If I could go back in time and shoot 2 painters, well the second one would be Monet, whose damn water lilies started us down this awful path.

No one is forcing you to engage with this stuff at all. I'd venture to say you don't even like the classical art whose decline in stature you're decrying. You can still go to the symphony. People still make sculptures. You're just a dullard

The clothes you like still exist. Anyone who can't see my new clothes is a dullard.

- the Emperor

Hear, hear! This point is beautifully made by philosopher Roger Scruton in his "Why Beauty Matters"

https://vimeo.com/groups/832551/videos/549715999

Unfortunately I think too many people are still falling for that nonsense

I like art that can spark conversation. This recital is a masterpiece :)

Tell me more about these fake intellectuals who degrade discourse by telling everyone else they’re doing it wrong?

It's those ones that are not measured on the merit of their work, but on how popular their ideas are to the self-appointed gatekeepers of intellectualism.

Truly, they do not belong in our True Intellectual kingdom. We must close the gates to keep them out!

Oh, you are damn right that the taxpayer that is paying these self anointed intellectuals should have every right to kick them out of our True Intellectual Kingdom by cutting their funding.

Let them survive in the free market of ideas, then. If they are so great, they surely don't need public funding to continue their activities.

The last three or so comments of yours prove you don’t do much self-reflection and that you hold others to a standard you cannot make yourself.

Tastes are by nature subjective. But if 99% of people think X is beautiful and Y is ugly, and 1% think it's the other way around, there probably is an objective reason the ratios are as they are.

Sure, keep being uncurious and ignorant, it's all your choice, it's you who is missing out.

"Fake intellectuals" is just... Sad, devaluing whole bodies of work simply because you cannot understand them, instead of attempting to curiously explore that you prefer to use a thought-terminating cliché and embrace your ignorance as supreme... All the while you live during a time where all information and knowledge in the world is there for you to access for free.

It's just... Sad to live that way but ignorance is bliss since it's just so much easier to reject anything that challenges you.

The fact that this modern "art" needs to be subsidized by the people that actually works with their taxes, is all the argument needed to tell you that indeed this is nothing more than fake intellectualism.

I'm not missing on absolutely anything by not appreciating a banana glued to a wall. In fact, nobody really appreciates that, it's just a bunch of sycophants pretending they have some artistic knowledge the rest of us, the poor populace, lack, that go on pretending with the charade.

The rest of the world, are just willing to tell you that the emperor has no clothes.

> The fact that this modern "art" needs to be subsidized by the people that actually works with their taxes, is all the argument needed to tell you that indeed this is nothing more than fake intellectualism.

When exactly did art not need financial support from the State, or rich patrons, to be able to be made?

You are moving the discussion into a completely different territory now, and again showing how your view of art is principled in some kind of "productivity" measurement, which is so absurd that is not even wrong.

> I'm not missing on absolutely anything by not appreciating a banana glued to a wall. In fact, nobody really appreciates that, it's just a bunch of sycophants pretending they have some artistic knowledge the rest of us, the poor populace, lack, that go on pretending with the charade.

The banana glued to a wall is one work of art (and polemic for a reason), and you are using that to paint a broad stroke over all contemporary art as if there is nothing being told there... You don't know what you are missing exactly because you don't know what it is, you wouldn't know the colours you'd be missing if you were born with black-and-white sight, nor would know you are missing music if you were born deaf. The difference is that you are not born with an unchangeable characteristic to not appreciate art in different ways, you can work on that, you just choose not to.

There's no charade, the actual charade is why are you so vitriolic opposed to something you do not even understand, lol. It reeks of some sort of insecurity, since you do not understand you feel it's beneath you because makes you feel lesser that others might "get it" and you are out of the club? I don't know, look inside you to find an answer because the passionate rage about something you do not understand has deeper roots.

It's not up to you guys to say we "do not even understand". It's too handwavy and a false premise. We could argue the same... you guys "don't understand" how much bullshit there is in contemporary art to the point it's basically noise at this point.

To take a reductive view, art is people saying stuff. It's one thing to think that what is being said is not worth saying; but you seem to claim that nothing is being said. And that's just bragging about your own ignorance.

> art is people saying stuff.

Maybe to you, but to me that's speech, not art. Calling me ignorant doesn't make your viewpoint more valid.

What do you think about the state of music? Do you also feel that since the 19th century it has only been down hill?

Erudite music (i.e. what we call classical Music)?

I think it managed to hold off a bit more, we still have Bizet, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, even Stravinsky and others composing great (fantastic, in some cases) pieces in the first half of the 20th century.

But then, a bunch of Jonh Cages came along...

What taxes or subsidies are you talking about?? The Halberstadt project is funded on voluntary donations by people who want to see it happen.

It’s not clear what’s making you angry about one obscure performance of an obscure piece of music, but you might have more in common with Cage than you imagine. Cage described himself as an anarchist, and pieces like 4’33” are, in part, a commentary on the rules of music that make fun of establishment. Maybe he’s saying the same thing you are about the emperor’s clothes.