Hip Hop Is Not Art

[Yelena]

"They are aware of and even try to appeal to young people as their target audeince. Tis a dangerous and boling solution created by the media made of both shockingly crude content AND a direct appeal to the most vulnerable and gullible audience, youth.That is marketing and corruption, not art" - thumbs up to dramasnot6!!!

[dramasnot6]

Thanks yelena!

[stlukesguild]

quoted: SheykAbdullah- Pornography is something whose primary intention is to titilate and arouse feelings in a sexual manner. Most of the works of Roccoco were intended as decorative cycles in boudoirs in order to titilate the viewer in a sexual way. That makes it pornography. Does that make it not art?


SLG- We merely dispute the terminology. What you call "pornography" I call eroticism. I certainly do not deny the erotic intent of such art.

As far as Il Sodoma there is no sexual intent there, as far as St Teresa in Ecstasy, while there is an element of sexual gratification in the piece that is not the purpose for which it is sculpted. That is the difference between it and most Boucher's work.

SLG- Personally, I find a good deal of eroticism and sado-masochistic eroticism within many of the numerous painted crucifixions and martyrdoms... something that the Japanese writer, Mishima tapped into:



Certainly, I have no doubt that religious images were seen by artists as just as much of a pretext to explore the subject which truly interested them... be it the human body, dramatic action, violence, etc...

The definition of pornography has not changed over time, but the threshold of what is pornography has changed and that is undoubtable. For example, Madam X by Sargent, the so oft mentioned by me Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, Olympia, and many others were considered pronographic due to the direct representation of the female nude outside of the established Academic conventions...

SLG- Perhaps we might suggest that what changed was not pornography... but the openess of fine art to appropriating imagery and themes that were once seen as taboo or simply beneath consideration. Sargent's Mme X
(Madame Pierre Gautreau) shocked largely due to the context. The Gautreau was a young American beauty who had married into wealth and was now seen as flaunting it in Paris. She had the audacity to be involved in a rather steamy and quite public affair with the womanizing Dr. Pozzi, also portrayed by Sargent at the same time in a devlish fiery red guise:



The Parisian public became scandalized by what they saw as the brazeness of this American upstart... especially when taken with the rather sensual nature of Sargent's painting of Gatreau:



L'Dejeuner sur l'herb and Olympia were similar transgressions. It was not so much the nudity as the contect. In the case of L'Dejeuner... Manet had thought to simply reimagine Titian's famous Fete Champetre (in the Louvre). Titian's painting essentially presented what, at the time, were two young men in contemporary dress accompanied by two nude women sitting outside. The act of updating it to contemporary Paris with the two men in the dress of modern Parisians sitting in a Paris park with their two naked female consorts shocked because it seemingly stripped away the perfume of history which made Titian's painting acceptable. Olympia shocked in a like manner as Manet recast Titian's Venus D'Urbino... a portrait of a Venetian courtesan and her maid as a modern Parisian whore who like Titian's Venus had the audacity to stare at the male viewer and not turn her eyes away to allow for the male voyeuristic gaze without confrontation. Context can certainly make a painting shocking or not. Most recently I think of a nude portrait done by Lucian Freud. This painting, like most of Freud's work, might be disturbing in the degree of unattractive realism with which he scruitinizes his models. When we discover that the model was his adult daughter, however, calling the work "Freudian"... Oedipal... takes on a whole new level.

[stlukesguild]

I would also remind you that my defintion of art is not '1990's' relativism, but is related directly the Warhol's idea of art and the idea of art that pushed forward the Pop movement.

Ahhh! Warhol. Then nothing more need be said.

[Yelena]

To me, nude doesn't always mean erotic or pornographic. People in the Roman Impire created a cult out of a naked, good looking and healthy body. I imagine that everyone has seen those statues of gods and just ordinary people, with no clothes on. Is that erotic or pornographic?

[stlukesguild]

...since you are so comfortable with elitism, let's set up an academy to dictate artistic tastes. If you are an artist and you don't meet the criteria you'll starve, never gaining noteriety, until a group of angry artists set up across the street and destroy your institution.

Certainly such an institution will never guarantee the quality of the art produced and certainly some artists will either starve... give up... or conform. But how is that different from the current system of capitalism? I have the same possibilities. I can conform to the demands of the market... or I can give up or starve. What is the difference if I starve for the lack of the support of a single rich patron, the support of the academy, or the recognition of the masses?

[dramasnot6]

To me, nude doesn't always mean erotic or pornographic. People in the Roman Impire created a cult out of a naked, good looking and healthy body. I imagine that everyone has seen those statues of gods and just ordinary people, with no clothes on. Is that erotic or pornographic?

Nudity is known to everyone, when portrayed artistically i do not consider it pornography. Nudity can have connotations and contexts of many kinds, perhaps it is considered more pornographic with a more sexually graphic context. There are some hip hop songs with a very graphic sexual description that i would consider a form of pornography and not art for that reason.

[stlukesguild]

It is inevitable, in my opinion, that a college education will begin to mean less as universities are democratized to accept nearly everyone, which is true. Anyone, regardless of how ill-prepared can go to college now somewhere if they can pay. I do not necesarily agree with this idea, and I think it is unfortunate.

The second thing is about lower levels of education, and much of the blame for ill-prepared college students rests here.

Actually, many education scholars believe the reverse is true. Because colleges, which unlike the public elementary and secondary schools, are a business and in business to make money (one needs only research the percentage of college deans and prseidents who have no education credentials), they have loosened their standards in order to bolster the student registration. This increased dramatically when colleges were faced with fewer students to choose from toward the end of the "baby boomer" generation. Once students have been accepted, grades are often relaxed or inflated as a means of maintaining (and not discouraging) students. If the standards at colleges remained challenging and large numbers of students began to be rejected the parents and the country as a whole would undoubtedly find the resolve to fix many of the problems with public education.

Speaking as something of an insider in public education I will tell you that there are several major problems with the public schools and teaching "critical thinking skills" has nothing to do with any of them.

1. Lack of proper funding. When one compares the budget for public education vs that of the military we immediately see where the priorities lie. Certainly not all schools are underfunded, but the funding is largely inequitable and maintains the cycles of poverty in poorer districts. As school funding is based upon property taxes, the wealthier suburbs fare far better. The teachers are better paid; the schools are properly supplied with needed materials, books, etc... In poorer rural and urban districts, the reality is 100 year old buildings that are collapsing, libraries with history books that speak of how "one day we will walk on the moon", classrooms overcrowded or held in broom closets and windowless basement storage rooms. Even those urban districts that recieve more dollars per student than the average are greatly struggling due to the fact that they must often deal with a far larger percentage of "special needs" children (due to alchohol fetal syndrome, malnutrition, and other effects of poverty), extreme discipline problems, major transportation issues, and students who lack the support of educated parents and who come to school lacking the skills of many of their more well-off peers.

2. Waste. Many large urban boards of education are populated by business figures with political aspirations. Such positions offer publicity at little expense for someone with aspirations to city council, mayor, state senate, governor, etc... In many cases, however, such administrators lack any concept of the realities of managing such institutions. There is rampant graft and nepotism. In my own school system hundreds of thousands of dollars (per school) were spent upon new windows which were never installed (they sit in storage) for buildings slated for demolition in one or two years. Nearly every other year millions are spent upon training teachers to impliment the latest curriculum and the latest teaching strategies passed down from college education researchers. Any one of these systems might have the chance of suceeding... but they are never stayed with long enough before the next educational novelty hits. Teachers are themselves often expected (forced by their circumstances) to spend hundreds if not thousands of their own dollars to purchase the supplies that are needed to teach which should be provided by the school boards. They are also expected to continually spend money on CEUs (continuing education units)... classes taught by first year Phds. who have no concept of reality in the schools. These classes are required by most states thanks to active lobbying by... you guessed it... the colleges for which these classes are great money-makers. They have almost no costs: a single classroom, un underpaid first year Phd. employed part-time without benefits, and a few xeroxes. A great way to subsidize the sports programs.

I could go on with any number of other problems: parents, lack of respect and discipline, violence, the adversarial position of teachers and administrators, the ridiculous unfunded No Child Left Behind mandate, the attempts to privitize education, etc... Teachers would love to be able to teach "critical thinking skills" and such "higher order thinking" as analysis, synthesis, comparison, etc... but these are dependent upon the students having learned and mastered certain basic "facts" ... which certain educational gurus starting in the 1960s have decided are irrelevant. How does a student analyze why Hitler invaded Austria when he or she doesn't know who Hitler was, what WWII was, where the city they live in is to be found on a world globe let alone where Austria is, or even what the word "invade" means?

My... haven't we gotten quite off the main topic?
And so I will gladly move further discussion in this area to another thread.

[jon1jt]

I JUST CREATED A NEW THREAD LOCATED IN GENERAL CHAT TITLED,

"THE CLASH OF CULTURES AND WHAT SHOULD BE DONE ABOUT IT?"

and i listed a bunch of thought-provoking questions that attempt to encapsulate some of the major themes here. i may have failed, but i tried! enjoy!

[SheykAbdullah]

Again I will respond in chunks, corresponding with the original posts.

Our definitions of pornography are indeed different. Like I said, I view anything created with the main purpose of titilation to be pornography. What you call erotic I call pornography. Now that doesn't mean I object to Boucher etc on a moral ground, I just call it pornography. One might say there is good or at least acceptable pornography and that pornography which shouldn't be tolerated (but not banned) by polite society.

We differ on our view of the sado-masochistic tendencies of certain religious tableaus, but that is our right. Often times in art, as I am sure you know, two different views simply can not be reconciled unless there is some example of proof aside form the painting to indicate the artists intent.

The change in the acceptability of pornography and eroticisms is what I have been saying all along. Things change with time and society rediefines certain aspects of its own culture.

[SheykAbdullah]

I don't like Warhol either, but the artistic elite generally accepts his vision as remarkable and revolutionary, changing what we view as art and allowing the emergence of post-modern definitions in art best defined in conceptualism, which I also don't like.

[SheykAbdullah]

Capitalism creates its own academy, that's true, but it is still looser than an academy of scholars dictating taste, and only theirs. In our market there is a chance a fringe movement will catch on with one collector and then be spread to others, but in an rigid academic setting vagrancies in art are squashed in the beginning.

I just want to reply to this in its original context, if for convenience of reference if nothing else. I will move my replies to a different thread. I agree with you comments on education one hundred percent. School boards like the easy way out and it is much simpler to plug in numbers to indicate successes vs failures. It's a shame.

[jon1jt]

throughout this thread and others during the time i advocated a position stating that censorship was a solution given the often vile content of rap music toward women and its glorification of drugs. most disagreed with my position.

i'm interested in what people have to say now, especially those who posted in here who made emphatic defenses against censorship, how they feel abot Don Imus being fired for making a couple distasteful (i.e. racist?) remarks given his intent.

Does the big network that fired Imus have the same responsibility to remove that sort of content from it's airwaves when it's made by rap music?

Imus' firing to me appears to be quite selective and grossly unfair if the same network not impose that standard universally---which is one of "content" not intention.

your thoughts, please.

[kilted exile]

I think this column by Jason Whitlock, in the Kansas City Star, on the subject makes for great reading on the subject

"I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?

When Imus does any of that, call me and I’ll get upset. Until then, he is what he is — a washed-up shock jock who is very easy to ignore when you’re not looking to be made a victim."

[jon1jt]

I think this column by Jason Whitlock, in the Kansas City Star, on the subject makes for great reading on the subject

that's a fantastic quote kilted!!! i thought i was the only person who felt that way for a second! thanks