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> Your view about art is just too constrained by an appeal to aesthetic beauty.

This gets repeated a lot, but the reality is to many people, including philosophers, artists and appreciators of both, aesthetic beauty is a fundamental property of art without which it cannot survive.

The fact that contemporary art circles handwave away that relevance while arrogantly mumbling "you're just miopic, ignorant and misguided, learn more" doesn't really change that fact.

From the outside, it just shows that you too have been co-opted into the cult. You're free to subscribe to that view, but you don't get to gatekeep the meaning of art, no matter how many members that cult may have.

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jcattle a day ago | parent | next [-]

In this particular case for me I see a certain kind of artistic beauty in the recital. The fact, that we as a society try to keep something going for 639 years, just a sliver of a thread connecting all those different lives together. Not knowing if it will work, how it will end up, if it will fail spectacularly or just fizzle out into obscurity.

I wouldn't say that people who do not see this as art are wrong, that's the beauty of art isn't it? It's in the eye of the beholder. To me this recital sparks some hope or in any case makes me stop for a second and wonder about greater things than just my day to day.

	▲	airstrike a day ago \| parent [-]
		I don't even mind this particular piece, but I do mind most of what gets labeled as contemporary art. Or pretty much anything since Duchamp's Fountain or maybe Yoko Ono's Cut Piece before that.

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piva00 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> The fact that contemporary art circles handwave away that relevance while arrogantly mumbling "you're just miopic, ignorant and misguided, learn more" doesn't really change that fact.

> From the outside, it just shows that you too have been co-opted into the cult. You're free to subscribe to that view, but you don't get to gatekeep the meaning of art, no matter how many members that cult may have.

Isn't beauty in the eyes of the beholder though? I do see beauty in a lot of art deemed "part of the cult", how do you even attempt to objectively judge aesthetic beauty in a vacuum? Beauty exists in contexts, there is stuff that without the context just looks weird, with context it becomes beautiful, how do you assess the objective aesthetic beauty of such without delving into philosophical discussions?

You are all free to create an art movement that aspires to do what you believe art should be: aesthetically beautiful, devoid of philosophical meaning as pursuit of beauty, beauty for its own sake, etc., it will be included, admired, rejected, judged as misguided, so on and so forth, just like you are doing with contemporary art that you do not agree with.

Isn't that all art anyway?

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airstrike a day ago | parent [-]

> Isn't beauty in the eyes of the beholder though?

This is a truism, and I don't even think it's that accurate. There are some universal aspects to our perception of beauty such as symmetry, balance, tension-and-release, contrast, recursion... whatever it may be. We don't need to know what it is to tell that it's there.

	▲	wrs a day ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe, but all of those are context-dependent and can operate at high levels of abstraction. The beholder needs to be able to recognize them to appreciate them. A Rothko or Pollock has those things, but that doesn’t make them automatically appreciated. Assuming you’re from a western culture, listen to some Thai classical music and see how obvious the beauty is to you.