Well, here’s the thing. There is a story about a writing assignment, where a student is asked to describe a street. They find it difficult. So the teacher asks them to describe a house. They still struggle. The teacher asks them to describe a wall. They still struggle. The teacher asks them to describe a brick. The student finds all kinds of interesting details to describe in the brick due to its texture, shapes of pores, etc.
The thing that you are missing is that the world around us is full of minuscule details and things that can spark our imagination and show us things if we sit there and consider them. These things are not created by auteurs, they simply exist, and its up to us to look at them in detail, and due to our humanity, we can extrapolate all kinds of ideas from them.
When I say “those works are not expressing anything” I am saying that the majority of the expression is being done by the interpreter. The same interpreter could look at a blank wall, and due to the details within that wall, they could see and think about all kinds of different things.
When someone goes for a walk in a naturally occurring forest, they have lots of different thoughts and emotions. Who is the artist?
My proposition is that if you actually have the balls to call yourself a artist, you need to put in some actual fucking effort and actually do something better than a brick does by existing. Because if you don’t , and what you make gets called art, it destroys the fucking meaning of the word ART, since if everything is art, nothing is art; since nothing separates things that are art from things that are not art.
The other point you are completely missing is that these works have value as instruction materials and thought experiments within the world of art to DEVELOP techniques; these works are unfinished and need to be contextualized in different ways in order to achieve something beyond possible techniques of applying paint to canvas. Take for example 4:33 by Cage; it is an effortless piece of shit that anyone can recreate, but it has value as a teaching material to let you be aware that silence in music is important, ambiental sounds can participate with and color your art in different ways, etc etc. It is not an expressive piece of music, but in terms of being a thought experiment to teach musicians, it’s very useful.
Well, here’s the thing. There is a story about a writing assignment, where a student is asked to describe a street. They find it difficult. So the teacher asks them to describe a house. They still struggle. The teacher asks them to describe a wall. They still struggle. The teacher asks them to describe a brick. The student finds all kinds of interesting details to describe in the brick due to its texture, shapes of pores, etc.
The thing that you are missing is that the world around us is full of minuscule details and things that can spark our imagination and show us things if we sit there and consider them. These things are not created by auteurs, they simply exist, and its up to us to look at them in detail, and due to our humanity, we can extrapolate all kinds of ideas from them.
When I say “those works are not expressing anything” I am saying that the majority of the expression is being done by the interpreter. The same interpreter could look at a blank wall, and due to the details within that wall, they could see and think about all kinds of different things.
When someone goes for a walk in a naturally occurring forest, they have lots of different thoughts and emotions. Who is the artist?
My proposition is that if you actually have the balls to call yourself a artist, you need to put in some actual fucking effort and actually do something better than a brick does by existing. Because if you don’t , and what you make gets called art, it destroys the fucking meaning of the word ART, since if everything is art, nothing is art; since nothing separates things that are art from things that are not art.
The other point you are completely missing is that these works have value as instruction materials and thought experiments within the world of art to DEVELOP techniques; these works are unfinished and need to be contextualized in different ways in order to achieve something beyond possible techniques of applying paint to canvas. Take for example 4:33 by Cage; it is an effortless piece of shit that anyone can recreate, but it has value as a teaching material to let you be aware that silence in music is important, ambiental sounds can participate with and color your art in different ways, etc etc. It is not an expressive piece of music, but in terms of being a thought experiment to teach musicians, it’s very useful.