began suffering physics envy. Thus they (well, some of them) wanted to portray what they did as something of a philosophical, intellectual pursuit rather than what was increasingly thought of as “mere” craft. And so we ended up with an aloof, intellectual-sounding terminology: words like juxtaposition and dualism and post-industrial feminism started creeping into reviews. There was ever less craft and ever more concept. In many art schools, especially at university art departments, learning the basics of drawing was even thrown out the window altogether as being old-fashioned.
Lucky for us illustrators kept those skills alive or we would have lost everything that their predecessors took several centuries to learn. It seems to me that art really is a craft far more than an intellectual pursuit, and that in our egalitarian age, it is high time that we stopped thinking of that as some sort of insult to artists. I do not know of a single highly skilled artist that would mind in the least to be called a skilled craftsman. Quite the contrary. And the ones going on about “mere” illustration are almost invariably the ones who cannot do it themselves: " expressing yourself" with “intellectual art” has often become little more than an excuse for laziness and incompetence.
[Spanner-in-the-works time]
One aspect that often features prominently in connection with art is the purported artist’s “suffering,” how s/he has “paid his/her dues,” that they are “sensitive to subtleties,” that they have “unique insight” and that they “need their freedom” to create. Everyone wants to be an “artist” of some kind and there is a strong propensity for using the epithet “artist” as a badge of honour to signify all the hardships that they face in pursuit of their art. In contrast, calling yourself a “scientist” or something technical that’s not directly associated with the art world is typically said without much expectation of eliciting expressions of deep reverence and awe from the listener.
Personally, I think “artists” just whinge a whole lot more than other people.
Creativity is a central precept for art. If it’s not creative, it just ain’t art. Consider that there are as many ways of, say, painting a given person’s portrait as there are people contemplating that project. Each rendition is unique to the artist who produced it, and the same artist can also do different versions of the same person’s portrait. This uniqueness and individuality goes to the heart of art’s alleged strength, and “creative” is the word we use to praise this or that artist. The more we like an artist, the more “creativity” we ascribe to him or her. How curious it is, then, that we invariably forget how truly creative scientists and engineers who work at the cutting edges are. How curious that artists usually decry the type of creativity where there is just one way to arrive at and render a theory or method or procedure, namely the correct way, by combining disparate bits of existing knowledge in novel ways in accordance with certain strict rules. To my mind, the latter is a much superior kind of creativity that requires significant skill in its execution and which meets all the requirements that entitle it to be called “art.”
On the whole, as a category, I don’t like artists very much.
[/Spanner-in-the-works time]
'Luthon64
We have here to distinguish between artists and aaahhhtists. The former are folks who are skilled at drawing and painting. The latter are the type of hip, self-indulgent people you see on artsy TV programs. Have you noticed that? How they pronounce the word as aaahtist?
You are of course right: math, science and engineering require creativity on a scale equal to anything Michelangelo engaged in (and note that Michelangelo was also a skilled architect and anatomist, and let us not even go into the talents of his contemporary Leonardo). One of the many ways in which postmodernist art and philosophy have harmed us is that ultimately, it has harmed the reputation of all artists, including the genuinely skilled and respectable ones.
My late uncle was a commercially very successful impressionist painter. He had no hint of the “artist’s personality” and the last forty or so years of his life were mostly uneventful - he was too busy working to engage in scandal and remained happily married to the same woman for forty or so years. He rose at the same time every day, spent six to eight hours painting, attended no wild parties, and pursued little in the way of weird philosophies (although he did have a certain liking for woo-woo theories - ancient astronauts and that sort of thing - but in his case it really showed a general interest in the cosmos and the world around him. He read Sagan with just as much interest.)
He was also an avid amateur glider pilot, and was fascinated with aviation. He even now and then painted aircraft, although it was by no means what he specialized in:
When he was a child he wanted to be a pilot and was sort of diverted into art because at the time there wasn’t any opportunity for him to pursue a career in aviation. But he read voraciously on the subject, had a great knowledge of aeronautics, built and flew his own model aircraft etc. He was greatly impressed with the work of some illustrators, notably Hergé (creator of the Tintin comics). He once pointed out to me that in the Tintin book “Flight 714”, in a scene showing a passenger jet landing, all the details of both the cockpit and even the position of the flaps and ailerons on the wings are exactly correct for what the craft is doing - this sort of attention to technical detail greatly impressed him (as it impresses me - Hergé is one of my favourite artist, “mere illustrator” or not!)
All this just to demonstrate that being artistically creative need not turn one into an enemy of science or technology. Quite the contrary: it is when an artist or art lover goes on and on about the evils of science, and how math is all just cold logic, and how engineers have no soul, that I know I probably needn’t pay any more attention to their art than to their philosophy. Yet how quick they are to run to a scientifically trained doctor at the first hint of sickness!
That’s most certainly possible but I can truly say that I have never encountered a self-professed artist — famous, middling, unknown or infamous — who isn’t at least on some level a shrill petulant egocentric fathead about their work, so my selection/confirmation bias is probably stronger than it should be. Moreover, by virtue of their nature, this is the type one is most likely to bump into, and yet it’s still astonishing how common they are. I don’t doubt that there are notable exceptions. I just haven’t seen any. That said, I’d’ve loved to have spent some time with a few selected artists whose works have impressed or moved me to see what sort of people they were behind the façade.
Growing up, Asterix, Lucky Luke and Tintin were among the staple reads in our house. The quirky charm of peripheral details in many Asterix panels is heart-warmingly amusing.
'Luthon64
Reminds me of the hours spent deciphering a MAD magzine’s margins… (bout as Art as I get, just like no spirituality whatsoever, our creator has endowed me with no art or fashion sense at all)
Just to qualify this: If you ask me, that’s among postmodernism’s pettiest offences.
'Luthon64
Artist MC Escher (1898-1972) was an interesting case. He drew his (no pun intended) inspiration from mathematics of all things. When you Google his biography and quotes, he comes across as sharing Brian’s uncle’s work ethic: less glitz, more graft. He said: " The things I want to express are so beautiful and pure" I can only assume he was talking about the Platonic mathematical world. Pretty cool methinks.
Rigil
Quite so. To get a better handle on Escher’s work in the context of modern mathematical theory and development, I strongly recommend reading Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. And in the literary world, there’s the wonderful Lewis Carroll who does mathematical and logic tricks in and with smart prose. Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice explains many of Carroll’s linguistic capers.
'Luthon64
It’s art, but is it GOOD art?
Is art not just in its totality a subjective experience, anyway?
Once we have established criteria, we could judge works of art according to those, reasonably objectively. E.g. one can tell which of two portrait likenesses is the more accurate (assuming one is more accurate than the other). But should art necessarily resemble the world? That is a way more subjective thing.
It seems as if some works of art (and music, and literature) have a certain “something” that makes it appealing to many different times and cultures, and those are what we usually call the classics. If we could precisely codify what exactly that “something” is we could probably all produce masterpieces.
But then, even with the classics, the Paris Hilton effect plays a large role, as Mikhail Simkin tries to show on his provocative website at http://reverent.org/
Brian, after a lot of contemplation, I think what you said right in the beginning of this thread hits the nail on the head:
Which, of course, offers the audience no guarantees. But perhaps that is how it should be.
Rigil
This reminds me of an experience I had at school concerning English Creative Writing as it was called at the time. Early on in Standard 8, quite by accident I hit upon a type of composition and a writing style to go with it that significantly improved the marks my essays were awarded from that point on. (That content and style is perhaps best exemplified in the writings of Roald Dahl, Ray Bradbury and John Wyndham.) I ported these principles to the other two languages and my marks improved, er, markedly there too. I remember being a bit concerned that this apparent preference was one limited to the particular teachers concerned, or possibly the school as a whole, but my matric marks eventually disabused me of that worry.
So it seems there are indeed such “universal” ingredients, at least in certain art forms.
'Luthon64
I can throw in with this to a large degree. But I usually value originality and what you describe, Mefi, makes me hugely uncomfortable. Formulaic anything gets boring quickly, and I used to roll my eyes when people had to read out their essays in class, each with a pre-set theme and structure, going by the textbook. I always preferred an alternative interpretation of the subject material. I didn’t do great but got better grades than most, likely because I was in a bit of a backwater Afrikaans school and my spelling/grammatical skills exceeded that of my classmates.
FWIW: In std. 2 a teacher marked my essay down with: “Children of your age shouldn’t write like this”. I thought this was a definite mixed message, and still think the teacher was being a bit of a retard.
Not that I claim my English is perfect even to this day. I often read my posts here in retrospect and cringe a bit.
That said, I think the difficulty in art is that each piece of art presents something different to be appreciated. There’s a universe of different things that qualify something as “art” and that’s what introduces the difficulty in people trying to apply reductionist principles in classifying it.
Some art presents beauty, some art presents incredible human suffering to prompt the viewer/listener/reader into action, some art is there to make the recipient reflect on their own behaviour/psychology/struggles/place in the world/etc. Some art is somewhat like a puzzle, leaving you lingering trying to tease the meaning out and rewards you, much like any other puzzle, once you do (or think you do).
Often the more “abstract” art is trying to convey a raw emotion using nothing more than the ferociousness or subtlety of the brush strokes. If it is done well I do appreciate it. However I think more often than not, it fails miserably and just appears like a mishmash of random paint.
More often than not, you walk into people’s homes and find “art” that is merely there to look nice hanging on a wall, to give a certain colour or feel to a room. I don’t qualify that as “art” art, yet I still think it fits into the general art category by lending a certain mood or feeling to a room. Then again, so does a blank wall painted a certain colour.
And this is where I come back to the admittedly thorny issue of originality. Is a guy pumping out moulds of ducks and selling them in a curio shop making art? I would say no. Seeing the same knitted-dress Barbie doll covering a toilet roll doesn’t inspire much feeling in me, other than total apathy. But then by the same token, if we mass-produced perfect stroke-for-stroke copies of the Mona Lisa, would that make it not art? After a while, it’s impact would diminish and nobody, IMHO, would consider it art any more.
It’s like your favourite song, that you listened to just one too many times in a week, and can no longer stand. (EDIT: Or like yet another italian villa some person has built in the middle of joburg. Maybe the first one was a good idea, but after 100 it got a tad… repetitive)
I think there’s something in this. I think true art requires novelty.
Then a giant butt plug in the middle off Paris is a novel as it gets. ;D
But I agree with everything you said.
My father in law is a part time painter. And we’ve had the debate a few times,
that in painting you don’t need or want a perfect copy of some scenes you have photos for that
rather a more abstract picture where the artist has left his impression is better.
Unless you going for a photo realistic painting in which case the skill is what is appreciated.