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CONCLUSION |
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The most basic form of art appreciation is to look at a work and see how it makes you feel, or if it is "interesting". This is fine if you are comfortable with knowing what you like and liking what you know. If you are content to like what you know and dislike what you don't know, you inevitably will not like new art, because you don't know it. Appreciating art is not just a matter of looking at a work and deciding if you like what you see or not. It is not just a matter of feeling how it makes you feel and if you feel good the art is good and if you feel bad then the art is bad. It is not just a matter of seeing if it holds your interest; if it's interesting it's good and if it doesn't hold your interest it is bad or boring. These are basically tests to see if the work is reinforcing your prejudices. Art works often deliberately invoke unpleasant feelings and boredom to create an aesthetic response that disturbs the viewers' prejudices and causes a re-evaluation of values and/or a re-arrangement of categories. Almost by definition works that are on the "cutting edge" will be moving into territory that is beyond the norms of evaluation. This does not mean anything that is outside of the envelope of evaluatable |
art is necessarily pushing the boundaries. For anything to be meaningful or significant it must be in a context that allows it to signify; however, works that are contextualizing themselves toward the outside of the "cutting edge" will not be evaluatable from a context that is comfortably inside the envelope of established norms of evaluation. Appreciating art also involves an examination of context. How does the work position it self in relation to possible contexts and does it work as a work in any of those contexts? If a work is meaningful in a context that you don't understand you probably will not appreciate it. The other end of the spectrum is a work that fits nicely into an established context that you understand all to well but the work doesn't work as well as hundreds of earlier examples. This is perhaps most notable in the mountains of tachist abstract paintings that have been done since the Abstract Expressionist. The paintings of Joe/Joan loaded brush stroke maker fit into a context the has been academic for fifty years; thus failure to appreciate the works propably has more to do with the inadequacies of the works, not an ignorance of the context. |
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