I’ve never liked what is traditionally called “fine art.” I don’t like going to art museums. I don’t like looking at paintings or sculpture or anything like that. It’s boring.
Call me an uncultured swine if you want. I’m only being honest. I’m unsure why these ultra-expensive works of creativity (often stolen from conquered peoples and put on display by the conquerors) are considered “the finer things.”
To be fair, I appreciate the historical significance of certain works of art, and I appreciate the craftsmanship and dedication of a lot of artists, but on the whole, it doesn’t move or impress me as much as good, popular entertainment.
Debates about the merits of art vs entertainment have raged for a long time. Some art is entertaining (I particularly like Dada because it’s funny and makes fun of the idea of art) and some entertainment is considered artistic (a masterful comedy movie like Raising Arizona, for example).
Still, creating effective mass-market entertainment is more challenging than creating fine art. The craftsmanship involved is more exacting. In entertainment, there are genres and structures that serve as a complicated, unspoken language needed reach to people’s emotions. Certain buttons have to be pushed in a certain order to achieve the desired result. Very few have mastered this craft.
Anybody can make fine art. You just have to express yourself however you want. For some types of art, this barely involves any skill.
We’ve decided that entertainment for a mass audience, which is incredibly difficult to do well, is “low-brow.” And we’ve decided that fine art, which anybody can do if they just express themselves to a bunch of ascot-wearing snobs, is “high-brow.” Why? Serving a mass audience—communicating to and moving a lot more people—should be the higher calling.
Somehow the world got all topsy-turvy on this subject. We should switch it around.
It takes a specific kind of genius to create art like any early Marx Brothers movie, or Laurel and Hardy's "The Music Box." Or Chaplin's "One A.M." Last night I stumbled across "There's Something About Mary," which I hadn't seen in years, and laughed my head off. I always believed Jim Carrey deserved an Oscar for "Liar, Liar." I agree with you, making people laugh is high art. Anyone who doesn't realize that needs a squirt of seltzer down their pants.
But it does make for a good laugh when you go to an art museum and see a string dangling from another string that’s priced at four thousand dollars. And the gallery writeup beside the work infers you’re a dipshit if you didn’t get that it represents multidimensional intersections of chaos-non-chaos meaning disseminated through place space and time present and past issues we face today. I guess I’m picking on one type of (postmodern ?) art. I do like some high brow art. I just can’t stand when a lot of pomp seeps through the work or the admirers.