Terrapin Tables

I got an Economic -2.62 and Authoritarian -3.38.
I'm tip-toeing the anarchist line :)

-2.50 economic
-3.64 social

One question that got me, since I don't know what it has to do with politics, was, "Abstract art that doesn't represent anything shouldn't be considered art at all." Anyway, I said I strongly agreed with that statement. Art needs to represent something, either emotionally or spiritually or something. Anybody can draw a picture or take a snapshot, but that doesn't make it art. Abstract art that doesn't represent anything is just graphic design.

Anything a person creates and declares as art is art - as long as you "put the frame around it." John Cage orchestrated a piece with over 7 minutes of silence as a comment on ambient noise - I've seen sheet music with 20 pages of blank staff. Remember Homer's junk pile art? If it can be appreciated as art, then it is art also.

There's a lot of art I don't "get" (and I probably try harder or more often than everyone else) but I understand that there were creative intentions, and that's good enough for me.

I think the question was geared towards the Social Politics graph; a more conservative person would answer as Jeff did, and a more liberal person, like me, would argue that anything called art is art. Within reason. I know the "within reason" weakens any point I might have made, but artis inherently subjective, hence the abstract-art question.

All the examples you gave represented something. The one represent a comment on ambient noise. Homer's junk pile represented rage. I understand that there will be a lot of art that I don't get, but I will still consider it art if it is supposed to represent something.

If I throw paint onto a canvas, and call it art, and then someone asks me what it represents, and I say just a pretty picture, that's not art. But say I throw paint onto a canvas, and says that it represents the emotion I felt while painting it, then that's art, because of what it represents.

Anyway, that's the problem with any survey. I answered strongly agree, which probably put me as very conservative, when I'm actually a lot more liberal than some by accepting Pollock's or Warhol's, or just about anybody's work, as art, as long as they give it a purpose, when a conservative would say that it doesn't look like anything, so it's not art, all because of the way I interpreted the wording of the question.

If you say "it's just a pretty picture" than you have created the most fundamental type or art - art for art's sake. More art has been created to please the eye - and not the mind - than for any other reason. Throwing paint on canvas, a wall, someone's mom, is art - as long as the creator says so.

I don't care for some of the abstract art, the "See how many different squares I can paint in slightly different shades of yellow" type art. However, just because I don't like it or don't get it doesn't preclude it from being art. Maybe it is simply depicting a contrast in color or maybe someone though it would look good in their living room

Economic Left/Right: -7.00
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.41

Economic Left/Right: 1.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 2.77

Okay, am I the only Republican here?

Look, it's a modern art argument where we don't have to do any of the heavy-lifting/thinking.

My argument is that there's a difference between a drawing and art (or subsitute the appropriate medium). I make probably close to 20 drawings a day, and I don't consider any of them art. They don't represent anything other than the physical aspects of the part that I'm working on. Making a picture without any deeper significance is just practicing a technical skill. And if you consider everything art, then the word "art" loses its meaning, because it doesn't categorize anything.

Here's my theory- correct me if there are any glaring errors. I think that modern abstract art, or at least its popularity, was the inevitable result of photography. Many pre-photography painters were working to capture the physical appearance of their subjects. Once a technology came along that could do that, what was the point of doing it with paint? Artists were now freed to focus on different aspects of their subjects. If they still wanted close physical representations, there was photography. If they were more interested in abstract concepts, then abstract art was the answer. Granted, they were free to do this before photography, but I think that's what opened it up to becoming popular.