Hot take: artistic skill is not related to the ability to clearly and memorably express ideas through artworks, but instead the effectiveness by which one invites viewers to perceive meaning in artworks (which, being material, are inherently meaningless).
Consider The Matrix, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Lord of the Flies... all unambiguously pieces of Art, widely interpreted, whose dominant interpretation is not at all what the creators intended. (Throw in Fight Club and A Clockwork Orange too)
Now, a much hotter take I also have is that people don't really mean things either, so much as they have a particular interpretation they have developed through conversation with the world (including the whole history of art).
But I won't get into that because what people do is quite a bit closer to the general consensus idea of what 'meaning' is than what artifacts do.
I say this as somebody who has done of the most tellic kinds of art -- I've written programs to generate artworks based on a specific model, as experiments to determine whether that model is valuable for modeling likely audience reception. Empirical aesthetics.
But of course, I am in conversation with my experiments and their reception! Often something comes out working much better or much worse than I expected, either from my POV or from what other people have said. Or it works in an entirely different way. This inspires new works.
The pinnacle of artistic skill is to reliably make your audience have thoughts they have never had before while also making sure that those thoughts are maximally different from each other.
Thing is, most conceptual art just makes people mentally recite the essay about R. Mutt's 'Fountain' they had to write in middle school.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
