happens all the time. Look at little league sports, beauty bs, etc., etc.

It is always a double edged sword. On one hand, kids are pushed too hard, on the other hand they learn and hone their skills at an early age and could be the next Tiger Woods.

holz
I saw it and had the same reaction as you. You could tell when mom was saying they just wanted to do what was best for their daughter that she knew they were doing the opposite.
(I wonder of the couple that were so proud to hang a painting with their Picasso feel like fools?)

I didn't see it; my husband did.

Here's the thing: You can make a lot of money on people, but if there's no intent, it's not capital A art.

<...ducks and runs away (giggling)....>

Somewhere Cy Twombly is chuckling silently to himself...

trace,

There is a difference between dad pushing jimmy to be a good baseball palyer, and dad stepping up to the plate and belting out a homerun for jimmy, then selling the homerun ball for $25,000

i'm with lb. there's no intentionality in what this little girl is doing and no content that's being communicated. abstraction presumably means you're communicating an abstract version or impression of something else. you're after something, some intention or idea or way of conceptualizing...but something.

what she's latched onto is a technique, a technical ability to do something more advanced than finger-painting. impressive, but, no, not capital-a art.

now, if she could paint accurate figural pieces and THEN give an abstract version so you could get a sense of her interpretive ability....

i guess i could have just left it at 'i'm with lb.'

I struggle a bit with the intentionality argument.
If the viewers interpretation differs from the artists intention does the artwork fail? Does the artist fail?
If the viewer interprets something in a composition created without intention - is the viewer wrong?

(BTW - In my opinion the girl was exploited. I'm not trying to argue weather ot not her work is Art or art or whatever else.)

Intention means squat. I just had a discussion with my sculpture professor who does lots of work starting out with absolutely no intention and he lets the piece come together through the process...so, not everyone approaches making art in the same way...unless you want to accuse him of not making art...which the school, his clients, and others within the art world would gladly disagree with.

The girls work can be art...but it doesn't make it any good.

I love some of Twombly's work by the way :)

to cross-pollinate two threads, i'd posit that your sculptor, jason, has some 'vision' or something he's going after in his work - either of which could be part of what i think of as intention. otherwise it would just be technical prowess.

(lb and i have seen lots of high school kids with great technical skills but no idea what to do with them.)

most people would nt know art if it bit them in the ass.

^ Yes that, and a work's ability to sell (even for big $$$) is in no way directly related to it being good art or not.

And I'd agree with Steven Ward, intention is crucial but shouldn't be confused with forethought. Intention can emerge through the artist's work. An architect doesn't necessarily know where his/her work is progressing towards as he/she begins a project, but it's their responsibility to adopt a self-critical attitude that focuses their efforts and eventually (hopefully) congeals into intentionality. In the same way, a sculptor, painter, etc. doesn’t necessarily have to know where their work is headed when they begin, but hopefully they at least know some of the questions it raises by the time they finish.

But then again I haven't seen the film so I'm just commenting in the discussion, not the girl’s work.

no intention is intention. sorry...

So for your professor, jason, process is intention. And I like citrus' use of "self-criticism", which your professor is also using. Honeslty, he can't not be.

Four year olds don't have process OR self-criticism, and I say this as the mom of one who does totally amazing drawings - but they're not art. Art is totally self-conscious.

You are probably right in regards to my professor...but I would still argue that one does not need an artist with intent for there to be art. I see art everywhere...where no one has consciously engaged a medium to express...like say a crack in the sidewalk where a flower is growing or some incident like the floating plastic bag in American beauty...what is the intent...air?

Art is what moves you...a person can see art in anything and if to them it is, then it is. I am all for the most liberal definitions of art as I find it ignorant to define and wrap all expressions with the sentiments of what is and is not Art. Heck, Rice doesn't have screenprinting classes because it is NOT an art by their definition...which I find absolutely laughable...same with graphic design...which, again, is a joke.

So, I am of the camp that calls almost anything and everything, art. And , yes, a painting by a four year old would be included...I actually find it condescending to assume that what they are doing is not...but, reasonable people can disagree :)

anything can be art and anything can not be art. remove certain works of art from a museum and they are no longer art. put non art in a museum and it can become art. this would have been a discussion worth having at the odeon in 1917.

art is not only experienced in a museum...that is just silly.

A 'Kid' is a baby goat.

Its wrong to call you children goats.

unless they are of course...mine is more of a monkey.

interesting. i think it's worse that he uses his kid to make a point than anything else. she's barely old enough to talk.

we don't need to go back into this discussion of what is and is not art. marcel duchamp is loooong dead.

BEAUTY LIES IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER.

agreed le boss...I do agree the father is a tool and using/exploiting his kid much more than he is giving her a creative outlet.

Funny, jason, I was all set to disagree with you on the term "art". But then I realized what I might call that floating bag in American Beauty is "poetry". But then I figure the poets would get mad at me!

That said, I do still disagree with you, on a vocabulary level. It's all words but as a graduate of an art school and spouse of an artist I do feel the need to define things. I can't equate an intentional and successful effort by someone to move my soul with a happenstance event that DOES move my soul. I could call the latter joy, and I admit that I find joy more often in happenstance than in art. In art, there is something about the effort of another human that I, as a human, recognize - that shared recognition might be why something is art, not just beauty.

Michael Benedikt would say that the crack in the sidewalk/blowing bag is a "direct aesthetic experience of the real". It's not a framed experience. Art is, in my opinion, always a framed experience. So is architecture.....mostly.

that's not what i said, but if you were to take say carl andre's 110 bricks out of the museum then well you have 110 bricks.

"direct aesthetic experience of the real"

yeah, I don't need to get overly academic with my experiences and how I define them. It's just semantic game playing. To me, the quoted above is just another way to say it is art...or poetry if you will, but poetry is also art...see, nothing is one word alone in a vacuum to be sliced and diced. It is all of them, it is the perspective from which the individual wants to digest it.

I would argue architecture also creates a space around it, the opposite of the frame, the idea only being the digestion of what is within the frame...and as each is added so is the space outside of the frames...so, we just chose to see the world from a different place...

although to contradict my previous statement i would go so far as to say that it is art, although it is the father who is the artist and not the daughter, who is merely a tool.

was the father who had an incest relationship with daughter in austrian basement an arttist?...or just a disgruntled thesis student?

i feel like it's art when ever it falls into the interstitials spaces of culture...assuming it doesn't land one in jail...then it's just too fucked up...the true measure of an artist is doing whatever he wants without literally being punished by the culture he operates, er, lives in

Not that I would know anything about that...nothing at all

Time for some laundry as ironing board is my mistress tonight!

So if a great artist in any medium can't describe their work with some psuedo intellectual bullshit then it isn't art? What about a jazz musician improvising, the whole point is to express your musical thoughts freely as they happen. Why can't this be the same in painting or architecture or dancing or whatever.

Journalists and academics want people to believe they can control what is defined as art by the words that are used to descrbe it. What has happened is that non-verbal expression suffers. I seem to remember alot of these ludicrous discussions in school. Just because someone doesn't have a "gift for gab" doesn't mean they don't have a gift.

i think lb would agree with you, jsbach, but i don't believe you've read what she wrote clearly enough.

b.s. and intention are often different. the improvising musician is similar to jason's sculpture professor, coming from a place of experience in which intention becomes part of a process.

i'll still agree that this girl is probably better at fingerpainting than my three yr old, but that neither girl's work is 'art'. it's activity.

Activity is exactly what a child produces. I don't think there is a hard and fast age at which expresison becomes meaningful, but I am certain that single-digit age groups aren't there yet.

Of course I also think a lot of what adults call art is just activity, too - and I mostly call it "bad art". So call me elitist because I believe that quality exists and that we as thinking beings can ascribe that jusdgement to objects.

I guess I just disagree about some of the grey areas between what is art and what is activity. Some people (children included) have an inherent talent to produce aesthetically pleasing things (painting, drawing, sculpture, music, dance and so forth). To say it's not artistic till someone hits a double digit age is a shakey arguement. Just because a child, or anyone for that matter, can't explain why they like what they produce doesn't mean it isn't art. It's a matter of degree, as a child gets older they may begin to understand why they do what they do, but the initial spark and judgement is already there.

if its aesthetically pleasing, it probably ain't art...

The other day on ArtWanted I got another positive critic --- this guy said " Per you are an awesome muralist! " . Now I didn't know what muralist is for an animal , I know now , but when you guy's discuss academics it work exactly with arts as with architecture ; you expect something you allready has an image of, and when it's not as you would emagine, then it's not architecture even not art. --- Isn't this the fact ?

I do has some experience you know ; I put all the "academics" where it belong, that's in the technique and method and uses only academics to qustion myself if I deliver what I learned to expect, or if there realy are newthinking , innovation or muscle in it ; if my pictures realy contribuate if my methods realy are using the computer to install a new architecture , an archtecture not based on the image of what you would expect , as there the greatest critics about 3dh has been ; it was not what we xpectet so it's wrong , even no one know what future would bring.

Fuck academics ; allow me to enjoy the instant reflection from people passing my galleri , let the local people decide what is good and what is boring --- what is the need for the frase "Art" , if Art has evolved pass the emagination of ordernary people and only speak to other artists or academics -- exacty as how academics care a shit about structure, and express only their oppinion about the clotches - The instant impression, if this architecture looks as the image, they has about how technology .will change architecture, even they don't has a clue..

^
"Fuck academics ; allow me to enjoy the instant reflection from people passing my galleri"

If someone can't explain why they like/don't like what they themselves produce, I'd say it's exactly not art.

I'm tired of this conversation; we've had it on archinect many times. it doesn't matter what one's definition of art is unless one is interested in the art market. I am, most people aren't; most people are interested in what they think is pretty.

IMO what the parents and gallery owner are doing in the film "my kid could paint that" is exploitation; even though I haven't seen the film, I've read a lot about it and discussed with a lot of people in the art world. And in any case, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that a 4yo with "gallery representation" is being exploited by an adult somewhere along the way.

lb,
the exploitation was sickening.

the two exploiters (that went to high school togethor and were living in a struggling factory town) are a "starving" artist w/ a gallery and the other a wannabe artist.

it isn't a far reach for them to decide that a 4 yo staged prodigy with the right press and representation can make a boatload of money.

they easily pulled in a few hundred thousand on that scam.