Be Excellent To Each Other

Well yes, against a backdrop of massively dwindling financial resources for ANY degree, 'good' or 'bad', bearing in mind that almost all degrees are still subsidised by said governmental dwindling pot.

Given this situation, it doesn't seem too outrageous to me to dare to suggest that, y'know, perhaps we should prioritise the availability of degrees that are actually so sorely needed by us as a country, where there is a high chance of employment, wealth creation or whatever. As opposed to funding and churning out yet more would-be poets, philosophers, composers and historians working in unrelated, menial jobs (if they're lucky) that they could've easily got without said degree, and furthermore would have got much better jobs if they'd used their intellectual horsepower (and our money) to learn something useful.

Apparently though, this makes me a philistine - well, so fucking be it, I say. Anyway, as I've said, just what is 'art' anyway? I know I get vastly more pleasure looking at a beautifully engineered and machined jet engine internals or racing motorcycle engine than ever I would ANY art - most especially the UTTER SHITE that passes for 'art' these days, at great public expense. Basically, I think people who say almost any modern art in particular is anything other than pretentious, useless, meaningless and valueless shite, is a wanker.

Well, that respect that you'd managed to regain has just utterly dripped away you fucking cretin. I love it when people show their true colours.

Oooh, I've been handbagged!

So, my 'true colours' = I think modern art is pretentious, over-rated crap, the very epitome of 'the Emperor's clothes'...? I hardly think I've ever argued otherwise, so apologies if you've only just now worked that one out.

Yeah, but "I don't like X at all" is a bit different from "I don't like X at all, and if you do you're a wanker".

Now now, boys.
DavPaz - why don't you post some examples of why Cavey is wrong?

You guys and your artistic temperaments!

Where's the ?

I must confess that I also don't "get" modern art, or whatever it should be called (I wouldn't go so far to think of people that do as wankers, however)*. I mean - what's so special about this piece, for example:



*It might make me question their judgement somewhat, though

Well to be fair Squirt, people have felt no compunction about freely calling me a philistine or devotee of some '1984 State', just because I happen to believe we should prioritise useful, practical, required degrees, especially given the de facto rationing situation, worries about access for poor kids and the fact that almost all degrees are subsidised by everyone else. Not to mention the great swathes of young people with the 'wrong' degrees who cannot get past McDonalds in the career ladder, which is a great tragedy for them and the rest of us. Etc. Not that I'm even bothered anyway - I like a good, robust debate and don't actually mind being called a philistine anyway! But that being the case, I'll be just as forthright and robust myself.

Being called a 'fucking cretin' for thinking most modern art is pretentious shite is a bit much though, but hey. I actually chuckled when I saw Davpaz' post and don't have any bad feelings towards him. Maybe I am being a twat, who knows.

I did reference Dadaism earlier in the thread and the hugely detrimental effect it had on art in the 20th century. But I have no intention of arguing with that smug twat with his broad strokes and hugely offensive style of conducting himself. He thinks he's a fucking prince, well he can have his castle. He's welcome to it.

Actually it's not a castle, but is Grade II Listed.

Hahahaha!

I'd just argue that, for instance, English Lit is useful and practical, as can any humanities degree. The lovely Mrs Squirt has English and Politics, and the skills she'd learnt on that course have been of great help to her in her career, probably more so than the Maths and Comp Sci degree that I did. I'd be more in agreement with getting people on to the right sort of courses for their abilities and future plans rather than sending them to uni no matter what, rather than discounting humanities.

I've seen that one, too.

And I agree. What's her career, though? Mrs Grim... is the first to admit that her (hnngh) Theatre Studies degree has absolutely zero value in the real world, but fortunately her masters in Social Work does

The skills I learnt on my PhD (analysis, scientific approach, pulling data out of noise, presenting complicated results, writing reports) have been far, far more useful to me in my career than the knowledge gained during both of my degrees put together. Even though they were computer science degrees and I'm a software engineer.

Good luck doing that around here.

Hmm, I guess you need to see how Rothco came to paint this way towards the end of his career to get what he's trying to achieve. It's a distillation of his previous stuff really. Breaking things down to simple forms and trying to evoke feeling through colour. Need to be seen in the flesh to appreciate the texture and feel as some of these were fackin huuuuuge.

Yeah, but - $157 million?

Tell you what I did see and didn't like - the Mona Lisa. After seeing all the things the Louvre has to offer, it was a bit small and unexciting in comparison.

I did email that to my dad earlier. He has post-doctoral qualifications in engineering and has been involved in some well-known things. He possibly out-sciences R. Gaywood too. He agrees with DavPaz.

Also, having studied economics myself, I can tell you that both developing and developed economies need diversity to function, grown and sustain themselves. An economy built on just the sciences and engineering is as functional as a human body with just a heart and no other internal organs, and will survive for just as long.


1.) The Nordic model is genuinely more efficient than its Anglo-Saxon detractors let on, and the Finns have one of the world's best primary and secondary educational systems to provide their youngsters with a decent preparation for university study. 2.) British governments following ideological doctrine over pragmatism, as they have for the last umpteenth decades.


I don't "get" maths, and didn't even manage to get a GCSE in the subject. Doesn't mean that mathematics has no use.

Ah. Ahhh! I assume that's what someone paid for it at auction? If so, what does that have to do with anything?

I've never seen the Mona Lisa, but I've seen a 200-ish year old exact copy painted from life. Apparently, as the paint then was better than da Vinci used, and the Mona Lisa has degraded a fair bit since then, it now looks more like the Mona Lisa than the actual Mona Lisa does.

It's pretty small and boring, innit? And the way it's displayed in the Louvre looks horrid from seeing it on the TV.

Soviet Russia does spring to mind as a good example of this.

Didn't it have ZOMG CLUEZ in it for you to track down TEH HOLEY GRAILS?

I'd be disappointed too.

What's money got to do with it? I thought you were appraising the work, not why conservative wankers* invest in them.


Bitch does fuck all for me too bruv.

*

It's quite a good judge of how much two people like it.

Zardoz has it. The key word is invest. The only reason that painting is worth $157mill is because the people bidding on it believe it'll be worth more in the future. To conflate this with some sort of reflection of its artistic, rather than materialistic, value is Daily Mail ish wooly thinking, particularly if you then proceed to present this as evidence that modern art is stupid.

What's the betting it will be stored in some super climate-controlled vault underground and never, ever looked at?

High. But actually, it doesn't matter, because (as long as it's looked after), looking at it doesn't decrease the value. Why do you think so many museums display pieces on loan from such-and-such's collection?

Yo Grim...

Rothco > Meatloaf

Good job no-one did that then, eh? Glad to see the data-sifting is going so well.


I'm going to go with "high".

Hang on, the division between "maths" and "art" is merely a cultural construct, isn't it? One so heavily engrained into us that it is hard to question.

(Man, perhaps we wouldn't be having such a volcanic arts versus science discussion if we had the benefit of a more diverse education system like many of our other European cousins have. Having to chose almost exclusively between humanities/arts and the sciences at age 16 is narrows our learning possibilities far too early.)

Heh.

547 bananas

Not in a fight.

My German teacher served Meat Loaf some food once, when she was waitressing as a student.

Well to be fair, I was only talking about artistic value; I never mentioned money. That said, Grim... certainly has a point. You can say that 'value' is only what someone is prepared to pay, but it's not as simple as that. It's quite valid to also benchmark this supposed 'value' against whatever else one could buy for $160 million as well.

If you do that, the true scale of the absurdity of the situation surely becomes clear. In fact, it's obscene. Clearly, anyone who's prepared to pay the equivalent of 150+ fine country houses for something that looks like a reproduction of a very distastefully painted front door, according to a 10 year old, needs their head examining?

Not if they sell it for the equivalent of 190+ country houses.

Having spent none of the fees owning 150 country houses would entail.

Well yeah, but what I'm arguing is that there is, or should be at least some relative correlation between market value and 'actual, intrinsic merit'? I know that's very difficult with works of art, so, my approach is to compare with other stuff of the same market value.

Back in the dotcom boom, people were prepared to pay vast sums for tech shares, even when these clearly had little or no intrinsic value. Sure enough, when the bubble burst, these shares did revert to being valueless, unlike stuff with actual, demonstrable material value, country houses for instance.

When the apparent 'value' of something is as abstract as 'what someone with money dropping out of their arse is prepared to pay, purely as an investment and with no material purpose', I would question this as a sole yardstick of measuring real value at all.

I dunno, could be on a sticky wicket here. Bottom line, I just find it ludicrous how anyone can say this is worth hundreds of millions of dollars - it's obviously shit, isn't it...?

How much has your house gone up in value over the last ten years?

So's that car park in Get Carter...

Quite a lot.
But then, a house has demonstrable value - it has a useful, universal purpose, it comprises of real bricks and mortar (well, bricks, timbers, horse hair, wattle and daub in my case), it occupies prime land. There is an intrinsic value. There's also supply and demand for good housing that's in short supply, etc.

I'm sure you'll prove me wrong here, but I wasn't aware of any mass market desire for Year 5 primary student impressionist paintings of dolls house front doors costing hundreds of millions of pounds.

Meh. Well, at least my windows are all good.

There's no mass market for houses in the 1,000,000 plus bracket either.

A painting has demonstrable value if there is a market for it. There is a big, and growing, investment market for art. Not least as it's less susceptible to the vagaries of shares and commodities.

Fair enough, but without setting up a Committee of Eminent Artistic Worthies to pass judgement on every single piece of art, I can't really think of any other way. People are willing to pay that, therefore it's worth that.

Or are you suggesting we abandon the free market and instigate price controls on everything, you lefty commie you?

Intrinsic value that hasn't changed, though. It had all of that stuff ten years ago. The views haven't changed, the walls haven't changed, the land is in the same place, but with no changes at all to the house's circumstances it could easily be valued 3x-4x-5x more than it was in 2000[1]. This is because the valuation is largely disconnected from the intrinsic value. The value attached to a painting is no different; it is, in the main, predicated on an expectation of future value, and not on utility value of the object itself.

[1] it's possible you've made modifications that have added value; for the puposes of my debate, let's imagine you've done nothing but routine maintenance. I think we can agree that it would still be worth far more now than then, right?

I'm no fan of modern art, one of the major problems I have with the way the Tate is being run is that Tate Britain has over 50 thousand pieces of art, either on loan or donated, which is in storage - this includes a large quantity of Landseers who happens to be one of my favorite artists, and yet the Tate modern is allowed to show insanely large installation pieces that can take up a whole room on their own.

It's more of a mass market than for paintings of the same, or indeed hundreds of times greater supposed value, that's for sure.



That's your view, I don't think it's as simple as that. I can only refer you to my earlier posts about the dotcom share craze, 'intrinsic value' and all the rest.

I wonder how much awesome there is in the archives that I have never seen. Or even, whole generations.

Same with any unique pieces of art, then.

Only one of its kind + lots of people would like it = high value

Clever money people are saying that you're better off buying a classic car than having savings, as the value of the car rises faster.
I know this because one of the cars the recommend is a Series 1 Land Rover, so it was in my magazine.