{"id":3211,"date":"2013-02-13T00:14:35","date_gmt":"2013-02-13T04:14:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arts.umich.edu\/ink\/?p=3211"},"modified":"2017-09-27T12:37:03","modified_gmt":"2017-09-27T16:37:03","slug":"the-stupid-question-of-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/2013\/02\/13\/the-stupid-question-of-art\/","title":{"rendered":"The Stupid Question of Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

This past weekend I visited both the International Erotic Art Exhibition (also called the DIRTY show) in Detroit and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD).\u00c2\u00a0 I feel as though I can say, pretty confidently, that the works exhibited at the MOCAD had a lot more artistic merit than the majority of those at the DIRTY, but regardless, both exhibits essentially posed the same question: what is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153art\u00e2\u20ac\u009d?<\/p>\n

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Admittedly, I think that is an extremely stupid, overly simplistic question.\u00c2\u00a0 There are a million different avenues you can take to answer it and the secret Marxist in me is hesitant to say that only highly educated art historians and critics have the ability to determine \u00e2\u20ac\u0153high art\u00e2\u20ac\u009d from \u00e2\u20ac\u0153low art\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (particularly considering they continually get it wrong; case in point: Bouguereau).\u00c2\u00a0 When doing research for my art history degree, sometimes I feel as <\/p>\n

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though art categorized as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153bad\u00e2\u20ac\u009d can be the most useful to me, because it tends to be overly reflective of a historical moment or culture and, in critical terms, too obvious.\u00c2\u00a0 Too many symbols, too many allegories, etc.<\/p>\n

In any case, the DIRTY show is more so asking the question of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What is porn\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and where the boundaries lie between art and porn.\u00c2\u00a0 About 90% of the works seemed like they were just going for shock value and didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seem to have a lot of technique or thought to them.\u00c2\u00a0 There were a lot of poorly shot photos of S&M.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the pretense of labeling these things \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Art\u00e2\u20ac\u009d that ruins them for me; ironically, I think I could find more artistic value in them if they would just become comfortable with the title of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Porn.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

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The MOCAD exhibits were a little more thought provoking.\u00c2\u00a0 I love contemporary art and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m intrigued by the fact that we are still in the process of sorting out its definition.\u00c2\u00a0 Many of the works made the same mistake as the DIRTY pieces, wherein they basically become a parody of themselves.\u00c2\u00a0 Contemporary art has no shortage of critics and caricatures. \u00c2\u00a0There was one installation in the MOCAD that was simply a banana peel on the ground; the group I was with debated about whether it was an actual piece of art or just a dropped piece of garbage for about 5 minutes.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe the actual \u00e2\u20ac\u0153art\u00e2\u20ac\u009d being made is just the provocation of the question about what \u00e2\u20ac\u0153art\u00e2\u20ac\u009d even means.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past weekend I visited both the International Erotic Art Exhibition (also called the DIRTY show) in Detroit and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD).\u00c2\u00a0 I feel as though I can say, pretty confidently, that the works exhibited at the MOCAD had a lot more artistic merit than the majority of those at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3211"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3211"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8444,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3211\/revisions\/8444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}