Art? no thanks, I do visuals

[many2]

Originally Posted by iro3

Most artists only seem to be appreciated and their works valued when they are dead ... that does not bode well for VJs!

Who knows, now that VJing is dead maybe success will come !

[Andy_T_E3]

this seems a little weird to me. As the width of what is possible with the equipment that is available and the potential for transient situations with projection systems is quite far reaching....why then is there a predominantly club centred discussion happening here?

I truely think making art is about intent..the person who is spinning .swf files freshly d/l to booming techno at the club on the weekend can hardly be called an artist. Nor possibly would they wish to be labeled as such. However the person crafting their own animation or video with intent and a mindfulness, has relationships with many parts of the fine art world...take your pick...make what you want and call yourself whatever you wish.

[Hfour]

Welcome to the forums Andy, I agree with you 100%.

[Moabyte]

I've always felt that what makes something a piece of art is the intention in which it was created. This same thing was said in a movie I recently watched called Beautiful Losers. http://www.beautifullosers.com/

For me that intention is to communicate the inspired internal dialog I have with myself about the world around and in me. What I like about VJing is that is lets us take things that have one intention, which may or may not be artistic in nature and reform it with another intention.

I approach it like this; We are all artists. Inspiration is the pure voice of our higher self and when you create from this inspiration you are making art.

There is video art in the club and rave arena, but we don't really know for sure unless we know about the VJ and their intention.

Cheers.

[Pleasuretek]

I consider what I create to be art as what I create is generative realtime visuals. I try to use as little "footage" as possible. So what do I sit and create with my free time at home and what gets delivered at the show... Yeah, its fullSpectrum psychadelic spiritCreature art.

I think art can be pure crap, but if the artist goes into that happy creative place inside us all when creating... then it is art. If the visualist goes into it thinking of the client and getting paid blah blah, its not art, its work. You might be hustling some art, but that still makes you a hustler and not an artist.

[vjneef]

The 'Artness' of a piece of work can be determined with 4 qualifying categories:
1. Institutional Value
2. Aesthetic Value
3. Conceptual Value
4. Technical Value

I'm no so sure I agree with your Art history profs. It seems that their definition only works for what is accepted as art by society, which is usually about the dead artists and artists that work in ways which are generally accepted and fit into a tradition.
For example Vincent van Gogh would probably not have made it into any of these categories during his life as an artist. He was not accepted in art school, society would not like his paintings, he did not communicate his ideas very well because he would just make a fight about it and his technical skills were actually not very good.

I do think that artists are related to a society and the relation between the artist and society defines the value of the art. But this doesn't mean that society should be the judge of what is good art. At least not at the moment it is created.

[Rovastar]

Originally Posted by Andy_T_E3

this seems a little weird to me. As the width of what is possible with the equipment that is available and the potential for transient situations with projection systems is quite far reaching....why then is there a predominantly club centred discussion happening here?

I suppose it is because this is most a VJing in club related forum - most here are from/in that background some do more, some are now in more 'arty' fields.

Originally Posted by Andy_T_E3

I truely think making art is about intent..the person who is spinning .swf files freshly d/l to booming techno at the club on the weekend can hardly be called an artist. Nor possibly would they wish to be labeled as such. However the person crafting their own animation or video with intent and a mindfulness, has relationships with many parts of the fine art world...take your pick...make what you want and call yourself whatever you wish.

Do you really think that all people do in clubs is have downloaded spinning swf files?

[Andy_T_E3]

Originally Posted by Rovastar

I suppose it is because this is most a VJing in club related forum - most here are from/in that background some do more, some are now in more 'arty' fields.



Do you really think that all people do in clubs is have downloaded spinning swf files?

of course i do not....although the predominant aesthetic that i have experienced is based around vector graphics. I was merely making an example of what i consider to not be "art".
Button pushing versus the "craftsmen who meticulously creates their own content"
Do we consider what people were doing at the first "raves" with 16mm and overhead projectors in the late 1960s early 70s to be art or were they just wrapped up in the full experience of a "happening" which itself could be considered art....

I have spent much time myself working at a club in melbourne back in the days of vision switching and tape.... analog styles...

[Hfour]

Originally Posted by vjneef

I'm no so sure I agree with your Art history profs. It seems that their definition only works for what is accepted as art by society, which is usually about the dead artists and artists that work in ways which are generally accepted and fit into a tradition.

I do think that artists are related to a society and the relation between the artist and society defines the value of the art. But this doesn't mean that society should be the judge of what is good art. At least not at the moment it is created.

If art is not defined by the society it is embedded in, how can anything be defined as art or something else? It is very clear that some objects are art, and some things are not, and that the only characteristic of their 'artness' is based on who made the work. This reminds me of an auction of some pieces 'attributed to Banksy'; in which the bidding value was expected to be several thousand pounds. Banksy refused to confirm or deny that the work was his, and thus the auction failed to reach expected levels because the buyers didn't want to buy a fake. Banksy being the rebel he is probably would have loved to see 'fake Banksy' works sold for thousands of pounds.

The problem in the 20th century arose when the art institution started defining art without asking the rest of society for permission. When royal families and nobility ceased to have as much power as they did, their requirement to support the art world decreased, and the reality check that they provided was largely lost. The development of photography also plays a huge role in the development of modern art, as artists were no longer needed to paint representational portraits of rich people.

And so, the art institution became their own little society, and began to play an in-game with artists, critics, galleries and collectors. There are those who are in on it, and those who are not. The utter crap which 'anybody could make' but is labeled as art receives such categorization because the artist is part of the art institution's 'in crowd'. The real art process going on seems to be how to find your way into the in-crowd, through social networking, attending famous art schools and sleeping with critics(social networking). And here you thought you had a hard time in high school?

Three art critics from the New York big time art scene in the mid twentieth century did more to shape the art world of that era than any artist of the time. Their art reviews made or broke the careers of every artist they cared to write about. They pretty much decided who would be part of the 'in-crowd' and who wasn't. Tom Wolfe wrote a pretty good book covering art history in the mid 20th century called 'The Painted Word'. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in (or hates but wants to understand) the Art World.

By the way, the three critics were: Clement Greenberg, Leo Steinberg and Harold Rosenberg.

After modernism broke apart and multiple styles of art once again became cutting edge, the 'in-crowd' grew in numbers, but the boundaries between art and not-art are still just as clear.

[Hfour]

Originally Posted by Andy_T_E3

Do we consider what people were doing at the first "raves" with 16mm and overhead projectors in the late 1960s early 70s to be art or were they just wrapped up in the full experience of a "happening" which itself could be considered art....

Is it art? Yes and no. Please read my last post before continuing.

...

It is starting to be considered part of the canon of art because it was the precursor building block to other forms which are definitely within the canon of art. In order to legitimize the current video artists who have work which resembles the acid test style projections from 40 years ago, their predecessors are 'written in' to the canon.

When it was being made, it was mostly created to 'trip people out' while they were experiencing LSD. Because it wasn't in a gallery, because it was happening in California and less so in New York, and because it was made by creative people who weren't playing the art game, it wasn't considered high-brow art at the time. Just high art

I made a post in a different thread about not being interested in vjing exclusively to make trippy visuals at a club, but it seems that this also has a potential art world future...