I think how much hatred and revulsion I feel looking at this is the brilliance here.
this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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The "revulsion being the point" comment brought back a memory...
My brother and I had a disagreement when I was young. He is a prolific and talented artist who went to an art and design college, and I was a teenage dumbass who was invited a show of his and others' work.
One such work was a framed typewritten letter.
I told my brother that that was not art and I thought it was stupid to call it art, and that it devalued the efforts of the other artists.
He didn't respond at first other than to say that art is often in the eye of the beholder and if it elicits a reaction it typically can be qualified as art.
He left it at that but I kept thinking about what he said. I was really annoyed that they could possibly call a stupid framed letter art just because it was hung in an art gallery. I said as much to several people over time.
About two years later I went back to visit him, this time for a solo show. He does abstract painting, and I liked his stuff. We started talking about the work and how some if it reminded me of our childhood home.
At one point I brought up the framed letter and how it still made me roll my eyes when compared to the work you see in art galleries.
He just smiled and said "still thinking about that piece?"
I was annoyed to admit that whatever my opinion might be I could not deny that it had had a profound effect on me, evidently.
So, yeah the revulsion at the thought of an acre of potential meadow being permanently smothered so that 4% of it could be used to park pollution machines is definitely the brilliance here...
Simply thinking about it doesn’t make the thing art, though. Like, it still could be but the only thing you were thinking about after all that time was how stupid it was and that feeling could be replicated by so many things and it wouldn’t matter. Being subversive and being stupid and not being able to handle criticism are two often conflated things.
It’s like misspelling something and throwing out a “language evolves”. It’s a cheap cop-out to cover up a mistake.
To say “that feeling” of indignation (at the letter’s inclusion in a gallery) is the same as other things that make him roll his eyes, is reductionist. We regard things as stupid for different reasons; they’re not all the “same feeling.” As others have said, the artist’s intentionality in presenting something is part of its message. So the indignation he felt about a piece being put in a gallery is part of that piece’s effect on him, born from the artist’s choices. That feeling is different than hearing a moron say something dumb and thinking it’s stupid.
Intentionality is the key. Case in point, “language evolves” is a silly thing to say after a mistake, but many subcultures start misspelling things on purpose, and that intentionality is how language evolves.
Well, exactly, but if the brother still can ‘t articulate his point any further than lol u mad” even after all this time then how intentional is it really? I totally agree that art is in the intention more than the execution but this doesn’t sound like that.