People who condemn anything remotely high-brow as "pretentious"
Wanting to become a more knowledgable person is somehow a bad thing, is it? If I want to learn French, I'll bloody do it. If I want to learn about the political machinations of the Roman Empire, I'll do it as well, rather than watch another one of the 400 documentaries about fucking Hitler on Channel 5. If I want to watch Peter Cook doing proper satire rather than Dead Ringers who think satire is dressing up as Jordan and repeating catchphrases, I'll do it. If I want to spend half an hour photoshopping a picture of Tony Blair's head onto Michaelangelo's David, then I'll do it.

None of that is pretentious. Pretentiousness is doing a shit on a floor, covering it in crisp packets and then flogging it as art.

See also: people who critisice others for having "too much free time".
(Cuthbert Annihilator, Tue 6 May 2008, 14:13, 14 replies)

*clicky*
totally deserved - fed up of watching Hitler.
(bazmorningstar efil4nat3b, Tue 6 May 2008, 14:17, closed)

A documentary about "fucking Hitler on Channel 5"...
...it sounds like their normal Friday night fare.

Still, have a click. A friend of mine once said "knowledge is despised in this country," (referring to England) and I think he was spot on. The ones who are pretentious are those who just try to nose around in "high-brow" things so that they can look down their noses at people who haven't looked at/read/done exactly the same things.
(LongJohnBaldry, Tue 6 May 2008, 14:22, closed)

Just to play Devil's Advocate....
Why is the art pretentious?

Surely if it is grounded in art history, has philosophical weight behind it and causes discussion or even better, actually tells us something about our existence, then why is it pretentious?

Highbrow, definitely. A few charlatans, of course. But intellectually demanding? Undoubtedly.
( chickenlady b3ta's very own Elizabeth Taylor, Tue 6 May 2008, 14:27, closed)

@Chickenlady
but can you really say that Tracy Emins (sp?) bed was intellectually demanding?
(Bazongaloid, Tue 6 May 2008, 14:33, closed)

Yes, it was
And it was entirely in keeping with hundreds of years of narrative painting. Look at the Dutch school - all those interiors telling stories...all Emin did was take a painting on one step further and turn it into an installation.
( chickenlady b3ta's very own Elizabeth Taylor, Tue 6 May 2008, 14:40, closed)

Art is not pretentious.
People pretending to be artists are.

While at university I spent some time in the Fine Arts building for two of my electives. During that time I saw some truly incredible and beautiful stuff, and some stuff that I looked at and burst out laughing (which was the intended effect), but also I saw a vast amount of stuff that was done purely for shock value and conveyed nothing.

Building an elaborate articulated mechanism ending in a stick that moved back and forth and putting a dead fish in front of the stick? Hilarious. Wrapping everything in a room in cotton wool that you've dyed acid green? Shite. Making a gizmo that has feathers on it that has a motion sensor so that when you approach it the feathers disappear inside like anemones? Silly and brilliant. Wrapping your Subaru wagon in tracing paper and making rubbings of it and displaying them on walls? Pointless.

The real point of art is to either communicate something or to inspire an emotional reaction of some sort in the viewer. If it's just something random that communicates nothing and doesn't really affect the observer in any way, it fails.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Tue 6 May 2008, 14:46, closed)

Well I shall have to bow to your superior knowledge on anything art related
But that does raise the question somewhat of art appreciation and why it is often considered pretentious. If you need to have knowledge of all these historical master painters in order to get an unmade bed as art then you can surely see why very few people will understand it.

I'm not going to try and argue that it isn't art, I know nothing about art in general, it really has no interest for me, in fact I was going to use a music analogy, but it actually shows my original premise to be utter rubbish.

I was going to say that you don't need a great understanding of the rules of music and classical composition to understand a great pop song, but that's the wrong comparison isn't it. You don't need a great deal of knowledge to appreciate a nice picture of trees and hills and stuff. But you would need a good knowledge of music to appreciate why some free form jazz is so good musically, even though most people would dismiss it as just random noise. Which is the equivalent of people dismissing Emin as a load of pretensious rubbish.

Hmmmm. Really must stop arguing in my own head.
(Bazongaloid, Tue 6 May 2008, 14:51, closed)

Al, that's it exactly
A great deal of contemporary (not Modern) art is just like free-form jazz - ground-breaking and very often academic. You need to know something of the rules and history of music or in the case of the art, art history.
It's no surprise that public taste tends to be many decades behind practising artists. What's the most common print that people have in their houses? Impressionist paintings....painted about 100 years ago.
( chickenlady b3ta's very own Elizabeth Taylor, Tue 6 May 2008, 15:14, closed)

Not me.
The most common paintings I have in my house are ones done by either my girlfriend or her brother. I also have some watercolors by an Adirondack artist, and prints of some Art Nouveau works. A few photos, and that's about it.

Oh, and a Louis Armstrong album cover.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Tue 6 May 2008, 15:20, closed)

@ TRL
That just reinforces my point, aside from the pieces made by artists personally known to you, you've got Art Nouveau...made in the 1920s and 30s.

Contemporary art, on the whole doesn't lend itself very well to a domestic setting. Just as no one could have free-form jazz being played constantly in ones house.
( chickenlady b3ta's very own Elizabeth Taylor, Tue 6 May 2008, 15:32, closed)

This pile of shit covered in crisp packets....
...I represent Charles Saatchi and he's very interested in your work. He'll pay 2 million for it. This in turn will cause media hysteria, making you famous and making the works value increase to 7 million. At which point he will sell it and move onto the next 'Challenging Artist'...

And thats how that works... Damien.. Stella..
(Phlash, Tue 6 May 2008, 15:37, closed)

I was just being wise-ass with the answer about my artwork, really.
Personally, I'm all about challenging artworks. Recently I went to the Virginia Art Museum, and they had a ten foot tall portrait of a young black man in hip-hop clothing striking a classical pose with a basket-hilt rapier in his hand. My girlfriend the artist was initially put off by it, but after looking at it for a few minutes we agreed that we liked it- the painting was very well done with a good eye for detail, and was a silly idea that had been flawlessly executed.

I like artwork that you need to think about.

I do NOT like things like this or this.

I've met this woman and listened to a lecture by her on her works. At that time she didn't really have anything of interest to offer, in my opinion. She seemed to be taking machinery, doing things with it that it was not intended for, and presenting the results as art. Was there a point to this? Not that I could see. Yet she seemed to think that she was making these awe-inspiring works that people with refinement and taste would appreciate.

I found her to be full of fluff and twaddle. Lots of big airy words that made no sense.

By contrast, I refer you back to my girlfriend's brother. Take a look. His stuff is far from conventional and is a bit challenging- but it has impact and creates an emotional response, and often actually communicates something. Avant garde? Probably. Yet it's pretty accessible to most people. That, I believe, is why he's a commercially successful artist in his own right. (Then again, I admit I'm a bit biased. *grin*)
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Tue 6 May 2008, 15:59, closed)

@ TRL
Funnily enough I looked at the link to her work before I read your entire post...my first thought?
Interesting technically - mechanical paintings rather than organic - but ultimately too concerned with process and not enough with content.

And then I read the remainder of your post - the same conclusion you had come to...Therefore we *must* be right!

Your g/f's brother's work is very nice - ideal for people to have in their homes as well as being thought-provoking...and I'm not just saying that to be nice - I could have said, Yes, lovely work. Or Very Decorative. But I have a soft spot for sheds and black and white photography.
( chickenlady b3ta's very own Elizabeth Taylor, Tue 6 May 2008, 16:20, closed)

YES! *punches air*
It's fun to take a machine and do silly things with it- I do that all the time- but that is NOT art! Using your bastardized machine to communicate something or to achieve an effect is art.

Look under "Projects" and you'll see the one about the Subaru wagon I mentioned, as well as one where she used a lawn mower to run over stuff, peeled the mess off of the underside, let it dry and called that art. What was the point of that? To say that self help books are worthless and only good for being run over with a lawnmower? Or is there something I'm missing here?

I like experimental art, if it achieves something. Hers doesn't, at least not to me.

Yoko Ono, similarly, does a lot of stuff that doesn't appeal to me- but I suspect that hers is an attempt to annoy as many people as possible at the same time, in which case she succeeds.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Tue 6 May 2008, 17:05, closed)