What Is Abstract Art? 

Glad you liked it and thanks for the comment!

So instrumental music?

It's what you feel when you listen/see

Its more like free jazz if we are talking about a comparison with music.

@@123agidee_2 No not really. Most abstract art, at least on on a more competent level, has underlying structure. I don't even think instrumental music is a good comparison. Do words in music symbolize a subject in art? The subject of an abstract painting is sometimes formal, sometimes not, but always contains one.

Like jazz or hard bop jazz

Going to be taking a look at her stuff in the near future, they're amazing

@@theartshole311 Thanks a lot! Please keep posting content, it is hard to find good, useful art related videos in you tube nowadays 🎨

Read about her recently

YT just pushed you up in my face and I LOVE your content. Binge watching ev-er-y-thiiiiiiiiiiiiing!

Hopefully here on this channel once I get around to it. The book The Cultural Cold War by Francis Stoner Saunders is a good resource if you want to read up on it in the meantime

Thanks for your kind words! I'll keep it up if people enjoy it, more new videos are coming soon

Ha, it was a very Avant garde move of mine to make a channel based entirely around a word I apparently can't pronounce

Travel around the British Isles and Ireland, and you see a lot of ‘vowel switching’ going on. There’s a great RU-vid vid where a voice actor demonstrates this, fascinating stuff. In the same way the artist employs tonal variation, so does the voice across geographical distance. Irish accent = always a beautiful thing 😎🥰🍀

Are you mad bro art is called art

@@sarikajain159 yeah but it's pronounced ART, not ART

it sounds like "err" at the beginning that's all

Thanks! Videos on minimalism and the more out there modernists are coming, though I'll be covering a bunch of other stuff in the meantime(including Kandinsky in more depth) in order to present the fullest case possible for its value

thank you for your criticism, I'm still figuring out the best way to go about making these videos and every bit of feedback helps. As you are someone who is interested in art education I find your comment very helpful. firstly I understand that I simplified the various nuances of abstraction in this video. I wanted to make something that would serve as a basic overview of the ideas and reasoning behind abstraction. as you said kandinsky, pollock etc can be considered to not fall under this general banner but in terms of public perception their works are often considered somewhat emblematic of abstraction itself. they are recognisable as being examples of abstract art to the public which is why I used them. I focused in on those as a way of making what I was talking about clear to an audience that may have little to no conception of these ideas beyond the fact that abstract painting exists. I also attempted to show the wide variety of possibilities for how abstraction can be handled and implemented as I touched on the various methods that could be employed in the process. it was not my intention to simply write it off as embellishing reality and simplify these works. it was also not my intention to misconstrue the information or make it seem like abstraction is more or less than what it is. it was simply an attempt to see if I could convey some simple and relatable concepts in a way that people with little or no art background will be able to approach. if I had gone into the details of every little bit of abstraction here the video would be ten hours long and I'd never finish writing it. I hope that in my efforts I have not muddled or mangled the information too much. I'm finding that the format of making videos is changing my writing style as I adapt to fit a different medium. As a result I fear that I may misconstrue or omit information without realising while I get used to what works for recording and editing. I will try harder in the future to make videos that are both concise and understandable while also not misconstruing the topic at hand. as I said this video was intended to be a very simple overview, i find with a lot of topics in art there is a knowledge barrier to entry which I am trying to minimalise by keeping things simple. I will be making more videos on these topics in the future and I hope to explore the depths of the work produced by the various artists you mentioned. secondly the stick figure. idle hands are the devils plaything as they say. I like the painting and while editing wanted to see if I could alter the image somehow. the idea that occured to me was to draw something deliberately crude with the mouse, the kind of thing a child or teen may doodle on a wall or the back of a notebook. with my awful sense of humour the juxtaposition of the austere gentlemen in the painting with the cruidity of the stick figure tickled my funny bone. in retrospect considering what I was talking about it may have come across in a way that I didn't intend. it had nothing to do with the video and is just a case of playing around with new tools. I am not very good with computers in general and I'm learning what I can do as I go. it had no other meaning beyond being a crude joke unfortunately. if it is offensive or distracting, or makes the video harder to understand I would have no problem removing it. I guess. wasn't something I considered to deeply to be honest. I want these videos to be relatively informal rather than being austere and purely pedagogical. I would like them to be a bit more human and hopefully relatable overall. Thanks again for your comment, I would be very interested to hear if you have any more advice which will help me hammer these videos into a more useful shape. I'm only learning how to go about doing this and it all helps a lot.

Wait ... starry night is abstract? I thought it was Impressionism.. 😫😫

Wow! I'm someone who has studied art seriously and I'm extremely surprised to find here just how differently from me people understand the term abstract. In understanding it, I always thought back to English lessons at school when we were taught that there are concrete nouns like 'vase' and 'group,' and there were abstract nouns like 'love' and 'principle.' So for me, when it came to art, there was figurative art, which depicted concrete things, and abstract art, which did not. People do, however, talk about concrete things in figurative art being abstracted when they are depicted less naturalistically.

@@waynekasmar4401 Thanks, that's how I understood Abstract Art too!

Thank you, that's a very good point that I admit I had not considered, in future I'll try to make sure the language is more easy to follow.

My pleasure!

Thanks glad it helped

Thank you! Will do!

WTF

Thank you, glad to hear it is useful!

The rules of Abstraction is a great series, if you're looking for other good ones Shock of the new by Robert Hughes and Way of Seeing by John Berger are worth a look too. As for identifying with art and pure form, I do think you're on to something. In general people will find it much easier to identify with something recognizable than an abstract concept. I think of it in regard to music, almost anyone can enjoy a simple pop song, but to those whose ear is more developed more formal complexity may be required.

@@theartshole311Completely agree with u regarding music. Even in India we have classical Indian music which really revolves around notes and melody and rhythm and "raagas'. And you have songs, a whole range of songs, semi-classical (quintessentially Indian genre - a derivative form of Hindustani classical music but blended with more flexible and popular elements of love poetry, folks music, etc ) , spiritual, nationalistic, political, resistance, romantic, pop, filmi (songs used in Bollywood fllms) and so on - and unless u have a trained ear, u generally can not fully appreciate Indian classical music. The songs, on the other hand, with their lyrics - be it some deep philosophical poetry or resistance poetry or run-of-mill love-song lyrics - are more understandable to novices. It is as if the words make the emotions, expressed by them (i.e. the lyrics) and the melody combined, more identifiable... May be the figures and shapes of nature and expressions on faces in paintings work in the same way.

@@theartshole311 I'l add an anecdote: So, we had a chapter on European Renaissance in our 7th grade (std 7 / class 7) history text book. Just very basic stuff. And it was a regular textbook, non-glossy pages, longish medium sized. For whatever reason the writer or publisher had included 4-5 full page pics of some Renaissance art - there was creation of Adam, one of Raphael's Madonna, the Last Supper, Michelangelo's Pieta, and perhaps a couple I am forgetting. I didn't know anything about art - well except mandatory school drawing. Nor was I steeped in catholic or christian culture. (I did study in a Catholic school, but it wasn't really a strongly catholic catholic school, especially for non-christian students - we didn't have to learn Catholicism or have bible-study, or attend mass, or anything like that). Yet, somehow I just was so overwhelmed by that non-glossy text-book size print of The Pieta I used to look at it for several minutes and often for quite some time. there was just something in the expression of the bereaved mother that was so sad and so beautiful that my 13 year old self was drawn to it repeatedly. And I did something that I have never done in my life before or since - next year a junior schoolmate wanted me to give her my textbook so she could use it, and I carefully cut off the page with the pictures (fortunately they were pages with pics on both side s, so there was no loss of study material) and kept them in this desk drawer I had at home, and for many years I used to take out the Pieta page and look at it. Much later I learnt to notice the other technical finesse and features of the sculpture, but the first thing that just had this spontaneous yet very long-lasting appeal was something in that expression that made me feel something very powerful... I still have those pages. Although now u get to see stuff on your mobile and laptop and don't need to take out torn-off textbook pages kept carefully in drawers... Anyway, just wanted to share this since we were talking about identification that arouses emotion in viewers.

@@theartshole311 Thanks a ton for the suggestions. I have watched ways of Seeing, found it immensely interesting and intriguing and stimulating. Re-watching it now. Will be watching The Shock of the New after re-watching Berger. Thanks a ton.

Thanks for sharing that anecdote, I know what you mean when an image resonates with you like that. The Pieta is a very striking work alright, I find it interesting that even without the catholic background it still resonates in such a universal manner. Modern art tends to move away from such religious imagery as its symbology is less well understood outside of historically catholic/christian cultures, yet some works like the Pieta seem to overcome this. I also sympathize with wanting to keep the picture! I must have drawers full of images I hold onto for drawing reference or just because something in it speaks to me

Thanks!

It doesn't sound like he had a great grasp on what abstract art is. It was still fairly new during his time. I could quote many famous representational artists who understand it much better.

A lot of modern art is essentially graphic design

So i can draw or paint whatever i want in abstract art?

@@therealmate1767 basically. It could be anything. It's very subjective art. It could have a meaning or not.

Your making the assumption AS IF its objective that people should know what they are painting therefore it should be representational and clear to everyone...BUT that's just a subjective opinion and one of taste and not definition...That wouldn't explain at all how a painter like Gerhard Richter can paint people and landscapes and such, realistically as well as choose to paint abstraction ..Are Richter's abstractions just paintings he is "doing for himself" yet remain some of his most popular and talked about works? It seems clear in this instance that his and other abstract painter's works are accessible to more then just the painter's that make them? ...Where you are going wrong here is in again in the suggestion that the subject matter be clear to everyone what it is...the subject matter of abstraction very often are new objects never before seen and its best to keep that under consideration when critiquing a whole mode of painting...People that appreciate abstraction like myself realize these issues and they offer no impediment to the enjoyment of abstract art itself.

@@HANECart1960 You say that under the assumption that the painters are painting for anyone at all and that there is a "Gerhard Ricter".

@@iamasalad9080 Thnx Buddha..

I like a lot of abstract art but i think it led in a lot of charlatans through hack critics like clement greenberg who promoted foolish trendy nonsense like flatness

You're welcome!

I know, right?! What a cliffhanger! Makes me want to see the sequel. Maybe he’s referencing Nazi Germany’s squashing of abstract art? But then again, he refers to America - so maybe it’s Warhol who killed abstraction? So many questions!

Sorry, I probably got a bit carried away putting that bit at the end without fully explaining what I meant! I was referring to what happened after the second world war when the US began championing abstract art in opposition to the Soviet realism of the USSR as a part of Cold war politics. Its a very interesting part of art history that I'll finally get around to covering later this year when we get to abstract expressionism. Apologies for being unclear!

Thanks, I will be back, I have no PC right now, once I sort that I'll have more videos coming soon

Thanks!

She may well be, she's one that I intend to do a video about at some stage. The subject of first abstract painter is something of a chicken and egg question too, shes a good candidate but I bet you could go back further and find other examples too

That's from Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights

Rothko? Are you ____ing nuts? He's the nadir of relying on apophenia to seem profound. Im hoping your message is supposed to be dry trolling

@@greghuffman3061 I mentioned a number of very good artists besides Rothko. If asked to rank them, I would place the other five above him as for composition, abilities, and ideas. Still, there are admiral qualities in Rothko.

That is a nice one, it's called "murnau street with women" by Kandinsky

Very true, we will be getting to DADA soon, looking forward to discussing that very aspect of it

Glad to hear it!

Lol, that's a great description of Bosch, he's on my list of artists to cover, will definitely discuss him (and Bruegel too) in the future

Its the opening of the fifth seal by El Greco

Thanks, glad I'm not the only one who found the name amusing

Sorry it's been a while since I did this one, which book is it you'r referring too? Reynolds has a few books out there but I must say the thought that he himself had not wrote them didn't occur to me!

I'll get to it one day, were working towards abstract expressionism and the role of art in the culture war between the US and Russia in the 50's but I've got a lot to cover before we get there.

@@theartshole311 oh thanks!! I have some hints now :)

@@theartshole311 Looking forward to that video!

A massive one who says flippant things in RU-vid videos apparently

You're welcome 😊

Its the Opening of the fifth seal by El Greco

No worries, hope it helped

@@theartshole311 oh and it did thanks I got a 10/10 points on my homework because of you thank you

It's nature. Art is culture.

But can you eat it ?

I know the ones you mean but I've no idea what the term is, possibly Op art? Not strictly the same thing as what you describe but the principal is similar

@@theartshole311 The closest thing I could find was abstract expressionism with an illusion drawing combined but there’s no category for that.

Futurism

Simple as

Lol, I've been called a lot of things but that's a new one, I'll take it as a compliment

Sorry it didn’t make much sense! Couldn’t even tell you myself it’s been so long since I made it.Honestly this video is not my best, I wrote and put it together in a very short space of time to see if I could do a video from scratch quickly. Looking back now it really doesn’t work. I may delete it and try again sometime.

The Arts Hole The video is great. Thank you!

Plinkyplonk piano music was a mistake! Don't use it anymore (dunno what I was thinking, it's hard enough to understand what I'm saying sometimes without it!)

Yeah at the end of the day these terms are pretty fluid

Same here!! Even my 2 year daughter paints this kind of stuff.

Well, it's subjective Dumbo

Very interesting comment, I get where your coming from though not being a student of the sciences myself I won't pretend to have the expertise required to draw parallels between Pollock and Quantum mechanics. Interesting property of the arts though, to be able to draw those parallels with advances in other fields. Also, yes, I saw Ascent of Man many years ago, must give that episode a watch again

I think I prefer the "Random Bullshit" paintings where the person looking has to put in as much effort as the artist. One has to use their imagination. It's like looking at clouds on a summer day and seeing animals and people and castles and so on. At a birthday party my daughter put out an empty canvas and paints and everyone had to put something on the canvas. Any color any style, whatever. When you look at the final picture it's somewhat ugly but if you look at it for a bit of time many things present themselves and the picture becomes beautiful. That's the kind of abstract art I enjoy.

@@guitarstrunged Very well put.

@@guitarstrunged haha, fair enough

It can follow the same formal rules as representational art, or not. Art is subjective.

@@ramenlover1727 then we have different definitions of talent.

Cheers, sounds very interesting, I'll check it out!

The pretty half is made by toddlers

What I'm trying to say is more modern abstract art and phychadelic art is different from gosh. Idk. Developed artists. I grew up with visual work and low and behold youbasicnis where I start to sprout. Abstract and phychadelic isn't the same. This is understandable too. And music is wild these days..