Hiatus OVER! Selkie is back in regular production, folks, and we’re kicking off a new storyline. 😀
Thank you once again to everyone who submitted guest strips during the hiatus, I greatly appreciated the time off for buffer time and holidays. 😀 Fingers crossed, shouldn’t be anymore half-finished or late Selkie strips.
I also received these drawings and was asked to use them as a Fan Art posting instead of guest week submissions. Nikki did some sketches of the Selkie cast, which I wanted to share with everyone:
Thank you, Nikki! 😀
Jenny last appeared in strip #420 ( https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie420/ ). She's Andi's friend, and the owner of the gallery space where Andi has been setting up her exhibit.
Well, that’s actually similar to how the person she got inspiration from was acting similar, so it makes sense that he made that interpretation.
“Art” makes a statement. The statement isn’t suppose to be “I couldn’t think of anything better to put up there.”
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA art student here, and that statement sounds adorably naive :p
Modern art is the most controversial kind of art. There are people who say it isn’t really art. I propose a rebuttal: If no one denies its validity as art, it’s not really modern art.
Before anyone gets mad, be aware this proposal was made for the sake of humor. Questioning whether the validity of something as art has been denied would count as questioning whether something counts as art, so the argument would be circular.
If you study your history, then you know that critics often dismis the new wave of art, as crap. But a stick in the mud will always complain about the river’s currents and eddies. Sometimes the critics are right (French Revolution: 10 hour days). My Mate doesn’t ‘get’ jazz. I don’t get Stockowski, or Stravinsky, but I do enjoy Stockhausen. It is hard to get objective measurements with art. Like reality, it is somewhat firm on paper, gooshy in the application.
Leopold Stokowski is something of an acquired taste, as far as conductors are concerned. (I’m currently on a bit of a Stokowski binge at the moment.) He was very much the showman when it came to getting Classical Music out to the public. (Thus efforts like his collaboration with Walt Disney on Fantasia.) He was also something of an amateur scientist/inventor in his efforts to bring better-quality recordings to the public (his electrically-recorded 78s in the 1920s, his experiments with stereo recording with Bell Labs in the early 1930s, his experiments with “surround” recording [the “Fantasound” system used in several theaters that showed the aforementioned Fantasia], and his experimentation with instrument placement in various stereo recordings.) He was instrumental (no pun intended) in bringing J.S. Bach and various other composers before the public with his transcriptions of various solo pieces for orchestra. He was also responsible for putting the Philadelphia Orchestra on the musical map, and created the All-American Youth Orchestra. He was also a bit of a charlatan in his private life. (He affected a vaguely Eastern European accent though he was British by birth.)
My main frustration (and apparently it’s shared by a lot of his fans) with him is that he had a tendency to change tempo in the middle of a passage (or even a bar), and it tends to throw off the rhythm. (Although this was apparently a stylistic thing among his other contemporaries as well.)
There is no denying, however, that he was a superb *Musician*; and his body of work, as a whole, is an important document in pre-digital recorded Classical music. (Sorry this is so long, but I have a tendency to gush when I’m talking about something that I love; and Classical Music is one of those things.)
I know, Classical, amIright? Bach’s counterpoint, Mozart’s marvelously infectious melody lines, Rick Wagner’s orchestrations. And don’t even get me started on Beethoven, I have no words, I mean like the 5th, 6th, oh! the 7th!! the 9th, the 2nd! I mean, … Yeah. And Rocky and Tschyk!
But then where do you stop? I stop when the artist makes me work the intellect so hard that I cannot feel anything for the music except:” This is too much work”, and that would be Stravinski. But me and Rocky, we’re best buds. I like what the Russian Composers had to say, even Mussorgsky, but give me my 3Bs and I’m content.
This ONLY applies to Classical. I like me my J.J.Jarre, Kitaro, emo Eno, … Just, PLEASE no Rick Halpern.
I’m actually more of a Berlioz man myself. I have a thing for large-scale works and works for multiple choirs and orchestras. Go BIG or go home.
I assume, at my peril, I assume that your Reynard Fursona is icon is for Rey’s legendary intelligence, but you really own an Irish Wolfhound, because: go big…
Art should speak for itself, if you need to be told it’s art or have a story for it so you can “get it”, it’s not art imo. I remember news about a gallery where people were gushing over a plate of half eaten cookies until one of the employees came and ate them – if some randomly discarded object (or in this case random vandalism, don’t even let me get into bodily waste…) could be called art then something’s wrong. 🙂
Oh, and also some amount of skill or technique should be a requirement for something to be art, otherwise I’ll just scribe a stick figure or throw paint on a canvas at random, and call myself an artist too.
Both of those ARE art. They’re just not very GOOD art. A kid’s scribbles are art and a kid making mud pies are both art as well.
A lot of the “is that really ART?” debate centers around the fact that different people use that term to encompass different sub-sets of the whole. Like saying that a scribbled note isn’t really “writing” or Easy Cheese on raw Top Ramen isn’t really “food.”
Go check out Scott McCloud’s book “Understanding Comics.” He defines art as basically anything that isn’t primarily aimed at fulfilling one of our two basic needs (survival and reproduction). If you dance around a bit while waiting for a line to move, randomly hum or whistle some notes, scratch a little design into the side of a tree, plant a garden with some sense of making the plants look nice next to each other, scribble mustaches on ads in the Sunday paper, all of that is artistic. You can debate about its quality or the creator’s skill, you can debate whether it’s meaningful, deliberate, pleasing, worth learning from or mimicking, but it’s all ART.
I don’t have the least problem with people creating modern art. I could get into a big debate over the role of tax dollars in funding art (especially given some of the eyesores in Seattle), but just putting things together in a new way and exploring how that differs from all the previous ways people have put things together, that in and of itself is a useful movement.
Ahh yes I once thought art had to “look like something” or be “understandable”, but then I hit puberty… I jest, it’s taken many years to appreciate there is more to art than copying life, that there is so much more to art than just being as photo-realistic as possible. Sorry we have cameras to be photo-realistic for us, I want to see what you FEEL. Anyone can take a picture of a sunset and dial the saturation up, but how did it make you feel? People hated Turner in his time, now he is shown at MOMA and taught in art history books. Not to disparage dear Dave, but we aren’t here for the stunningly rendered 3D characters, we are here for the feelings and the story.
“should look like something” ‘s a pretty good guide actually imo. That doesn’t mean it has to be photo-realistic or a portrait of something real though. And asuming you mean William Turner, if you look at his stuff you can still tell, that’s a ship, that’s a lighthouse, it’s not just blue on blue or a dot on white canvas or whatever.
So what “should” art “look like”? Have you seen “Straight” by Ai Weiwei? Please look it up, it is a pile a different lengths of iron rebar stacked up to from a wave. It doesn’t look like much, a big stack of rusty old iron, but the story behind it- it is rebar taken from a school in Sichuan that collapsed during an earthquake because it was poorly built. Most of the children and teachers were killed and the government covered it up and placed Ai Weiwei under arrest because he kept trying to bring it to people’s attention. So I actually think art “that has to be explained” is much more meaningful and important than something that is merely pretty.
What you said? Ditto for me, too.
See also http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Sculptor-Cornelia-Parker-s-multidimensional-2593159.php
It’s made from charcoal from burned churches (one lightning, one arson).
From your example, remove the story and you could find a similar pile on many a construction site. The story behind it has meaning, but why does that make the exhibit something else than a pile of rusty iron?
Just a made up example but if I draw a stick figure it’s just a crappy doodle, but if I say it actually represents how soon children are forced to loose their innocence in the modern world, oh and also I drew it with a pencil I got from Paris exactly one year before the Isis attacks – is it suddenly a masterpiece?
Sometimes the art is in the story behind it. Sometimes the art is in the possible story behind the image/sculpture. In a way, removing something from its context (e.g., a construction site) can lend “art” to something, because it can make you think of the emotional impact of the scrap heap by itself. Does it look lonely? Does it look like potential? Is it about to be made into a building? Is it from a torn down building? Are you the sort of person who sees the ghosts of all the workers who made that stuff in the first place? Do you see a (dangerous) playground with imaginary children? Would your cats play on it?
Sometimes the art is in “…that is one way-detailed sculpture of a scrap pile in bubblegum…” — which can totally be art. If, er, kind of… um… yeah. You can be impressed by the skill and WTH at the medium. 😉
I’ve seen some pretty terrible drawings, turned into posters and being sold for prices that make me go, “…my kid has made fridge art better than that.” But I guess it “spoke” to someone in Marketing, so they made prints. :/
I mostly don’t like a lot of more modern art, but every now and then, for some reason I just cannot explain, something will draw the eye.
The thing with “art” is that after you get past Skill In Making An Accurate Representation and/or Pleasing Composition, at least half of “art” is what the viewer brings to it. Do you like certain colors? Splat those on the canvas and there’s at least the color appreciation going for ya, while your buddy hates those colors and says it looks like a paint accident.
Is it “ahrt”? Dunno. How much did the viewer bring to it?
So abstract and non-referential art are now excluded from “art” by definition?
Please look through my offerings on my Zazzle store and tell me which ones you think count as “art” and which don’t: http://www.zazzle.com/ZeyovianPathways*
I don’t have any illusions about them being particularly SKILLED art, or particularly WORTHWHILE art, because I’m still learning the craft, but I put effort into the choice of colors and designs, and yet most of them don’t look like anything so by your definition it’s a store full of non-art… somehow.
That stuff is actually pretty nice, but yea wouldn’t really call them art, cause if a colorful bottle opener is art then my toothbrush is too.
Crafts maybe, is that a thing? Or like a graphic designer, you have to pay attention to color, layout and arrangements etc, and making a good and functional website takes skill and work, most probably wouldn’t consider a good website art either though.
Or you could take the view that everything is art but I feel that would take away the meaning of the word, saying I’m an artist wouldn’t mean anything if anyone is one.
I agree it’s not possible to draw the line 100% though, there will always be some subjectivity in it.
There’s a fair amount of art in how to craft a good-looking toothbrush. Or a pen, or many other things whose art we don’t really pay attention to — first you figure out a general shape, then give it a utility pass (how to make it feel good to hold in your hand), then a secondary look at overall aesthetics. Certainly an artist is involved in creating a specific look.
This debate is reminding me of the debate over the term “game.” Some people use the term to mean a wide variety of activities including wide-open sandbox programs where there’s no rules or goals to speak of, and of “explore to learn the story out of order” experiences such as Dear Esther.
I’m in the camp of those who use the term “game” to include such criteria as a ruleset without which the game could not exist (if there’s no way for people to call you a cheater (say you’re not playing the game “right”), then it’s not a game), a goal inherent to the game (not merely defined by the users), an uncertain outcome, and the fact that the enjoyment is intrinsic to the game itself rather than based on extrinsic rewards for playing.
But the real problem in “what is a game” debates are that people are using the term to mean different things, and then effectively arguing that the other person’s meaning doesn’t match their own meaning. It’s like arguing that “meat” (meaning flesh from an animal) and “meat” (meaning flesh from certain animals, not including fish) are somehow the same thing, and then debating whether fish is really “meat” or not.
So in this debate, I’m using “art” to mean a much wider set of things than you are. You seem to be defining it quite narrowly, something like “the things that by rights ought to be hung on the walls of a museum” or something. I’m defining it quite broadly, such that “arts and crafts” are a subset of “art,” and not all art is the type that deserves time being lauded by a museum exhibit.
A graphic designer is an artist. And while I agree with you that applying the term too broadly makes it meaningless, I’d say that everyone is capable of producing art but only those who focus on and develop that talent are “artists,” like the difference between a guy who throws a ball around with his kid and a guy who plays professional-league baseball.
Ooh, now I want some of your stuff. It’s so colorful!
I dunno, I like Andi’s bloody shoe art. It’s more interesting than some drab oil painting at least. It could be symbolic for a plethora of different things. I think a lot of people could relate to it or at the very least project their feelings onto it.
Also the only real qualification you need for art is for someone else to call it that or at the very least someone like it. One person might think a watercolor painting of sunflowers is pure genius and another might call it washed out uninspired trash.
That makes “art that nobody actually likes” and “art that nobody actually sees” both non-art. I don’t think that definition holds up either.
Is Selkie’s vomit-fish drawing not art until Todd likes it, or not art until she shows it to Todd?
“Art” is currency- something the market can slap an arbitrary value on. The only message any art conveys is the figure. And ’twas ever thus.
“Bad art is a distraction. GOOD ART changes people.”
The Selkie comic strip is good art. Regardless of market value.
You shot me down, Kilyle!
ART IS WHAT DAVE DOES.
But the “fine art” market is still an almighty con. Tom Keating Rules!
Oddly, the shoes appeal. I mean, it could be surrealistic horror — THE WALLS BLEED! It could be a statement of power — THESE HEELS WILL KILL YOU. It could be a statement of pain — these heels are killing (me). It could be frustration. It could be humor, like the posters a local store had of, e.g., a cut pineapple that was watermelon inside — you don’t think of heels dug into a “bleeding” wall, so there’s the surprise “world does not make sense for a moment” gotcha. It could be a complaint about menstruation, if you have cramps (trust me on this; that would be a mild representation of cramps…).
I don’t think I’d put them on my wall, but honestly, I’m going to go with Remi being squicked by the blood. Squeamish, bah.
That third thing. 😀
I enjoy your thinking and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
The problem with art is that there’s too much goddamn bandwagon jumping. Too much fancy trends like modernism and postmodernism and crappy ideals taking over everything. Can we have bloody shoe walls and a few nice landscapes in the same gallery? Can we have a bunch of Cambell’s Soup cans in the same building as the Mona Lisa? It seems not, and that’s what my problem with “modern art” is: the lack of VARIETY.
Everything has to be about “self-expression” of some “postmodern” idea. No impressionism allowed! No reverence allowed, only blasphemy! No modesty, only super-sexy everything! Nothing that isn’t trying to destroy every last trace of established culture! Include only everything which is radical and nothing which isn’t!
It’s all terribly narrow-minded.
Maybe it’s time for you to spend a while lost in TV Tropes? Because art isn’t built in a vacuum. People reacting to previous movements is a legitimate movement (deconstructionism, or trope subversion or deliberate aversion).
There’s probably a fair number of modern artists who are reconstructing the old stuff, and doing it better than some of the older artists because more time has been spent thinking over the old stuff and why and how it was done.
Again, Scott McCloud (in either Understanding Comics or Making Comics) goes into the four basic camps of art. There are people who use art to express the best and most beautiful and perfect that they can, and there are those who use it to express the gritty, realistic, imperfect mess that humanity goes through. There are people who use art merely as the medium whereby to tell a story, and there are those who use art to explore what art can do.
All four camps are useful.
I’m of the type trying to use art to tell a story, but also attempting to make something beautiful, lasting, and perfect, or as close as I can get. So I’m a Classicist/Traditionalist Animist. Someone like Will Eisner (“A Contract with God”) is an Iconoclast Animist, using art to tell a story but not shying from the uglier details or trying to make it come to any grand sense of closure or perfect justice. (Iconoclast, by the by, means breaking down the icons, or understood conventions, of the era they rise from.)
Iconoclast Formalists work within art to express what can be done with art, and that’s the kind of stuff a lot of people react negatively to, because they’re striking out against both the “beautiful perfection” school and the “actually tells a story” school.
And Traditionalist Formalists use art to express beauty and perfection apart from story. Here is where abstract and non-referential art sits, pushing the medium to its extremes in a way that’s still aesthetically pleasing. That’s the kind of stuff on my Zazzle store (Zeyovian Pathways), no story, just explorations of color and enjoyable combinations. And although my art is not yet that skilled, the style is no less worthy than the storytelling kind.
The true skill of art isn’t in painting or sculpting. It’s in the ability to craft a B.S. story behind it to invent a message. This is why the railroad tie rammed through a log at my undergrad university was art while the same tie in a scrap yard is just industrial waste.
I used to think modern art was mostly crap. Then I wandered into an installation by Robert Ryman, the “White on White” guy, and after half an hour of going “this is stupid” I started going “This is brilliant.”
So I promised myself that I would never criticize any piece of modern art that I hadn’t taken the time to understand. Since then, I’ve found that about 3/4 of the stuff I’ve really looked at is actually pretty good.
(Ryman had two pieces next to each other. One was a gray cardboard box with some slots cut in it – kind of ugly. The other was an architectural model, the same shape and size and features, painted white – quite attractive. I think of this as his tutorial piece. After that, I was able to see what he was doing in all his other pieces. Maybe you had to be there, but it worked for me.)
This is what I’ve learned to think about my dad’s criticisms of… well, a lot of stuff, really. He makes snap judgments about things he knows next to nothing about.
Over the years he’s delved into some of the things, such as TV shows, that he originally thought negatively of, and found something to like about them (even Buffy the Vampire Slayer), but I don’t think it’s made him any less likely to snap-judge stuff. But it’s a reminder to me that it’s easy to judge things you’ve never taken the time to understand. It’s very human.
Interesting discussion on art:) Art, in my opinion, is an open expression which others can experience in some form or fashion: poetry, painting, webcomics, a pile of rebar with special meaning, clay work, etc. It is the release of creative energies. You make something for the sake of expression and that to me is art. Can a serial killer’s work be considered art? To them, maybe, by definition, but most assuredly all forms mentioned above, whether they are “modern” or “classical” or my four-year-old’s doodles… It is art. That’s my take:) I personally enjoy writing more than anything but I also do papercrafts, watercolors, paint miniatures every now and then, do a little sculpting, and create stuffed animals for my kids:) It’s all art. And yay for art!
My son and I were having a discussion last night on how some words tend to carry an inherent meaning; a class of words where the word – by itself – usually implies a given adjective or state. When I want some other meaning, I do use extra words. When I say “I live in a house” (or apartment), y’all start to form an image. If I stop my description there, and then you come to visit, there are a whole bunch of houses where you’ll think nothing more of it, and then there are ones where the first response would be something like “well, you should have said xxxxx: this isn’t a normal house!”
I think ‘art’ is one of those words. To some people, to use the word at all means that the creation must live up to their implied adjective. Others let it be all encompassing. The “but is it art?” discussions are often driven by people with different implied adjectives.
My two-cents of something being ‘art’ – over just a painting or sculpture or pile of steel – has two facets:
– most people like it and see it as higher quality than what they could do
or
– if it’s in the realm of modern or avant-garde (where most viewers say, huh?) : if people who are similarly skilled in the medium independently come up with similar meanings,,
then I think it’s ‘art’. Otherwise, it’s just be a cool, attractive, pleasant sculpture/painting/etc.
The colloquial usage is just to double the word: “That’s art, but it’s not ART-art.”
Examples follow, though we could quibble over which ones would actually be used in speech (I’m more trying to convey the concept):
“An ostrich (or penguin) is a bird, but it’s not a BIRD-bird.”
“Swimming is exercise, but it’s not EXERCISE-exercise.”
“Fish is meat, but it’s not MEAT-meat.”
“Telling your kids that Santa’s watching them is a lie, but it’s not a LIE-lie.”
“A bard’s a spellcaster, but not a SPELLCASTER-spellcaster.”
“Yeah, it’s cold, but it’s not COLD-cold.”
“Sure, he’s tall, but I expected TALL-tall.”
“Well, it’s white, but not exactly WHITE-white.”
That sort of thing.
It’s sort of a form of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy, isn’t it? Or “Moving the Goalposts”? “It technically met my criteria, but it’s not exactly close to what I envision as the ideal category, so I’m gonna exclude it for that reason.”
As far as “most people like it”: I am going to flat-out deny attraction as a qualification of art. Of certain sets of GOOD or WORTHWHILE art, perhaps — we are meant to be attracted to that which edifies, which uplifts. There’s a whole set of criteria (pleasing forms) to which we’re inherently attracted to its perfections and largely repulsed by its opposites.
But saying, for example, that people’s like/dislike reaction to Van Gogh has any impact on his value as an artist is highly questionable. And the whole realm of modern art was an outcry against the idea that what is good art must necessarily be ATTRACTIVE art; trying to put it in two categories like that just muddies the issue.
In fact, C. S. Lewis posited that part of education is to train us to like things the things we should like and dislike the things we should dislike. In his mind, this quality was not inherent to humans, but needed to be trained into the young.
South Park covered much of the same ground when Mr. Slave pointed out that parents should be training their impressionable children to appreciate good role models and shun bad (slutty) ones.
And there’s an anecdote of a literature professor who gave a final exam with just two questions. First question: “Over the course of the semester, which book did you like the least?”
Second question: “To which defect in yourself do you attribute this lack of interest?”
My favorite example of the doubled word for understanding is “Do you want milk-milk or soy milk?”
This has been a fairly pointless comment…oh, well. I’ll just add that I’m really enjoying the discussion today.
Seeing “Dead Panda” as the gallery name made me thing of Allgood from “Endtown.”
http://45.media.tumblr.com/aa7cc8da65ef05a60e88dfc9cd6388d8/tumblr_nzhvb3RuIs1qkinreo1_500.gif
I’ve been kinda ruined for modern art ever since Beetlejuice. Those sculptures that came alive, so ridiculous. Not that I don’t like some modern art. I love Kevin Eslinger and some really great other artists. But this whole modern art genre, doesn’t really do anything for me. And that’s ok. Nothing is really for everyone.
The movie or the cartoon? I was meh about the movie but adored the cartoon. Used to get up at 5 AM just to be able to watch it before my dad left for work.
Then they switched it to a different channel and made it tamer and I lost all interest.
The movie, with Lydia’s mom. Her artwork always irritated me, though that was the point. Turned me off the genre however.
I kinda feel like the whole world is out to get Andi at this point. Even her art gets torn down. Like everyone just wants to hurt her or make fun of her. Even her friend here kinda does it by insinuating Andi is indeed just throwing a tantrum because of her mom. Or perhaps she’s more insulting Andi’s mom here, but to me it seems like she’s saying, “Yeah, that sounds like Andi. Mommy issues and throwing a fit.” here.
I have the sketches for my mini fan comic about halfway done. I’ll send them to you before I start coloring. Thanks for the post 🙂
Btw i’d actually like to see more art by Andi. I like the controversy it’s causing..haha!